Nine decades of names behind one Singapore broadcaster.

Mediacorp is the national broadcaster of Singapore, running television channels in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, a set of radio stations and the streaming service meWatch. English Wikipedia says it is owned by Temasek Holdings and is based at the Mediapolis development in the one-north precinct, which replaced its predecessors’ long-time home at Caldecott Hill in 2015.

Its roots are in radio. English Wikipedia traces them to a Marconi experimental station, 1SE, set up in 1925. The more lasting start came with the British Malaya Broadcasting Corporation, created on 12 April 1935, whose regular broadcasts began on 1 June 1936; its station ZHL was formally inaugurated on 1 March 1937. The service was taken over by the Straits Settlements government in 1940 and reorganised as the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation.

The post-war years brought a run of new names. The same article says Radio Malaya was established in Singapore on 1 April 1946, and that Radio Singapura took over as Singapore’s own radio service on 4 January 1959, with a station each for English, Malay and Mandarin listeners and a time slot for Tamil.

Television followed. English Wikipedia says Television Singapura was founded on 4 April 1961. Test broadcasts ran on VHF channel 5 from 21 January 1963, and the official pilot broadcast went out on the evening of 15 February 1963. The opening programme was a documentary, TV Looks at Singapore.

Radio and television were later run together as Radio Television Singapore, or RTS. English Wikipedia says RTS was dissolved on 31 January 1980 and its assets passed to a new statutory body, the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, or SBC. On 1 October 1994 SBC was privatised into a holding company, Singapore International Media, with four units: the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS), the Radio Corporation of Singapore, Singapore Television Twelve and SIM Communications.

The present name came five years later. On 15 June 1999, the article says, the group restructured as the Media Corporation of Singapore, shortened to MediaCorp. The news channel Channel NewsAsia, now CNA, had launched that March. In 2004 the television business of SPH MediaWorks was merged into MediaCorp, and its Chinese-language Channel U continued under the new owner.

Competitions, a gradient letter and a move off Caldecott Hill.

Singapore’s broadcaster has chosen logos by competition before. English Wikipedia says that ahead of full-time colour broadcasts, RTS held a contest to design a new logo, and that the winning design by Loh Hong Liat and Lawrence Wong Heng Kwok was unveiled in August 1975. When SBC replaced RTS, a further competition for a new SBC logo was opened in January 1980; the brief asked for a mark that was simple and attractive and used no more than three colours, including the background. SBC used a temporary wordmark from 1 February 1980 while the entries came in, and the competition closed on 16 February.

The current mark arrived with a new building. Marketing-Interactive reported on 17 December 2015 that on 8 December 2015 Mediacorp had unveiled a new logo to mark its move from Caldecott Hill to a new campus at one-north. The logo, the report said, was a multi-coloured gradient “M”, with the company name written out in what was described as “contemporary lower-case”. Alongside it Mediacorp was promoting a revamped end-tag for all the programmes it produced. The report named the designer as The Bonsey Design Partnership, a Singapore studio, and quoted its creative and managing director, Jonathan Bonsey.

The lower-case name changed the look of the word itself. The MediaCorp of 1999 carried a capital C in the middle; the 2015 mark set the whole name in small letters. English Wikipedia confirms the logo was introduced on 8 December 2015, the same day the company officially opened its new headquarters at Mediapolis.

Digital services were renamed in the same family spirit. English Wikipedia says that on 30 January 2020 Mediacorp rebranded its platforms Toggle, MeRadio and MeClub as meWatch, meListen and meRewards, giving each a shared lower-case “me” at the front.

One letter, many channels, a shared prefix.

Public broadcasters often keep their initials while the shape around them changes. In Belgium, Télépro reported on 23 June 2015 that a symbol drawn by the designer Michel Olyff in 1967 was shared by the French-language RTB and the Dutch-language BRT. When the RTB became the RTBF in December 1977, French Wikipedia says, the letters “RTB” and a large “F” were added to that same emblem, so the new name was set into the old mark rather than replacing it. La Libre Belgique reported on 10 June 2005 that the RTBF had then dropped the emblem for a blue corporate logo by Publicis, with black in the letter “F”.

The letters can also become the name. Danish Wikipedia dates the first DR logo to 1964, while the broadcaster was still called Danmarks Radio, and records the formal change of name to DR in 1996. When reading a broadcaster’s identity, look at which letters stay fixed through each rename, which symbol or shape is added to them or taken away, and whether the channel names are built from the parent’s initials.

The 2023 refresh: an “M” in front of every channel.

The next step pulled the channels closer to the parent. Marketing-Interactive reported on 16 January 2023 that Mediacorp would roll out refreshed logos for its digital, free-to-air and audio platforms and products from 1 February 2023. Each logo would carry Mediacorp’s “M” prefix prominently, rendered in a single-colour or dual-colour scheme.

The report said the core design of each product logo had been kept, but streamlined with a flat, two-dimensional treatment in one or two colours, while the composition and colour palette of each product stayed the same. The stated aim, according to the company, was to lead audiences back to the main Mediacorp brand through a harmonised look across the network. English Wikipedia adds that the news channel CNA was left out of the change.

A new graphic came with it. Marketing-Interactive described the Mplifier as a stylised, upward-pointing arrow forming half of the “M” in the Mediacorp prefix, to be applied across platforms, communication channels and marketing materials as a shared visual cue for Mediacorp’s products. The report quoted Oliver Chong, head of marketing and communications, describing the design as “fresh and familiar at the same time”.

The roll-out was staged on screen. The logos were soft-launched on 16 January 2023 through on-air channel bugs, the small marks in the corner of the picture, as well as GIFs and videos on social media showing the change from the old logos to the new, before the official launch on 1 February, the same report said. English Wikipedia notes that a flat version of the 2015 corporate logo has been in use since that date too.

Read together, the two changes form one sequence. In 2015 the company gave itself a single letter in a spread of colours and a lower-case name; in 2023 it flattened that letter and put it in front of its channels, so that each product logo now carries a piece of the parent mark.

For a design guide, Mediacorp shows how a broadcaster with many channels in four languages can tie them together through a shared prefix rather than a single shared logo, keeping each channel’s own colours. Compare TVB, the Hong Kong broadcaster that also runs channels in more than one language, or SBS, which broadcasts in many languages in Australia. For this guide we use indigo, magenta and cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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