Hey, at least HBO Max can laugh at itself

The streaming service branding game of musical chairs continued this week when Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced the streaming platform Max would once again be called HBO Max, starting this summer. It’s a complete brand reversal from a switch the company made back in 2023, when it ditched the “HBO” in its name for a head scratching “Max.”

It immediately brought to mind this joke from 2024: “It’s on Tubu. It’s literally on Heebee. It’s on Poodee with ads. It’s literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it’s on Gumpy. It’s a Pheebo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now.”

But for all the absurdity, the decision to resurrect the HBO name is the right one. And the company continued its good brand decision-making when it decided to unload a tidal wave of social content making fun of all this branding back and forth. 

Social strategist Jack Appleby said in his Future Social newsletter that this might actually be his favorite social campaign of the year so far. “This is the kind of big decision agility more companies should aspire to, and create a culture that encourages it,” said Appleby. 

Not only is it rare for a giant company to be this quick to make a good reversal on a bad decision, it’s equally rare that it’s self-aware enough to create genuinely funny content acknowledging how silly it all is. 

The power of sorry

Remember when Skittles brought back its lime flavor in 2022? The brand livestreamed a 35-minute press conference in which it began to individually apologize to all 130,880 people who complained about lime’s removal from the classic Skittles bag. As hilarious as that was, it was also grounded in solid research. A study from Forrester that same year found that 41% of consumers would return to a brand that concedes to making a mistake and apologizes for it.

For HBO, the moment gave the brand a perfect excuse to utilize some of its iconic IP—from Game of Thrones to The Wire—to celebrate its name reclaimed. 

The lesson here for other brands and companies ties back to a common refrain among top marketers: know how your brand is being discussed in culture, and act accordingly. While brands do have some power to dictate their own image, ultimately that image is a product of a back-and-forth between that and how fans and culture see them. 

HBO’s self-awareness, and its ability to articulate that in a fast, funny way is a case study in how brands can say, “We f**ked up” and still win.

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