Verse Meta Verse
Facebook attempts to change the conversation…
There’s a scene from Mad Men, season 3, episode 2: “Love Among the Ruins”. In it, ad man Don Draper is trying to talk Madison Square Garden VP Edgar Raffit off a ledge:
Don Draper: In the interest of time, you want to demolish Penn Station and New York hates it.Edgar Raffit: Not all of New York. A vocal minority.Don: Can they stop it?Edgar: Well I think all the hubbub is making it unpleasant for…Don: …But they can’t stop it, can they? Edgar: Why do you people insist on making us sound like villains?Don: Your concern over public opinion shows a guilty conscience. What good is that serving you if what is to be done is already underway?Edgar: So let’s say I don’t have a guilty conscience…Don: Good! And let’s also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy. A tantrum that says ‘I want the way it was.’ Or a dance that says, ‘look, it’s something new!’Edgar: Would you draw the line at 50%?Don: I’m not drawing the line at all. PR people understand this, but they can never execute it. If you don’t like what is being said — change the conversation.
I was thinking about this scene today when reading about Facebook’s name change.¹ Facebook is now ‘Meta’. And this is a conversation about that name change to Meta. How meta.
In an interview with Alex Heath (the reporter for The Verge who also broke the news a couple weeks ago that Facebook was contemplating such a change), CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked the following question:
You said you started this formally about six months ago. Is it at all a reaction to the brand baggage and the brand tax you guys sometimes refer to internally that Facebook has, and just wanting to distance from that? Or is it really more just looking ahead? I have to imagine it’s a mix of both.
In other words, is this name change an attempt, at least in part, to change the conversation? To which Zuckerberg replied:
We started well before the current cycle [of bad news]. I think the current cycle clearly had nothing to bear on this. Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing. If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in.
Two things can be true: this can both be complete bullshit and not entirely bullshit.
First and foremost, there is an approximately zero percent chance that the current cycle had “nothing to bear on this”. If that were true, several people inside of Facebook are being negligent. Second, making such a connection is not “a ridiculous thing”, obviously. OBVIOUSLY. Third, the spin that this is not the environment to change your name and brand is just utter nonsense. This is the exact time to do it. To — yes — change the narrative.
Or to attempt to.
Few think this will really work, of course. And yet, it did change the narrative for today. And the hope on Facebook’s part is that this will at least shift the narrative overall and going forward. So yes, all the stuff about wanting to change the branding so everything is not under the first social media application which made the company popular (not to mention money) can be true. But there’s also clearly a reason they didn’t do this when they last did a brand refresh two years ago (even though many of us at the time thought they should have done exactly what they did today). Facebook is Meta today, at least in part, to change the narrative of yesterday. Full stop.
I believe this because I predicted it, a few weeks back. As I wrote:
Facebook is not dying as a business, but they’ve died as a brand. The company needs to move on to ‘what’s next’ as quickly as possible to distance themselves from the social network. This is nothing new, of course — I wrote this over six years ago. They’ve more or less been trying to do this for years. But even in creating an umbrella company, they called it ‘Facebook’, which was dumb. It was the exact opposite of what they should have done. Because, again, Facebook, the brand, is over.
…
The company needs to pivot from the brand from which they’re making all the profits. They can’t just rip off the band-aid and shut down Facebook itself — obviously, OBVIOUSLY — because they need said profits to pull off whatever is next. But they need to do a better job on the branding side to distance the newer projects. It seems like that is starting to happen. It needs to happen more fully.
I don’t say that to portray myself as some sort of Nostradamus (though, some people are saying…). But rather to highlight the obviousness of how this would all play out. Facebook’s brand is in ruin. And they’ve been trying to pivot from the core app as the main hub of the company for a while. It’s okay to admit that! This can be both an offensive and defensive move. And it is.
The obvious comparison is to the Alphabet maneuver several years back. But in many ways, this is almost the opposite. Google was and remains a great brand.² That move seemed to be more about diversification. Facebook needs that too, of course. But they also already have that thanks to the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Which, again, is why they should have done this years ago! It was a natural move. Doing it today is about the narrative. And to suggest otherwise and in such a disingenuous way suggests a company that won’t actually be able to change the narrative!
Nearly every story I read on the matter with some level of Facebook involvement today made it clear that Facebook went out of their way to try to convey that this was not a reactive move. “Your concern over public opinion shows a guilty conscience,” one might say. Again, who are they kidding? And the answer is no one, but the fact that they so clearly care about controlling this part of the narrative is just ridiculous.
Who gives a shit? I mean, clearly I do. And more people probably do today. But in a few days and weeks no one will care about the ‘why’. All that will matter is if it worked or not. And, to be clear, it probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t! This is what Facebook should have done years ago — and what they should have done today for an entirely different reason. Both are legit. Own it.
Now you’re free to say, launch a smartwatch without it seeming absolutely ridiculous that the brand no one can trust is launching a wearable. Or to put cameras in our living rooms just weeks after perhaps the worst data management disaster in history. Or asking us to strap a screen to your face with nary a book in sight. Long live Meta, the maneuver absolutely totally completely six months in the making which changed the conversation. Because Facebook didn’t like what was being said.
Update 10/31/21: More thoughts on the Meta maneuver:
¹ After I got my memes and jokes out of the way, of course.
² Yes, I happen to be a partner at GV, which was formerly under Google and is now under that Alphabet umbrella. That said, I have no insight or information as to why such a decision was made. I was not consulted, Don Draper-style :)
