An Ident is a short little clip, which is played on a channel to advertise it.

The point of the Ident is to make the audience remember the Ident and therefore remember the channel. TV Idents all have the same basic things, such as: they all last between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, they all have a theme like the BBC has the circle to represent a globe. This is the BBCs first Ident, and as you can see it does have a globe in which is why they have kept the theme the same. Ever since this their motif has been a circle which represents the world, they have also changed the BBC1 to BBC One this has helped them as the O of One is being used in the middle of the circle which makes it easier for the audience to remember the Ident. From this Ident they have created many more. The Idents that we see today all came from this Ident. But over time small things have changed as now the Idents have colour which is normally red and they move. BBC also changed the BBC as they put a One in front of it. The red colour has also added to the Ident as it does make it easier for the audience and it adds to the creativity and flair to the Ident. This is an example of a Dave Ident and we can slightly see that the people are sitting down having a picnic having fun. This is a successful Ident as it helps people remember the Dave channel. Dave is owned by UKTV and they hired Red Bee to rename and give a new brand Identity to the channel. They wanted this because they held their own survey and the results they got back were not good. Therefore they renamed it and based their Idents on witty banter. This was a success and now the Dave channel is known around the country. Red This is Red Bees This is the logo for Dave. Bee has made the Ident very simple using simple Logo colours like black and white. This makes the Ident effective because he audience doesnt need to remember much about the logo and the name of the channel Dave, its self is very simple and easy to remember. All Idents are made for a certain channel and there are companies out there that make Idents for channels, Red Bee is an example of one of these companies and they made the Idents for Dave. Most channels have Idents but some channels have idents for certain programmes such as BBC have an Ident for match of the day and they play it before match of the day comes on. Most idents have a jingle or a piece of music that the audience will remember. The BBC idents have the same jingle and so does the Dave

Idents. However, some Idents don't always have the same jingle for example the BBC One Ident for Eastenders doesn't have the normal jingle. The Eastenders Ident doesnt have the normal jingle because they have used part of the Eastenders theme song used in the Ident. Idents also have a continuity announcer and they tell the audience what programme is on next and sometimes they tell us a little about what happens in the next programme. Normally a continuity announcer is a man with a masculine voice. Only a few seconds is used so that the audience will keep watching. An example of an Ident would be this:

The motif for BBC One is the circle seen here as the men are arranged in a circle. They also have the O of the One in the centre, which makes it seem like another globe with in a circle.

The Ident has a jingle and a continuity announcer, the jingle doesn't stop but the volume lowers a little when the continuity announcer starts to talk. They use this ident to tell the audience that a football programme is about to start. It also advertises the channel as the BBC One sign appears and it sticks with the globe idea as the men are gathered around the circle in the middle of a football pitch. All of the BBC Idents take his form because if there was a different theme for each ident then the audience may not remember it as well but with one thing that stays the same then it makes it easier to remember the channel. Idents advertise the channel to the audience watching it, and they make the channel stick in the head of the audience. BBCs main colour is red and we can see that it is also used here with the red footballs. The footballs stand out as they are against a dark background. The colour also stands out as the balls move to the centre and all the balls meet in the middle of the O in the one.

This first aired in September 2007. ITV also made three other Idents in September 2007; they did this just because they thought that they would have a change with their Idents. They also made 6 new Idents in November 2006 and they made 4 new Idents in April 2010. This is showing us that ITV have a lot of Idents, which they still use, which makes the channel interesting. They also use different Idents when they have certain programmes on, and they use them at different times in the day like they use the fountain Ident in the evening but not during the daytime. This is another good Ident from ITV1. It also has a jingle it is played over all ITV1's Idents this then sticks in the audiences mind so if they were to here the jingle then they would know straight away that it is from the ITV1 Idents. It also has a continuity announcer, which is telling the audience what programme is on. At the start of this Ident we see families and little kids playing with bubbles, this could be saying to the audience that the channel is a family channel. The bubbles then rise up and the ITV sign is there. TV Idents give the channel their own brand identity as Dave idents show that Dave is the home of witty banter. The colour yellow is used a lot in the ITV Idents; this will help the audience remember the Idents. However, not all Idents are successful like these ones, the odd couple do seem to fail. Some Idents made may not even make it on to the channel. This E4 Ident didnt make it on to E4s channel because they got an audience to watch the Ident but the response from the audience wasnt good enough for them to put it on to their channel. Idents that are successful help the channel give itself a brand identity but they are also well known by a wide audience. This is an example of an Ident which isn't on E4's channel but on their website. This Ident has never been on their channel. It starts with sprinkles falling down on to the donut, the name of the Ident is called sweet, and we can tell its E4 because of the purple used. We also know it is E4 because it has the symbol in the top right.

It then comes to another sweet, but this time it is a cake with a sparkler sticking out of it, this makes it seem fun and exciting. But the colour doesn't seem to match E4's normal colour. The symbol is in the top right, which is strange for an Ident to do through the whole Ident, as most Idents will show the logo later in the Ident.

Finally it comes to the E4 symbol and it is the same colour of the donut at the start, it also has sweets either side of the E4 symbol, which sticks with the sweet theme. E4 idents don't really have a basic theme like BBC, but they always use purple colours. But the E4 symbol is still in the top right even though it is on screen. This Ident it slightly weird but wonderful which goes well with the channel, even though this Ident failed for some reason, it still matched the channels brand identity. All the other idents match the channel due to the type of proggrammes that the channel shows. E4 show weird and wonderful shows which is why this ident matches their brand identity. This is an example of an E4 Ident, which is a success unlike the sweet Ident. In this Ident it starts with a hotel room and then the purple starts to come out of draws and under the bed, the E4 sign appears. This is am example of E4 being weird and wonderful, they use the purple colour like they have done before. E4 also use a lot of stop animation, which this Ident does. This could be seen as a convention of E4s idents, which could explain why the Sweet Ident failed as it was an animation. Another unsuccessful Ident is from UkTVG2, this is now Dave but before it becomes Dave it wasnt much different in the proggrammes that it showed but they just didnt get enough views and this could be many reasons and one of these reasons could be that their Idents werent the most interesting easy to remember. As you can see one of there Idents is arrows falling down landing on the yellow surface and some of the arrows would make it through the surface and go right through until off screen. Then the logo of UKTVG2 appeared which was just the name but instead of G it says Gold. As you can see that this Ident isnt the best in the world and is one of the reasons of this channel failing. This Ident goes on for 17 seconds which is quite along time and seeing as all it is, is arrows falling down you can see why it failed.