Verizon breaks Oath

Less than two years after coming up with the name ‘Oath’ to encompass all its media properties, Verizon has sensibly concluded it’s a rubbish name.

As a result it’s being rebranded as Verizon Media Group, a much more prosaic, utilitarian name and more of a default description than a brand, but nonetheless better than Oath. We don’t know how much good money was thrown after bad in trying to polish this turd of a name, but Verizon at least deserves credit for not persisting with it indefinitely.

“I’m excited today to share that beginning January 8, 2019, Verizon Media Group will replace the Oath brand, representing our strong alignment as a core pillar of Verizon’s business,” wrote K. Guru Gowrappan, who replaced former AOL boss Tim Armstrong just ten days ago at the top of Oath. The immediate renaming of the group would appear to be a fairly symbolic act by Gowrappan and Armstrong is only hanging around until the end of the year.

The rest of Gowrappan’s post commenced with the standard ‘this just goes to show how well everything’s going’ corporate spin that it’s apparently compulsory to attach to any announcement. After that we got a list of all the specific things that have gone well at the artist formerly known as Oath, in case any doubt remained about how well things are going.

Most of those focused on Yahoo sub-brands, which must surely remain a work in progress. In basing its move into digital media on a couple of very faded internet brands – Yahoo and AOL – Verizon created a branding challenge for itself that it attempted to solve with Oath. Having acknowledged that mistake it wouldn’t be surprising to see further rebranding done within the Verizon Media Group.