Freeform: When TV Rebranding Goes Dumb

ABC Family changed its name to what?

That ABC Family, a subsidiary of the The Walt Disney Company, felt compelled to rebrand itself isn’t a shock. But that it chose Freeform as its new identity is more puzzling.

It’s been a long time since ABC Family made any sort of effort to target an all-ages, family-friendly audience. Signature hit Pretty Little Liars is typical of the network’s original programming. It’s trendy, aspirational and unafraid of sex. It also routinely attracts a healthy audience of young female viewers attractive to advertisers.

This has been ABC Family’s focus for about a decade now, it seems. For a while, the network used the tagline A new kind of family to communicate that it wasn’t about squeaky-clean programming you could watch with the tots. A rebranding was inevitable at some point.

But Freeform? It’s so vague it could be a network about anything: Dancing, skiing, poetry. ABC Family apparently tested Freeform with focus groups and concluded it was an appealing new brand, but this somehow just seems unlikely.

There are a couple problems with ABC Family’s adopting the name Freeform.

First, jettisoning its identity as an ABC network isn’t necessarily a good idea for ABC Family. It’s true the ABC Television Group hasn’t chosen to align some of its (owned and joint-owned) cable outlets — like Lifetime, A&E, and ESPN — with the identity of its well-known broadcast network, ABC. For the most part, that hasn’t been a problem. Channels like ESPN and Lifetime, for example, were strong brands before becoming part of the ABC/Disney family, and the various Disney-branded channels have been better off using their potent parent company’s brand.

But maintaining ABC Family’s brand alignment with its parent network makes sense today, especially since the channel’s programming represents a more youthful, genre-oriented refinement of ABC’s primetime identity.

For example, it’s not hard to see a through line from ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, The Fosters and Switched at Birth to ABC’s primetime hits like Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, Secrets and Lies, and Nashville. Jettisoning the “ABC” connection in favor of Freeform seems like the abandonment of a useful identity alignment.

Also bizarre is Freeform’s attempt to make the term Becomers happen. The network is pushing that term to describe its focus on the age 14–34 demographic (high school, college and the decade after college, roughly). Freeform claims to want to target viewers experiencing all kinds of “firsts.”

But why is Becomers necessary? A well-known term already exists to capture that demographic: Young Adult (YA).

ABC Family/Freeform creates programming that serves a similar audience as YA books. And like the most successful YA books, the best ABC Family programs have simultaneously been embraced by the network’s target audience and a wider swath of viewers. YA is a well-known shorthand. It perfectly encapsulates what Freeform is doing.

The desire to create a new term suggests a certain contempt for the very audience Freeform intends to court — as though it can’t be taken seriously as a network if it acknowledges its pursuit of YA fans. This, even as the network heavily promotes airings of The Hunger Games and Twilight movies.