DC Comics has grown up. Now just one of the three publishing legs that make up the foundation of DC Entertainment, the comic-book publisher unleashed a new logo and brand identity this week, according to Fast Company.

The logo will start appearing on DC books in March as well as on its other publishing entities: Vertigo and Mad Magazine. The company also is involved with a slew of entertainment ventures, covering movies, TV shows, video games, DVDs, and merchandising.

“It wasn’t as obvious to the rest of the world as it was to the comic fans that Batman is from DC Comics or Sandman is a Vertigo character,” says John Rood, DC Entertainment’s executive vice president of sales, marketing, and business development, to Fast Company. “Now that our audience has exploded beyond just a readership, we needed a way of making a more consistent connection between our properties and their parent brands.”Continue reading...

Telstra celebrated the launch of 4G LTE services in Australia (the country's first taste of 4G, with Optus and Vodafone to follow next year) with a campaign called "The Fun Has Just Begun."

The communications giant brought some fun to Sydney's central business district. The public was treated to musical pop-up events including free performances by Friday phenom Rebecca Black in her first big endorsement deal.

Other free performances included a mariachi band and breakdancers around the Sydney CBD, while a flash mob removed their colored t-shirts in unison to reflect Telstra's bright new look. Watch more of the launch event marketing below.Continue reading...

Next time you are in Australia and a multicolored truck rolls by, don’t worry. It’s probably just the phone company.

Telstra, the nation’s largest telco and provider of voice, mobile, video (pay TV) and broadband Internet services (via its BigPond ISP), is in the midst of a major branding initiative with a new tagline that announces “Welcome to Life in Full Colour” and an advertising push whose song includes the line, "Get out your rainbow colors."

According to Telstra's press release, the company is wrapping itself in six colors (orange, green, turquoise, blue, purple and magenta) to symbolize "the diversity" of its customers and services.Continue reading...

North Dakota may have the fourth fewest residents of any U.S. state, but they’ve got more stubbornness than most states put together.

In 2005, the NCAA told its member schools that they needed to get rid of any American Indian nicknames if area tribes didn’t approve of the name or face penalties. Even though only one of two major Sioux tribes approved of the name, the Fighting Sioux of the University of North Dakota have fought that ruling at every step. The pair reached a settlement in 2007 that would have the university change its name by this past Monday, but then the state went so far as to pass legislation in the spring requiring UND to keep the name, USA Today reports.

Indian Country News reports that despite the NCAA’s hard-line efforts on getting rid of offensive American Indian logos and mascots, the association’s site still sold University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux gear this week after the deadline it had imposed.Continue reading...

Tattoos as personal branding is a growing trend for people living with HIV who want to communicate their status, as seen in the above video of Michael Lee Howard:

It's a branding of who I am, and it's a branding of being comfortable with that, being comfortable with who I am and particularly the ribbon because after five years I've gone through a huge amount of stuff to get to where I'm at now.

Howard is tattooed with a biohazard symbol on his right arm and a radiation symbol on his left. The origin of HIV-related tattoos is unclear, but the biohazard symbol is a clear sign "to let other men know that they're HIV-positive so that they don't have to come out and say it… a "secret identification code," said David Dempsey, clinical director at the Alexian Brothers Bonaventure House in Chicago and The Harbor in Waukegan, Illinois, transitional living facilities for HIV-positive people in drug and alcohol recovery.Continue reading...

The Windows Phone 7 operating system launched last October and it isn’t exactly clear how many users it has. CNET points out that the company said it had sold more than 2 million of ‘em back in January.

No matter how many people are out there using it, though, it will now have a new square-shaped logo, TechCrunch reports, citing Japanese Microsoft developer and "Windows Phone evangelist" Takahashi Shinobu, who posted the WP 7.5 logo on his Microsoft blog about changing his email signature, above.Continue reading...

On August 1st, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., MTV: Music Television launched and changed the face of television, music and branding. That means the brand that once typified youth rebellion is (gasp!) old enough to be the age of its target demographic — and you know what they say about trusting anyone over 30...Continue reading...

Missouri television station KOMU was the first dog to the bowl when it became the first television station to start up a Google+ account. Of course, that was because the social-networking site isn’t allowing businesses to start accounts just yet.

Lost Remote reports that KOMU’s site on Google+ has been shut down. “In lieu of flowers, please send your topic ideas for my next recorded Hangout,” KOMU anchor Sarah Hill wrote in an obituary of the page on Google+.

KOMU New Media Director Jen Reeves “points out that Google’s enforcement of the ‘no brand’ policy is random and perhaps even unfair,” the site notes. After all, a KOMU competitor, KRCG, also has a page that hasn’t been shut down.

Meanwhile, Google+ is still working with Ford and other major companies to ready itself for the launch of branded pages of Google+. Ford, like KOMU, was an early adopter and went right ahead and hacked a branded page into the site, Ad Age reports.

The upshot: just as Google is trying to establish a new brand with Google+, one that could take on (or enhance) Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and other social platforms, the delay in branded Google+ accounts has become a branding challenge for Google itself.Continue reading...