#225 What’s in a Name

Recently Warner Brothers and CBS announced they were closing down their respective struggling TV offshoots and merging them into one entity targeting the 18-24 demographic. TV companies that target the 18-24 demographic are struggling because they have to compete with so many other entertainment options for the young people’s attention—Ipods, Grand Theft Auto, online paintball and the internet generally. Older folks’ TV channels only have to compete with internet porn and karaoke. Even older folks networks simply have to compete with their viewers nodding off in the recliner. But it is a testimony to the perceived power of initials in branding that the name of the new network is called by two letters and two letters only. The network CBS is closing down is, or was, UPN. I don’t know what UPN stands for, when I first it heard it I thought, oh, that’s those channels at the other end of the spectrum you could only tune it with a really good Star Trekkie antennae. The other network that’s closing is WB. Initials bug me. I never knew what UPN meant and I didn’t care, like IBM, I wasn’t going to be confused. WB was a little more of a stretch. It sounded like it ought to be something. I remembered seeing it at the end of a movie or something. Eventually I realized that the company I knew of, and was comfortable with, as Warner Brothers had decided to initialize, to divorce themselves from their past or something. WB, which was Warner Brothers, is now a division of Time Warner, which was a merger of Time magazine and Warner Brothers Entertainment back in the corporate slash and burn era of the 80s and 90s, and Ted Turner was in there somewhere and so on and so on and where the heck is my Enron stock? Oh well. What’s in a name anyhow, a rose by any other name is just as sweet. Although I’ve never really subscribed to that theory either. If we had named roses yogurts or skanks I don’t think they would have caught on. I mean words kind of find their level. Giving your sweetheart a bouquet of fragrant skanks for Valentines Day just wouldn’t quite be the same. So what two intials did the branding mavens of corporate America decide to name the new channel that merges the best of 18-24 entertainment options? The wired, techno, Ipod generation? The WIFI users and downloaders and computer savvy laptop totting, cellphone digital picture texting, vampire slaying smallvillian Goths and geeks? CW. That’s right, they named the network CW. I guess cause C is for CBS and W is for Warner Brothers. But you know what partner? In the rest of America CW means country western. So they’re gonna be a lot of cowboys tuning in and complaining to there bible belt congressman about all those steamy teenage goings-on UPN and WB were famous for. What were they thinking? Was the name I-TV taken?
America, ya gotta love it.