"META" the brand?!
Branders Delight
My last post was titled, “It’s been a minute” and I’m sad to say it’s been too long since I’ve contributed any content out here in the ethos. Unless, that is, you follow my personal weekly time capsule, provided “free” from Mr. Zuckerberg via Instagram. Each Friday to close out the week (starting week 1 in 2021), I post favorite random pictures from my iPhone.
Facebook brands, oh sorry, the Meta family of brands—Messenger (meh), WhatsApp (I missed the cool factor on this one), Occulus (bought the glasses, haven’t opened the box), and more—have outnumbered trading days under the “FB” ticker symbol.
As a marketer that has spent the majority of her career working for publicly traded companies, I can’t get enough of this story.
How long have regulators, Nasdaq compliance and operations teams, and Facebook’s very own brand team, been working on this change? Mr Zuckerberg’s in-house creative agency, Creative X, thoughtfully managed the name change identity rebrand.
I worked on the asset management global rebrand during my time at Deutsche Bank and I thought that took a lot of coordination! And since I was someone who’s time at college included a print “facebook” I look forward to watching the evolution of the Meta brand. Kudos to Creative X for marrying logo simplicity, for example, with a basic definition (“beyond”) for the parent company’s new name. This is not an easy feet, that is visually keeping the brand grounded in the present (gradient blue, anyone?) with an one eye on the current pipeline, and the other with a hopefully twinkle, inspired by what we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
update: as of mid-Feb 2022, this “FAANG” darling is down 38% ytd. Ouch