In late November, Audinate announced a major brand identity refresh that positions Dante as a complete AV-over-IP distribution platform. It’s a role Dante has been occupying and growing into for two decades depending on how you count.
The rebrand was over 18 months in the making; company founder Aidan Williams, CMO Joshua Rush, and key executives, consultants, designers, and end users worked to capture the ubiquitous Dante lighting as a message in a bottle. The resulting logo, tagline, color palette, and narratives portray the essence of Audinate and the Dante platform; the process of getting to that design helped codify and chart the future.
The branding change reflects the times in AV. Audinate as a company, and Dante as a platform, long epitomized the innovative, relatively unsupervised, can-do world of AV as we matured into digital and converged with IT. Even as Audinate became publicly traded, Dante spoke loudest in the field, in installations, and as a partner in solving the AV world’s problems. Although the company did extensive and helpful outreach and excellent training, it was also the poster child for word-of-mouth. Dante spread by doingness. Stakeholder surveys before the rebrand affirmed this connection and recognition. No surprise there.
It’s also not really surprising that Audinate was founded by a Motorola engineer who was also a musician. It’s fitting in our world. With this rebrand, Audinate plans to draft the engineering accomplishments of Wiliams and his partners into a more formal and broader future. Going forward, the Audinate parent will stand alone as the serous, publicly traded company that it is. Dante will get its own community website where the active, real-time exchange of getting things done will continue and be supported. This reflects what was already true–the Dante community incudes more than 550 manufacturers, over 3800 products and countless installations, and the technology covers interoperable audio, video, control, and management.
There’s also a bigger play at work. The company wants to define engineering problem-solving for a broader human purpose. To me, Dante already served an important human purpose—on site for those struggling in the earliest days of AV networking to the present. However, while Dante was spreading in a head-down kind of way, the world was changing to need networking in a more holistic way. The future is more digital and networked than ever, not just as a matter of engineering.
In the company’s own words, the Dante AV-over-IP platform enables communication, experiences, inspiration, and collaboration to be shared among people and spaces using one connection. This spirit is captured in the new Dante tagline, “One Connection. Endless Possibilities.” The new Dante logo also captures this concept, showing one connection spreading into multiple directions. Getting to these representations was more than marketing, it was also a way for the team to understand themselves.
The redesign helps point the way to why that matters in the world. As someone who has been Dante-adjacent for the company’s whole existence, it seems to me natural, and also adventurous to claim space that way.
