SCI FI CHANNEL CHANGING NAME TO ‘SYFY’

03.16.09 SCI FI CHANNEL CHANGING NAME TO ‘SYFY’

Ah, nothing cheers me up on a Monday like a good corporate re-branding story. That’s what the Sci Fi channel is doing, as the NBC Universal property will announce today that it’s changing its name to “Syfy.” You see, the term “sci fi” is associated with geeks and losers and assorted people who masturbate to Deanna Troi fan fiction, whereas a made-up homonym is totally going to change people’s impression of the network.

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network…

[Sci Fi president Dave] Howe said going to Syfy will make a difference. “It gives us a unique word and it gives us the opportunities to imbue it with the values and the perception that we want it to have,” he said…

“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

The sad thing is that this is totally going to work. The Web and text messaging have made it okay to make up new words (Uproxx? WTF is that?) and misspell things for the sake of brevity, so the greater populace is going to love this. And if there’s one thing that TV executives are good at, it’s thinking that most people are idiots. Dave Howe just earned himself a six-figure Christmas bonus.

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