MasterClass’s CMO Says Rebrand Gives Edutainment Platform More ‘Cultural Currency’

With new funding recently raised and nearly 100 celebrity-taught classes now online, MasterClass now has a new look.

Today, the company is unveiling its first rebrand in the celebrity edutainment platform’s five-year history, changing everything from its logo and color palette to the visual identity of each course. The redesign comes just months after MasterClass in May announced it had raised $100 million in new financing led by Fidelity Investment & Research, bringing MasterClass’s reported value to $800 million.

According to MasterClass Chief Marketing Officer David Schriber, the old identity didn’t have the “cultural currency” to match the level of instructors on the platform.

“It didn’t have a good way of reflecting the diversity of the instructors and their subject areas,” he says. “It sort of treated everything as if it were kind of the same. And it also didn’t quite reflect our values of challenging people to learn and to do, even down to the letter ‘M’ being a literal level M. It didn’t acknowledge you to think very much.”

Indeed, the “M” has changed, evolving from a classic black-and-white letter to something more abstract. That includes a deconstructed shape but with an underscore in front. Brown says it’s meant to resemble critical thinking and education.

“The idea of merging classical forms and interpreting them in a modern way: classical Serif and abstracting it and forcing the mind to bridge those gaps,” says Ryan Moore, the creative director at Gretel. “Purposely leaving some room for interpretation…It represents the potential of today and dabbling in something you’ve always been curious about.”

For the unfamiliar, almost every single name on MasterClass’s roster of teachers is recognizable to many people interested in the worlds of entertainment, food, music writing, sports, business, design and science. The classes—which are each a few hours long and split into a few dozen lessons—allow notable talent to talk about their life and work while also providing advice and inspiration to learners both familiar and unfamiliar with any given craft.

It’s almost difficult to just name of a sampling of the names on the platform. Among the famous who have taught a MasterClass are filmmakers Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, photographer Annie Leibovitz, actress Natalie Portman, writers Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman, journalist Malcolm Gladwell and Bob Woodward, producer Shonda Rhimes, athletes Serena Williams and Misty Copeland, architect Frank Gehry, advertising legends Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, and executives like Disney’s Bob Iger and Starbuck’s Howard Schultz. Icons from a variety of other fields include the magicians Penn & Teller, adventurer Jimmy Chin, chess master Gary Kasparov, and gardener Ron Finley, conservationist Jane Goodall, and scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Because of the diversity of talent, each of its courses has a new look based on the personality and work of each instructor. Working with the New York-based agency Gretel on the redesign, MasterClass has given each teacher a new visual identity on the platform that includes a personalized logo, font and color that stand out from MasterClass’s own branding.

According to Chris Brown, MasterClass’s executive creative director, each visual identity was created after looking at instructors’ book jackets or film posters to create something that fit with the work they’re known for. However, the overall platform’s redesign is meant to incorporate “the language of cinema” that continues to fit the company’s origins.

“The brand before receded into the background and didn’t really have a point of view,” he says. “We just realized that in order to become more relevant in culture we had to take a step forward to become more vibrant to stand alongside our instructors.”

As MasterClass got further into its redesign that began more than a year ago, Schriber said the team started noticing how other streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO Max were also making changes to their design.

“One of the things we noticed about entertainment streaming is their content comes from a lot of different sources,” Schriber says. “I mean, at Netflix there are a bunch of different movies that didn’t consider each other in their creation. All of our content, all of our classes, come from the same place, so our identity doesn’t have to try and unify all of those pictures, all of those video elements. They all hang together very nicely. So our brand has an opportunity to kind of foreground all the creative that comes from within making our classes that doesn’t necessarily require a different photo shoot or artistic treatment that come together quite naturally.”

While MasterClass has leaned heavily into performance marketing on social media, it’s also dabbled with out of home advertising. For example, there’s a billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where Schriber says instructors who live or work in the city often see their faces when they drive by. (It’s also probably great advertising not just for new users, but also a way to recruit new A-list instructors.)

MasterClass has also been buying a lot more media on TV across streaming and linear platforms. Schriber says people are tending to engage more with MasterClass on the biggest screen in the home, leading the company to lean into streaming platforms like Roku.

“In a lot of ways, when people are checking in later evenings and talk shows, news programing, etc.,” he says. “They’re probably kind of ready to think.”