Step One: Shiplap. Step Two: ??? Step Three: Profit!
The branding bungles of Warner Brothers Discovery were entirely preventable -- and could be very expensive if not corrected.
One of the key retail developments through the Aughties was an increasing elevation of the quotidian consumer object. This played out in a few ways:
A new emphasis on design as a competitive differentiator (the iMac, OXO products, the Michael Graves collection at Target), as explained in Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness.
A new emphasis on access to luxury-level goods at mainstream retail price points, i.e. the "masstige" movement, captured in Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster
A new emphasis on social signaling as a competitive differentiator, i.e. the boom in "authenticity," the Michael Pollan-esque emphasis on real food/slow food/local ingredients, the descriptors like "artisanal," "small batch" or "heritage."
This also played out with an increasing polarization of consumer options -- middle-market goods at middle-market prices have been increasingly squeezed out while both the low- and high-end markets flourished.
This is probably not the Ikea Docksta table.
Those happy few who can merrily skip between the poles, mixing an Ikea dining table with a Noguchi pendant, for example, demonstrate another interesting phenomenon: the systemic devaluation of material goods to assess someone's real socioeconomic position.
As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, since people can buy things on credit, the real status indicators of the 21st century are the intangibles: health care, educational options, travel/hobbies/experiences, cultural fluency.
This is more or less backed up by the graphic HowMuch.Net put together using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics through 2018:
In other words: anyone can now buy stuff, which is why those paid-blue-check Twitter threads screaming about how people can't really be poor if they have televisions or phones are all factually incorrect and should be ignored.
(You can probably also safely ignore any thread from a blue-check Twitter poster, period.)
What is expensive and time-consuming -- and therefore desirable -- is cultural capital. You see it directly referenced above in college tuition and fees.
Currid-Halkett contends that "cultural elites" build a sense of identity around what they know, both through formal education and cultural fluency. And here's why that's a problem for Warner Brothers Discovery and the way they're handling the brand formerly known as HBO.
THE DUMBING DOWN OF THE "REAL SEX" CHANNEL
Calling HBO an entirely upscale brand would be dumb: we all know there's gleefully lowbow content on there like I Did Not Know Middle-Aged Nudists Were That Saggy and other "alleged" documentaries.
However, there's no doubting that HBO has cultivated a body of work and a reputation for creating aspirational cultural conversations.
I'll go to my grave arguing that giving credit to The Sopranos as the start of the "golden age of television" is historically inaccurate -- peep Chris McGrath's New York Times Magazine feature "The Triumph of the Prime Time Novel," which ran on October 22, 1995, and posited:
TV, as a result, is frequently more daring and less formulaic than either the stage or the big screen, both of which have to make back huge investments very quickly. Television can afford to take chances, and often enough it does. And TV of late has, ironically, become much more of a writer's medium than either movies or Broadway, which are more and more preoccupied with delivering spectacle of one kind or another.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
However, I am willing to concede that The Sopranos kicked open the door to legitimizing the notion of television as an acceptably aspirational medium and no longer a quick cultural shorthand for "mouth-breathing proles."
HBO furthered its aspirational brand positioning with other golden-age heavyweights like Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Deadwood, and then spent the subsequent two decades nurturing watercooler shows like Game of Thrones, Girls, Big Little Lies, or Succession; comedies that simultaneously humanize and satirize the 1% like The White Lotus, Silicon Valley and Veep, and shows that are not so much ahead of the curve but plotting a whole new trajectory, like I May Destroy You.
These shows kept a pop-culture industry humming, from recaps to YouTube riffs to SNL sketches, and thus generated part of the cultural conversation for what Currid-Halkett calls your "cultural elites."
If you haven’t seen SNL’s “The Black Lotus” sketch, fix that.
Which is why it was so astonishing in summer 2022 when the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zaslav, gave that board presentation that showed how little he understood or valued exactly what it was that HBO did or who its audience was.
As a longtime HBO watcher (and intermittent HBO show recapper), it was pretty insulting to be reduced to someone whose simple lady brain couldn't follow plot-driven TV shows because -- ohh, shiplap!
As a reporter who's covered business, I was surprised by how little comprehension a CEO had of what he was selling, who was buying, and what the market potential was.
The subsequent ruination of Max has confirmed that the CEO is very good at making self-interested careerists do what he wants and very bad at understanding how to keep or build a customer base.
Just as a personal example: My list of things to watch on HBO Max included Barry, White House Plumbers, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Berlin: Symphony of a City, Watchmen, The Doom Patrol, Los Espookys, Sort/Of, many Studio Ghibli films, Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and documentaries on Alexander McQueen and Andre Leon Talley.
I expect that any "For You" or specialized carousels on the home page of my user profile would highlight dark comedies, documentaries, comedies, more Studio Ghibli, more DC Universe offerings, and more Janus Films offerings. We know the streaming company has the data; it can certainly use it to suck me deeper into binging on its catalog, right?
Readers, my Max home screen seems to think I'm the perfect audience for the reanimated corpse of Sex and the City. It is almost as if the service is actively trying to repel me instead of luring me in to become a daily watcher. And it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the technological underpinnings of this cloud-based streaming service.
