40 Years. Lean in or move on?

Written by Fleur Horner, CEO

TVE turns 40 this month. And yes, we’re celebrating loudly and proudly with enormous gratitude to everyone who built this thing before my leadership. But this milestone has also sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Bear with me.

Nostalgia, heritage, and provenance. These words get thrown around a lot in brand conversations and I’ve been thinking about how differently they land depending on the surrounding context and how best to play each as a brand asset (if it’s indeed an asset at all!)

The breakout growth category K beauty and skincare leans into origin story and provenance as a proxy for quality, efficacy & trust where there is little existing consumer knowledge. But provenance can risk being limiting especially when it comes to entering new markets – you can’t control how people feel about a whole country!

Whisky basically sells time, heritage, and in its case, age alone is largely the value driver. But in other categories like professional services? Heritage feels like it cues ‘slow’ ‘traditional’, ‘inflexible’ in a world that is moving a million miles an hour.

So as TVE’s latest custodian, I’ve been sitting with a genuinely uncomfortable tension: do we dial up the memories and what’s gone before and risk also dialling up the perceptions that can accompany age in our industry, or do we focus relentlessly on the here, now and future?

Obviously, the way ahead doesn’t have to be binary and I’m hamming this up to strengthen the storyline but I do keep landing in the same place. The brands that I think navigate this tension well don’t use heritage as identity.

They use it as evidence. To me, there’s a meaningful difference between “we’ve been here 40 years” and “we have 40 years of experience”.

What feels true to me is this: 40 years means we’ve been through enough disruption cycles to know how to adapt. Multiple moments where the category shifted, where clients need something different, where the power and politics surrounding brand strategy evolved. That shift in framing moves heritage from a nostalgia territory to one that speaks to resilience and the ability to stay relevant whatever the era.

Which brings me to some news that is lovely to be shouting about.

Today, alongside this birthday month, we’re announcing a brand refresh for TVE: a new logo, a new visual identity, and a look and feel that truly reflects the agency we are, not the agency we were.

This isn’t a vanity project and it certainly isn’t about throwing shade at what’s come before. But when we looked at the work we do alongside some of the world’s best known, most innovative, and most technologically advanced businesses, and then looked at how we were presenting ourselves, there was a gap we couldn’t ignore. Our positioning and accompanying visual identity were whispering when they should have been speaking clearly – and as you may have noticed I’m not one for whispering!

The refresh is deliberate, not decorative. It’s sharper, more confident, and more contemporary; designed to sit comfortably alongside the brands of the clients we serve. Because when you’re in the room with some of the most forward-thinking companies on the planet, you should look like you belong there. We always have and now it shows.

What hasn’t changed is our belief in the things that are so important in this current business environment. The thinking, the relationships, the stubborn commitment to doing work that actually makes things happen.

So yes, the birthday is happening. Cake, fizz, celebrations, the lot.

But the birthday itself is one thing. The other is what the birthday proves and what the next 40 years get to look like.

We’re ready.