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.
Who cares, I never stopped calling it HBO, just like I still call X “Twitter”.
The point ? Wasting even more money on marketing budget
What else are they going to spend it on? Content?
Could be testing and data driven decision. Usually done with sample group before publishing half a dozen times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it’s the CEO. all of these changes are his calls. he decided to get rid of ‘HBO’, but obviously that was insane
I know, you have a brand that is literally synonymous with movies for two entire generations of people.
Let’s break it apart, let’s change its name, let’s spit it off as multiple products and then destroy half of them. Let’s add a whole bunch of content and then remove it.
They’re now synonymous with indecision, confusion, and whatever Hallmark movies they managed to have in their catalog these days.
Quality movies and shows, HBO was the place for that for decades. If you saw HBO and static, you knew you were in for something good.
Discovery has been a clown show for years now, and Warner must have been an even bigger one to get bought by Discovery.
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!
And bring back that static TV intro too. Dumb ass.
It’s still there?
The new stuff has that purple logo with like a bing bong sound
Is it region dependent, maybe? Which series or movie? I still see the static HBO intro in everything, including the just premiered stuff.
I’m thinking it could be. While I do have access to the app through my inlaws account. I’m already set up pretty deep with plex and radrr and sonarr and everything else so I just pirate their content. Maybe the region online video is from uses a different start up.
When I watched Real Time and LWT last week, both had the usual static intro.
Because Cinemax but your point stands
I don’t think I followed this… did HBO also own Cinemax? Is that why they called the service HBO Max?
Hbo bought Cinemax and I assume that was why they added max but I can’t say for sure.
Cinemax was only softcore porn and action movies. We will be fine without having that in the name lol
They made The Knick which was cool, and sure it has the odd softcore porn scene here and there, but so does almost everything HBO has ever produced. It was their only drama production, but it wasn’t without merit.
HBO: “…”
HBO: “Go”
HBO: “NOW!”
HBO: “MAX!”
MAX: “…”
HBO: “MAX!!”
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
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.
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.
Phef. I’m still salty from when they went max and threw up a TON of old Hannah Barbera and Tom and Jerry then pulled it back down before I could liberate it.
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.
HBO Go and HBO Now were technically different products. Kinda dumb though. HBO Go was for people who had HBO service through their cable provider so they could stream HBO on demand at no extra charge. HBO Now was a subscription streaming service for people who didn’t have HBO.
Blah blah blah I am gonna torrent the fuck outta them Millions must seed, I aint paying for that
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
In between they thought the HBO brand held some great prestige and wanted to protect it from stuff like live sports (that aren’t boxing) and reality TV (that isn’t Real Sex or Taxi Cab Diaries or Cathouse Some SHits) and so forth.
Then they realized nobody gave a shit AND it led to a lot of people wondering “what the hell is max?”. So the HBO branding is back.
HBO Wii U
No I’m not asking the difference between HBO and MAX. I’m asking the difference between HBO MAX and HBO MAX. Please refer to the chart above.
HBO MAX was HBO’s streaming service, albeit with some content from partners and subsidiaries. The difference is that HBO MAX is HBO’s streaming service (with some content from partners and subsidiaries).
HBO Max became Max which became HBO Max.
Please refer to the chart above.
For David Zaslov, about $200 million.
Employment justification
Does CEO have a kid called Max?
Cinemax
