Someone got paid to come up with Oath replacement name 'Verizon Media Group'

Today, Verizon CEO K. Guru Gowrappan posted a press release about the official end of its media brand Oath and the start of its new brand: Verizon Media Group.

Some would probably say “Verizon Media Group” is a little too on-the-nose for a brand name, but hey: no one wants to work late at marketing meetings, so they probably just settled on the first name that popped up and called it a night.

Verizon Media Group will now be the umbrella brand for the various Verizon media properties, such as Yahoo, HuffPost, AOL, TechCrunch, and the recently overhauled Tumblr.

The Oath brand began in 2017 and was the combination of two media properties Verizon had recently purchased: AOL and Yahoo. Verizon’s main ambition with Oath was to create new media which appealed to younger consumers, with a major focus on video content. However, Oath struggled to make much headway with several of its ambitious ideas falling flat, such as the go90 app which aimed to take on video streaming services like YouTube and Netflix.

Earlier this year, Oath CEO Tim Armstrong made some comments which made it pretty clear that go90 and Oath, in general, weren’t going to last. Armstrong left his position to be replaced by Gowrappan who very quickly announced the removal of all pornographic content on Tumblr and laid off about 10 percent of the Oath workforce.

Now, starting January 8, 2019, Oath will officially be done and Verizon Media Group will take its place.

For general consumers, this reorganization won’t mean much — HuffPost and TechCrunch will still publish their content, Yahoo will still offer news, stocks, and email, and AOL will do…whatever it is AOL does now. Other than Tumblr’s controversial makeover, it will be business as usual at Verizon Media Group.

NEXT: Verizon’s 5G aspirations lead to over 10,000 voluntary resignations