the art of the rebrand
what to steal from HBO MAX's identity crisis 🥸
Four different names, six different logos, and a branding agency that has gotten a lot richer.
The reintroduction of HBO MAX was all over my feed yesterday. And for good reason, they absolutely fucking CRUSHED the rollout of the rebrand on social. We’ll get to the tactics in a sec.
Rebrand is far too heavy-hitting of a word for this though. ICYMI, they added “HBO” back to “MAX”, so it reads “HBO MAX”.
TBH, I thought that was the name the whole time. But “HBO” has a heck of a lot more equity than “MAX” at this point, so i respect that they’ve reverted. Even if they were iterating on the idea for the past two years (lol).
But when senior leadership makes a choice you know is going to get roasted by the internet, and it’s a subject matter that the brand has authority to joke about, why not meme the shit out of it.
I’m obsessed with this rollout. Here’s what they did:
65 posts in 24 hours
16 posts on HBO MAX’s IG, 2 posts on HBO’s IG, 20 posts on X, 4 posts on YouTube Shorts, 12 TikToks on HBO MAX, 1 TikTok on HBO, and 10 total posts on Threads.
Not counting their unique channels for IP.
In less than a single day.
Some of these were cross-posted, sure, but it’s still a ton of assets to concept, produce, and traffic.
Using IP accounts to co-create and reach audiences
Harry Potter, True Detective, And Just Like That, and more—all posting original content from those media properties that were in on the joke. My absolute favorite:
Talent Cameos
The petty White Lotus girlies are back, along with John Cena and Tim Meadows, the principal from Mean Girls (using a social trend, at that).
Reactive Posts
They used organic tweets from fans and haters alike to create a few more posts on X. Comments can be the best form of content.
*In most of my campaign plans now, we bake in the reactive posts so we’re prepared and budgeted to move quickly.
Now, if only they had the time to update their name and cover photo!
I haven’t seen anyone talk about a streaming service this much since Netflix’s glitchy livestreams.
A typical day for HBO MAX might consist of maybe 5k mentions on X, at a high level. For this launch? They saw about 65k mentions—a 1200% delta. For news that easily could have been buried.
I DO think that the flip-flopping from HBO’s leadership is a bit, well, embarrassing. And though the humor cut through for social audiences, making fun of your own internal choices isn’t something I would proudly tout.
But that tone has certainly struck a chord.
If there’s anything I’m taking away from this launch—it’s to make something out of nothing. Instead of a quiet announcement where they got trolled in the comments, they went big.
And it’s paid off.
Bravo to this team. May we all reinvent ourselves with this level of audacity confidence. 🙂↕️
The social marketing campaign was superb. They played into what they knew audience reactions would be. But yeah, I pause on the touting it part. It’s humor trying to disguise a massive brand fumbling the bag & a clear lack of cohesive, strategic direction on the biz front.