Alumni Spotlight

Billy Pittard

In 1994, MTSU alum Billy Pittard (’78) was in Los Angles running his television branding and marketing firm, Pittard Sullivan. An industry giant through the ’90s, the company was fulfilling its contract to create on-air graphics for CBS when Pittard recognized an opportunity.

“The FCC required networks to identify themselves every hour,” Pittard said. “At the time, they would have a guy in New York put a 35-millimeter slide up on something called a film chain, and a live announcer would say, ‘This is CBS.’ I thought, ‘This is crazy; you could do so much more.’ ”

So he talked a CBS exec into letting him set up a stage at a summer shoot where on-air talent gathered for photos to promote shows for the fall. “We shot film and had the talent interact with the CBS brand,” he said. “So they were the personification of the brand.”

Think Candice Bergen of Murphy Brown saying, “This is CBS,” with the CBS eye logo in the background; Jane Seymour of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman doing so and throwing a lasso at the camera; and Fran Drescher of The Nanny dancing before announcing, “You’re on CBS.”

“The next year, every network did that, and they’ve been doing it every year since,” Pittard said.

Billy Pittard (l) with MTSU’s extended reality (XR) technology

That’s just one of his countless behind-the-scenes, yet familiar, accomplishments in his former life as an industry branding guru. Pittard’s vision was to provide on-screen

design and communications for entertainment and media industries, and no other company in the world offered such services to the industry at large at the time. Plus, Pittard felt cable TV wasn’t just a fad.

“I could go to any magazine stand and point to every genre on a magazine, and say, ‘That’s a network waiting to happen,’ ” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Pittard and his team had the opportunity to launch many of those networks, as well as take existing network brands to the next level. Continuing to create animated graphics for the likes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy, he also became the go-to guy for designing main titles for TV and film. With Pittard Sullivan responsible for about 1,000 title sequences, Pittard earned two of his five Emmys from ER and Ricki Lake.

In 2011, he left Hollywood behind to head up what is now MTSU’s Department of Media Arts. While he stepped down recently as chair, Pittard’s career is a testament to the fact that technology constantly changes, and as elucidated by the department’s recent installation of an extended reality (XR) facility, those changes are accelerating.

“Wayne Gretzky famously said he played so well because he skates to where the puck is going to be,” Pittard said. “I try to tell students to look where things are going, not where they’ve been.”

—Katie Porterfield and Drew Ruble