I know I criticize WB a lot here, but dammit, how can I help it when they do stuff like this?
Please tell me it was the holiday weekend and they couldn’t contact any of their graphic artists, so they whipped something together in PowerPoint that reminded them of “Superman, the Movie”.
More like their graphic artists see the cost-cutting handwriting on the wall and so were home designing really cool resumés.
The previous mega-mergers involving AOL and Time and Warner did not turn out to have anywhere near the synergy (or even the energy) that their respective then CEOs bragged on, so I don't know what anyone should really expect this time either.
There's something about those huge media libraries, I guess, that people keep thinking can generate whole new realms of profit not yet even imagined. Yet in practice all that has happened is that assets have been spun off, debt loaded in, massive cost cutting has occurred in the realm of middle management and worker bees, and some CEOs and VPs walk away once more with whatever gold was woven into their exit packages.
It has to be demoralizing for those who are still around as long term and supposedly valued mid-level employees. I remember once doing some work for clients in the HBO component of TW after that AOL-TimeWarner debacle of a merger had occurred.
Everyone at HBO seemed shell-shocked... "Steve Case?
A O L ??? Seriously?"
Anyway cost cutting was already gearing up, with signs of that becoming a suitably epic part of the newly merged outfit's corporate saga. One of the managers there who had originally worked for Time Inc. was ranting about how the healthcare options at TimeWarner were all he'd been sticking around for after the
prior merger... and now even that stuff was on the chopping block: he'd just found out his preferred pharmacy right around the corner from work was no longer in the insurance carrier's network.
"All the little things"... are why that logo sucks the way it does, believe me.