THE SACK OF TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES
Let's not be coy: Turner Classic Movies is another aspirational brand. In the ur-text of aspiration in America, Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, a casual fluency in classic movies is a sign that one is higher up the greased pole of class ranking.
A rare moment when someone is not busy having a meltdown in The Toy Wife.
And while TCM was admirably egalitarian in its programming -- I defy anyone to watch 1938's magnificently batshit The Toy Wife and call it high art -- it was a channel that strove to appeal to aspiring and entrenched cinemaphiles with very careful curation, themed programming and great discussions between passionate, knowledgeable and well-respected members of the industry. TCM was a premium brand. It was why a lot of people still subscribed to cable. It was a crown jewel in the array of sub-brands that the erstwhile HBO Max streaming service office.
Naturally, under Zaslav's reign, that cultural capital had to be sacked like the Library of Alexandria. He laid off TCM's programmers, the producers of special material, and the executives who plan the events like the TCM film festivals and cruises.
Anyone who's worked in media in the last twenty years can tell you: Events can be a cash cow for media brands, but to be done well, they really do have to offer participants a sense of immersion and participation in the media property. Sacking the people who get the brand is a great way to gut events -- and reduce revenue in the long run.
Even if Zaslav can't recognize the cultural value of the premium brands he's running into the ground, you'd think he'd recognize the great whoopsy loads of money generated by brands associated with an aspirational consumer class -- and how getting those great whoopsy loads of money is dependent on offering the brand experience consumers expect. That's only good business.
The way Zaslav is devaluing the experience of consuming WBD brands like HBO and TCM reminds me a whole lot of the brief and inglorious reign of Disney CEO Bob Chapek from 2020 to 2022.
A TALE OF TWO BOBS
Speaking of premium brands -- Disney as a company has been steadily moving into premium status from the start of the 21st century, and they identified early on that people will spend on experiences. (See also: this So What, Who Cares? from the early days of this newsletter.) Disney could and did keep pushing price points higher; for the last decade, there have been articles about Disney gradually pushing the middle class out of its parks.
The flip side to making the Disney parks part and parcel of the aspirational class checklist is that the parks experience was expected to reflect the prices. The grounds were to be pristine, the guest service unfailingly pleasant and helpful, the food and rides easy to access. When Bob Chapek took over Disney in 2020, he oversaw two tremendously unpopular changes: reducing the parks' workforce and adding an additional pay-to-play feature where people could skip waiting in long lines for extra fees.
In his book The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business, Nelson D. Schwartz covered the slow and careful work Disney had historically done to ensure that class divisions and pay-to-play perks weren't so obvious. He included this interview:
“Disney has perfected the art of the soft sell,” said Robert Niles, editor of Theme Park Insider, a news site devoted to the industry. “Disney is always looking for ways to make money but they don’t want it to look like they’re doing it aggressively.”
There's a subsequent section on Disney's Signature Services division, which enumerated the discreet and privileged access that people who are willing to pay an extra $3000 a day could get. The key word was discreet; the high-end customers got their high-end experience but everyone who paid to go to Disney still felt as if their experience was a premium one.
The different classes of Disney customers, obvs.
The Velvet Rope Economy came out in 2020. Chapek's aggressive pay-to-play rolled out subsequent to publication. And suddenly guests realized exactly how much -- or how little -- the parks valued them. That they were getting this lesson in class consciousness right as the parks' maintenance and guest services began to downgrade was really bad timing. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
Even casual Disney theme-park fans blamed Mr. Chapek for changes they disliked. Park visitors posted videos on TikTok and Instagram, saying rides closed for repair were “Chapek’d.” “Bob Cheapek” became a meme on fan sites and message boards, referring to the CEO’s reputation for cost-cutting and higher prices.
Former CEO Bob Iger watched Chapek drive brand perception into the ground for a year, then came out of retirement to take his job back from the man he had previously hand-picked as his successor.
The lesson: Don't mess with aspirational brands if you want them to keep making money in the long run. The same people who are taking their kids on the Grizzly River Run at California Adventure can afford to take their kids on a vacation where they can go down a real whitewater river -- with no lines and less likelihood of garbage overflowing the can. Iger understood that consumers always have options, and they're the ones who determine what cultural currency any brand has.
OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS
I began writing this newsletter a week ago; as of yesterday morning, there was Yet Another WBD Thing with the discovery that GQ magazine had pulled an article critical of Zaslav and would you look at that, GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch just happens to have a movie in development at WBD. It's another self-own of another brand that used to mean something — and another example of Zaslav's fingerprints all over the bungle.
I don't know what will be left of media brands that used to mean something once Zaslav is done with them.
Perhaps this will end up as a gift to American culture, shaking up the hegemonic holds some premium brands hold on what the extremely online call "the discourse," and allowing a whole new set of cultural signifiers to emerge. Between strikes and the self-owns by mainstream and social media brands alike, 2023 may be the year of wholly unintentional media disruption.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Some, as per usual, interesting writing. WBD def making moves I don’t understand. “Max” sounds like a condom brand. And do any of those algorithms really get you? There’s good stuff that I like on Netflix, Amazon, etc., but I’ll be damned if a single one of their algos knows what I like.