Max Brand Declares Defeat to Netflix in a Meme
I plopped down on the couch last night after we put our 11-week-old to bed to get lost in TV. My wife opened her phone and started to giggle. I asked what was funny, and she said….
“Max is going back to HBO Max.”
I replied: “That is funny.” On first blush, a brand capitulating to its fans who decried the 2023 name change was fascinating and funny.
And even better, Warner Bros. Discovery was in on the joke! As the announcement was made, its marketing team pumped a torrent of memes into the ecosystem, flooding social channels with some help from stars of the network’s hit shows. Over in their newsroom, WBD appended a downloadable Ross Geller “WE WERE ON A BREAK” meme to a press release so banal that its significance could have been lost.
The plan worked. WBD owned the conversation, and “oops, we made a mistake,” was their loving way of telling us that we told them so.
Here’s the problem: What looks like a light-hearted brand course correction is, at its core, a multi-billion-dollar retreat.
Over in the New York Times a more sober storyline emerged: “Executives have conceded in recent months that competing with an everything-for-everybody app like Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers, was not realistic. Instead, they would be perfectly happy to be a complementary service.”
Consider that the company that churned out Casablanca, The Shining and Barbie is perfectly happy to be a 'complementary service,' incapable of building a big tent audience to compete with Netflix. (Netflix owns an eight percent share of TV minutes; Max owns 1.5).
Is it still funny?
Going back to 2023, when the change to Max was announced, WBD exec Casey Bloys was quoted (in another press release): “The Max service is a wide-ranging mosaic of content that will be unmatched in the breadth, reach, and excellence of its offerings.”
Unmatched. To undone. In two years. What happened?
An unbothered Netflix declared war on shared accounts and continued to pump out high volumes of 'casual viewing' slop to its millions and millions of new subscribers. This was a brand running headfirst with vision and consolidating its power.
And on the other path, a streamer that had changed from 'HBO' to 'HBO Go' to 'HBO Now' to 'HBO Max' and 'Discovery+' to 'Max' in the space of 15 years was struggling to bite back against the one-time upstart. On Wednesday, they pumped the corporate word-salad spinner once more to retreat to safer waters.
The result is a tragic missed opportunity (and a 22x difference in market cap). By knocking off the half of their name that signified quality and prestige, WBD seemed eager to race Netflix to the bottom.
It didn’t have to be this way. Somewhere along the way, even now, the studio that released The Notebook could think about the joy that quality films and shows (fuck calling it content) really bring people. They could have built a brand that differentiated their offering through prestige. They could have listened to their audience who was crying, 'don’t do this.'
In this writer’s opinion, WBD could have grown by focusing on its 100-year history of great storytelling rather than trying to emulate its one-time challenger.
Now, they’re undoing it all, and you can’t blame them for having some fun with it. To see how a legacy company can declare defeat in style, Max is the one to watch.
Eli Haddow is associate director of marketing at PETERMAYER.
