WAPT, Hearst’s ABC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi, unveiled its new brand positioning statement as “Jackson’s Breaking News Leader”.

Since 2012, WAPT’s brand was “The One To Watch”, says Brett Kenyon, WAPT’s creative services director.

Kenyon says as far as a brand goes, it was a memorable slogan, and hard to let it go.

“If you are wearing a shirt from the station out in public and people ran into you and they said, oh, yeah The One To Watch,” he says.

But the slogan was ambiguous and really didn’t have a direct viewer benefit, he says.

“We wanted something that viewers could know exactly what they were going to be getting from us,” Kenyon says.

Kenyon says the process to change the station’s brand began earlier this year with an all-hands on-board meeting with research and corporate.

“We wanted to choose something that we were already doing well,” Kenyon says. “And breaking news just constantly rose to the top in our research.”

Kenyon says the station created an internal definition of what is breaking news, a checklist to determine what qualifies as breaking news.

“We want to avoid the breaking news overload of just calling everything breaking news,” he says. “If everything is breaking news then nothing is breaking news.”

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