Don’t forget the brand color changes.
6 weeks ago they updated all their logos and signage to say max in grey instead of purple. Now they’re updating all the same collateral again to add “HBO” back.
That marketing and brand team has to be the biggest clown show of all time.
I work with people that are like this. They’re fucking useless and they spend all of their time making busywork for others and trying to fail upwards.
We don’t need max in there who asked for max. Just call it HBO. Everyone knows HBO. And bring back that static TV intro too. Dumb ass.
I want the DUN DU DUN DU DUUU NU NU intro with the camera flying over the town and a giant HBO logo warping into low earth orbit.
That intro slapped.
Hell yeah!
Depending on the length of the timeline for all those name changes, it rather looks like the HBO execs suffer from schizophrenia.
I’m just waiting for Denny’s Applebee’s Max.
Calling it now, this is the Coke/New Coke/Coke Classic strategy. Coke was good, New Coke sucked, and when they went back to Coke Classic, people were so happy they didn’t even notice that they swapped out the sugar for corn syrup. They were HBO Max, then they became Max, added in a bunch of reality TV slop, and dropped a bunch of their other content. I bet they’ll announce they’re bringing back half of the library they dropped for the 30 House Hunters spin-offs they added and hope people will count it as a win.
I had a front row seat to some of these shenanigans when I worked adjacent to some people directly involved in the Warner Media spinoff from AT&T. The level of executive incompetence would astound you. Even if you have worked for other big corps and think you’ve seen it all… this whole divestiture was an absolute clown show compared to what you usually see coming out of the C-Suite. And AT&T ate billions and billions in debt for this. lol
Were the clowns mostly AT&T or Warner? Or pretty even between both?
There were plenty on both sides in that circus. I would say most of the blame is with AT&T though. When they bought Warner Media they replaced media execs with telco execs that knew jack shit about running a media business, and those execs ignored everyone telling them the right way to do things. Once you know about that, everything else makes a lot of sense.
I can believe that. I used to work in broadcast TV operations/engineering and remember a boss at the time lamenting about how the FCC board was composed entirely of telco people, so it was no surprise that they were taking all our spectrum and giving it to the telcos. I can only imagine if you put them directly in charge of the media company.
Can somebody explain the difference between HBO MAX and HBO MAX?
EDIT: As it was explained to me these are all the same service over time
HBO: “…”
HBO: “Go”
HBO: “NOW!”
HBO: “MAX!”
MAX: “…”
HBO: “MAX!!”
Employment justification
Someone near the top got the idea that the brand matters more than consistency in message.
When people started calling Coca-Cola, “Coke”, they didn’t change the name to “Cola”, and they didn’t abandon Coca-Cola.
Just one more example of meritocracy being dead. Fools at the top pulling levers they don’t understand just because they can.
Does CEO have a kid called Max?
Cinemax
