• Jesus
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    751 month ago

    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.

    • @jdeath@lemm.ee
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      371 month ago

      it’s the CEO. all of these changes are his calls. he decided to get rid of ‘HBO’, but obviously that was insane

      • @jqubed@lemmy.world
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        11 month ago

        Discovery has been a clown show for years now, and Warner must have been an even bigger one to get bought by Discovery.

    • @aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      191 month ago

      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.

  • @Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • @CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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    241 month ago

    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

    • @Amanduh@lemm.ee
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      51 month ago

      I already can imagine the number of meetings had over weeks and months agonizing every name change and referencing focus groups etc with a bunch of people talking about numbers etc, gross.

      • @CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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        21 month ago

        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.

        • @jqubed@lemmy.world
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          229 days ago

          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.

  • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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

  • @pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    191 month ago

    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.

    • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost
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      329 days ago

      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

      While I agree with the general statement of your comment, I do wish to be a bit “um actually 🤓☝️”

      The new product continued to be marketed and sold as Coke (until 1990, when it was renamed Coke II) while the original formula was named Coca-Cola Classic, and for a short time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Some who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This was true for a few regions, because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula in that all bottlers who had not already done so were using high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink, though most had by this time.[11]: 183

      The putative switch was planned all along to cover the change from sugar-sweetened Coke to much less expensive high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a theory that was supposedly given credence by the apparently different taste of Coke Classic when it first hit the market (the U.S. sugar trade association took out a full-page ad lambasting Coke for using HFCS in all bottling of the old formula when it was reintroduced).[11] In fact, Coca-Cola began allowing bottlers to remove up to half of the product’s cane sugar as early as 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke. By the time the new formula was introduced, most bottlers in the U.S. had already sweetened Coca-Cola entirely with HFCS.[2]

      New Coke was a major fuck up, but it wasn’t a cover up for swapping to HFCS. Reagnomics/shifting safety laws enabled it being used, before New Coke happened.

      • @pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        229 days ago

        Hey, “um, actually,” is half my comments, so I can’t talk. Also, thanks for the info. It was a conspiracy theory that I heard a couple of times but never bothered to look up.

  • TrackinDaKraken
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    329 days ago

    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.