RTL - rebranding

With the rebranding of RTL, a completely new, not your average corporate website was born. Visually as vibrant as the new brand itself.

Client
RTL

Roles
UX Designer
Creative director

Date
2016 - 2018

URL
www.rtl.nl

A new corporate website.

The objective.

Five years ago, RTL Nederland was amid a significant visual and strategic rebranding. It was coming from a time where the main commercial focus of the broadcaster was on the advertisers. The company's attention needed to switch entirely to the viewer, who was turning into a customer and also user.

While the rebranding itself was outsourced to a UK based design agency, there was a need for someone within the company to take care of the new identity and brand values. To bring the new company identity to life and act as an ambassador to the rest of the company and its suppliers who have to use this new identity.

I took on the role of Creative Director with the sole focus on the new RTL brand. I took care of the visual representation of the RTL brand and related projects and products.

Besides taking care of the new brand, I also took on the role of Product Owner for an agile team responsible for the development of a completely new online corporate environment.

Brand presentation.

Video made for the launch of the new RTL brand, explaining how the logo and corresponding visual elements came to life.

Challenges.

The rebranding was needed to act as one identity to the outside world and mainly to the customer. But online, the company was very fragmented, with a separate website for the pressroom, a completely different looking site for advertisers, and another stand-alone site with the main focus on publishing job vacancies.

As the product owner, I was responsible for setting up a complete agile team and took care of the stakeholders within the company. Besides this, I took on the role of UX design, since this was a relatively new aspect for the way of work within RTL. With the team, we set out to develop a concept that would be a logical online translation of the new brand values, resulting in the current corporate RTL site.

Research.

We started by analyzing the old RTL sites and their target audience. As you can see in the image below, there was little cohesion between the stand-alone sites and nowhere near the look & feel of the new RTL brand.

Discovery.

We soon discovered that with focussing on the new RTL corporate site, we needed to appeal to four different user profiles:

To get into the user's needs and expectations, we conducted many interviews with both users and business owners within the company. Based on the outcome of these interviews we managed to come up with a cohesive concept for a new corporate website that would be appealing to all the different user groups, while also taking into account their expectations.

Employee.

Advertiser.

Journalist.

Viewer / user.

Process.

Besides being the scrum team's Product Owner, I also helped the visual designer in the team with the User Experience aspect. Gathering user information, setting up site flows and persona's and making wireframes before the visual designer would start with the actual visual representation.

Outcome.

Concept.

The concept behind the new corporate site for RTL is that we wanted to make the visitor aware of the fact that there is more to RTL than what they came for and expected. When a journalist visits the latest press releases, we want to show more other content (video, cases, news) that is relevant to the subject of the press release that they came for.

#tags.

By adding tags to each press release, video, case, job vacancy, and event, we were able to show accessory links to more content at the bottom of each page.

With adding tags to all content, we gave actual meaning to RTL's new payoff '...and discover'. We were letting the visitor discover more content from RTL that was relevant to why they came in the first place.

By clicking on the button in the right top corner labeled ‘..EN ONTDEK’ (and discover), the page quickly scrolls to this section below the article.