So, what's a name, anyways?

An exercise in branding continues to go awry.

One of the more wild things that continues to bother, amaze and confound me is that HBO continues to rebrand its streaming service, for what I can only assume is due to extreme boredom and a desperation to justify outrageous salaries.

HBO stands for Home Box Office, which indeed is a bit antiquated, but I’d also guess most HBO customers never knew this, and - just like KFC only barely means Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore - just knew the name, and the brand. This is the channel that provides exceptional quality programming - not just movies but original content like The Wire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and seemingly half the shows on my top-25 favorite shows list.

A few years back they changed the streaming name to HBO Max. While conceivably this was to carve it out from the “cable” station, the choice was weird, since historically one of their biggest competitors was Cinemax. Then, two years ago, they changed it directly to Max.

Why? Nobody knew. (Including myself who whined about it in the below post.)

Now, they’ve announced a new branding for their streaming service. Guys, you’re not going to believe this but they’re going to call it … HBO Max.

The money quote from the above article is here.

In a press release, WBD said “returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering. It is also a testament to WBD’s willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach — leaning heavily on consumer data and insights — to best position itself for success.”

So, two things. One, I’ve read that four times and it still doesn’t make any sense. It’s a combination of saying absolutely nothing and using words that make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. It’s embarassing. But my second realization is … guys, what are we DOING here?

All I can think about is how much of my monthly HBO bill has gone into paying for the meetings about these name changes, the consultants that were hired to iterate and strategize, all for this to resolve itself with coming back to what the team had two years ago.

I envision it like this, except older and whiter.

The next season of House of the Dragon better be really good.