It’s not HBO. It’s toasted.
HBO’s re-branding as Max misses Don Draper’s advertising lesson in Mad Men.
This week saw a momentous change to one of the most successful, most recognizable, brands in all of television history. Home Box Office which launched as a premium cable network in 1972 and quickly became known by its acronym HBO is no longer.
HBO has been re-branded as Max.
What Max Launch Means for Existing HBO Max Customers
Since the late 1990s HBO reigned as the home of premium television which in turn made it one of the most profitable networks in the history of the television industry. Now, under the leadership of David Zaslav, the new CEO of WarnerBrosDiscovery (how’s that for branding?) the name and network that was HBO, is no more.
HBO will now be HBO Originals and will live on as a network/tab/app/whatshamacallit available on the streaming platform…Max.
Far be it from me to criticize somebody as successful as David Zaslav, but the fact that he and his team chose to select for the streamer the utterly indistinguishable, unmemorable, and frankly regurgitated moniker, Max is hard to believe.
Max. As in Cinemax.
As in been there done that.
And not particularly well.
Feels like a bad Mountain Dew commercial.
The mistake of the HBO —> MAX rebrand, *which I predict will be reversed within six months if not sooner, calls to mind a famous scene in the Mad Men pilot.
In a bit of relevant TV trivia, Mad Men, written by Matt Weiner, formerly an Executive Producer of The Sopranos, was shopped to HBO first, where all the executives promptly passed. This led to the script landing at AMC where we turned it into one of the seminal shows of television’s “Golden Age.”
Quick recap: In the pilot of Mad Men we are introduced to “Don Draper,” the Creative Director of the ad agency, Sterling-Cooper. At the start of the pilot Draper, (played brilliantly by Jon Hamm) is feeling creatively uninspired. The well has run dry. This is a problem for him because he’s got his firm’s biggest client, Lucky Strike Cigarettes, coming in the next day to hear Draper’s pitch for a rebrand following a recent Readers Digest article reporting on the fact that cigarettes are cancer-causing.
For the entire pilot, Draper struggles unsuccessfully to come up with a campaign for Lucky Strike. Predictively, the meeting with the tobacco company goes poorly. His uninspired pitch falls short. It looks as if Draper is about to suffer a professional setback. The Lucky Strike owners stand up to leave, disappointed, when the scion of the company says to his father, “…At least we know if we have this problem everybody has this problem.”
A moment of inspiration strikes. Don Draper says, “Excuse me, gentlemen, this is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal.” He explains, “We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.”
Draper asks how Lucky Strikes cigarettes are made.
The father/founder explains the process. “…we grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it…”
Draper says, “There you go.” On a blackboard, he writes the words:
“Lucky Strike. It’s toasted.”
The Lucky Strike owners, not getting it yet say, “But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted.” To which Draper responds, “No. Everyone else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strikes is toasted.”
Draper recognizes that by calling Lucky Strike cigarettes “toasted,” he’s come up with an advertising hook that separates their cigarettes from all of the other brands on the market.
And this is the point that HBO….er, sorry, Max, misses completely.
When you are marketing your product, you want branding that distinguishes it. Obviously, you want the product itself to be better than the others in the marketplace. But let’s face it…cigarettes are cigarettes…and television is television.
Good marketing makes people who already use the product feel like they’re in the know, in some kind of cool club. And it makes all the people who’ve yet to try the product feel like they’re missing out.
For decades HBO’s brilliant marketing campaign was:
It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.
Think about it. What does that even mean? It’s not TV it’s HBO. What? Of course, it’s TV. HBO was a network that showed shows that were either 30 or 60 minutes in length. Same as every other network. The only difference was the premium status, which stemmed initially from the fact you paid for commercial-free, uncensored, programming. It had nothing to do with the quality of its shows.
HBO launched in 1972. The Sopranos, which arguably was the first true premium show on the network, debuted in 1999. The slogan, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” started in 1996. The History of HBO
But if it isn’t TV, well then what is it?
The answer of course is that it was HBO.
It was something special.
Which eventually their programming lived up to.
Look at companies like Apple and Tesla. When you get right down to it, a computer is a computer and a car is a car. Unless of course, you use an Apple computer. In which case you “Think Different.”
Getting back to HBO, for decades their slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO” let them lay claim to being different, something that transcended traditional tv. And in doing so, HBO was offering something better than their competitors.
Kinda like…
It’s Not Lucky Strikes. It’s toasted.
Which is why, both because of my personal connection to HBO, (I grew up watching it religiously), and as someone who’s worked in the television industry for over twenty years, it is incredibly sad for me to see the announcement that HBO is effectively no longer.
Because while HBO Originals might exist, and I surely do enjoy shows like Succession, White Lotus, and The Last of Us, the sense that HBO is anything special, is gone now.
Now it’s just…Max.
Ugh.
What David Zaslav and his team apparently fail to grasp is the fact that by becoming Max all they’ve done is turn themselves into regular-old-same-as-everybody-else TV.
How ironic.
And while we are on the subject, could Max be any more of an uninspired moniker? How long before somebody at HBO points out that Max is a truncation of Cinemax, the less-known, less successful, sister network to HBO?
This would be like Coca Cola changing the name of its company to New Coke. Or McDonald’s changing its name to Burger King. Or like changing Time Warner to AOLTimeWarner.
It never ceases to amaze me how smart people do dumb things. My suspicion is this brainiac decision was one made by committee. Sometimes group-think can be useful, but rarely when it comes to creative matters. Then, group-think tends to lead to “solutions” stupidly lacking in creativity.
No doubt the decision to change HBO’s name to Max was weighed in on, mulled over, focus-tested, and ultimately signed off on, by countless high-ranking executives within WarnerBrosDiscovery corporate. Decisions like this don’t get made without approval from the higher-ups (looking at you, Bud Light).
WarnerBrosDiscovery Streaming Chief J.B. Perrette is quoted as saying:
“The importance of removing HBO from the HBO Max name [is]:
HBO is not TV. HBO is HBO.’”
Hard to believe he actually said that.
Not surprisingly, the response to the rebrand has not been well received by consumers or investors. A quick sampling of responses online have mocked HBO….er, Max, for its decision. The stock price fell 6% in after hours trading.
Given all this, one has to wonder if HBO, like Netflix, will start showing commercials on their channels. Proving the old adages that everything old is new again and there’s nothing new under the sun.
There’s only…Max.
Perhaps, the new slogan ought to be.
It’s not HBO. It’s just TV.