Case Study

Active Watch / The NGO that takes action

Visual identity Stationery materials Branded materials

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Context
Founded in 1994 as a new department of Cultural Settlement of Academia Cațavencu, Press Monitoring Agency
is a non-governmental organization standing for man’s rights protection. The Agency activate in four distinct
areas of activity: press freedom (Free Ex department), fighting against social inequity (Antidiscrimination
department), guarding the good governance principles (Good Governance department) and increasing the
analytical capacity of the media consumer (Research and Media Education department).

In 2006, Press Monitoring Agency addressed BrandTailors the request to create a new identity, able to fulfill at
the same time two objectives: differentiate and eliminate the association made beforehand with Academia
Cațavencu, and enable the fund raising activity through “2% of the income tax” program launched back in
2003. The latter objective was quite difficult to reach as an extremely high number of NGO’s were developing
large communication programs in this respect.

Challenge
This re-branding project commenced with an in-depth brand audit starting with all the brand’s manifestations
and ending with the service quality delivered by this organization. The turning point of this project was the
moment when BrandTailors consultants concluded that the services provided by PMA could rather be defined as
“knowledge” and “power to action” rather than services in itself.

These results being grounded more than in any other organization in PMA’s team, generated the real project
challenge: how an organization’s philosophy could be extracted from its employees’ identity?

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Solution
In order to define employees’ identity, BrandTailors’ consultants conducted an organizational culture research
study by means of Human Synergistics’ Circumplex model, revealing the fact that people working for PMA built
an organizational culture oriented towards results and personal development, despite national perceptions
regarding NGO’s, such as: futility, ridicule, means serving to personal interests.

The new positioning for PMA came as a natural result to these two observations: the only way to counteract the
passive attitude is not to simply observe – as many NGO do, but to actively and passionately get involved while
having an winner mentality. So, the brand came to its definition as the “observer taking action!”

Further, the new name chosen for PMA - ActiveWatch, unifies both the specific area of activity - “the observa-
tion” and the brand differentiator - “the action”. This new name changed the paradigm for the NGO market
where the acronyms were predominant.

The previous brand name, Press Monitoring Agency, was turned into a denominator in order to explain
ActiveWatch’s activity and to facilitate transition towards the new identity within the multitude of the stake-
holders’ types.

The visual identity concept to depict the brand positioning was a straightforward one:

Basically, there are two ways to fight against injustice and inequity:
by means of physical force, or of words power, thus bringing urgent
facts to the public opinion’s attention. These two ways have been
visually synthesized in one single symbol encapsulating both the
hammer – standing for physical force – and the pen - standing for
Janos Kurko
words power. Creative Director

Further on, ActiveWatch identity was implemented on all sorts of stationary and communication materials,
BrandTailors’ consultants and designers defining a brand architecture taking into account the visual distinctive-
ness of the four independent departments. Moreover, a very permissive visual territory was created, consisting
of various symbols for research, observation and action activities – all being expressed in a unique visual
manner.

Contribution
Brand strategy - Beatrice Daniș
Project management - Cristina Ionescu
Creative concept - Janos Kurko
Graphic development - Ovidiu Pop
Image retouching and printing pre-production - Mihai Părpălea

Project implementation started in April 2010.

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