Episode Transcript
Don Mock 0:21
We’re at episode 88. We’re back, Rob.
Rob Broadfoot 0:22
We are back. I’m back.
Don Mock 0:24
I know which is exciting. Super exciting. I missed this.
Rob Broadfoot 0:27
I know. Went to a wonderful little vacation and now I’m back and ready to talk about the things that the people want to hear about.
Don Mock 0:32
What do they want? I mean, what do people want to hear about?
Rob Broadfoot 0:35
They want to hear about breaking news.
Don Mock 0:37
Okay, drumroll please.
Rob Broadfoot 0:39
And I suppose the most recent late breaking news, as of this podcast would be certainly one of your idols.
Don Mock 0:50
Yeah, I know.
Rob Broadfoot 0:52
Elon Musk and his raging maniacal takeover of Twitter and now the latest and greatest episode chapter 14 Is that he is now rebranding it X. For letter X.
Don Mock 1:08
Yeah. When you think of x what’s the first thing you think of?
Rob Broadfoot 1:11
Um, I think of X marks the spot.
Don Mock 1:14
Okay. All right. I’ve seen some funny headlines of X marks the bots because of the bot takeover of twitter.
Rob Broadfoot 1:20
Of course, that would be a good one.
Don Mock 1:22
No one’s gonna reference this but I think of the kiss the popular kiss song when they took the maggots
Rob Broadfoot 1:28
Just put the X in sex?
Don Mock 1:30
Yes. Isn’t that random? or I think of Triple X the wrestler
Rob Broadfoot 1:36
Hang on hang on even more random. Let’s put the X in sex I believe Cuyler’s father had something to do with the production
Don Mock 1:47
The audio engineering?
Rob Broadfoot 1:48
Yeah the audio, I think he worked on that out we’re gonna have to fact check that but I think that’s right.
Don Mock 1:54
Here’s what we’ll do between episodes. We will fact check that and then we’ll mention that in the next episode.
Rob Broadfoot 1:59
I think that’s right
Don Mock 2:00
Let’s put the X in sex is a very weird music video I believe it was all black and white it was very strange to see them without the makeup you know, and I’m not a big KISS guy. I don’t love KISS. But it was topics. But anyway, Twitter to X, Elon has had a fascination with letter X forever it seems like
Rob Broadfoot 2:19
Do you know what the foundation of the fascination is?
Don Mock 2:22
I don’t know why he has a fascination with the letter X. I know that and I’m not an Elon aficionado, or chronicle or historian. You know, I just know what I’ve read through the news. Right? Remember he was part of the original PayPal conglomerate and stuff like that. Right? He wanted it to be called X. You know, that didn’t happen, obviously the board changed the rules on things. There is an anecdote that he wanted to name one of his children X and was rejected by whatever state either California or Texas.
Rob Broadfoot 2:54
Well he did name his kids something odd.
Don Mock 2:56
Yeah, it’s all sorts of weird numerals symbols, and we’ve got SpaceX I was gonna mention that. So he has had a lifelong obsession with the letter X, I’m a Twitter lover.
Rob Broadfoot 3:12
You’re a twitter lover yeah
Don Mock 3:14
I am not a power user. I mean, I’m on Twitter every single day, I love Twitter. It’s my favorite. You know, love it for sports. I used to love it for breaking journalism when you could trust verified sources, you know, love my comic book community on Twitter. I think none of the social platforms historically made me laugh as much as Twitter has
Rob Broadfoot 3:35
Because it forces people to be witty.
Don Mock 3:37
Yeah, yeah. So it’s funny, you know What I mean? And I have an appreciation for funny headlines and funny little takes, and sarcasm and all that good stuff. And Twitter is the creme de Graaff for that, right. So I do love the Twitter it has has taken a sharp turn to an interesting place.
Rob Broadfoot 3:57
Yeah, for sure.
Don Mock 3:58
And I think what’s interesting is his vision of hey, it could be so much more, you know What I mean? And that’s What he was with PayPal and everything back in the day, it was can you have one solitary app, where you can do all your messaging, you can do banking, and you know, financial transactions, you know, a little bit of WhatsApp and stuff, maybe even calling right I mean when he took over, maybe there’s a hey, you can call people through their username. Like, that’s the last thing I want is spam calls from Twitter through my user name, right but interesting ecosystem, why you would need to spend $44 billion to build that on something, I don’t understand, but that’s beside the point, I guess.
Rob Broadfoot 4:38
Yeah, we always say things are worth What people want to pay for them. And so clearly, he felt it was worth that.Who knows? A lot of people didn’t agree with that but who knows? But it seems to me like, and this is leading up to What we want to talk about, which is the idea of the rebranding and whether that’s good, bad or whatever. But it seems like ever since he took over there’s no real plan seems like there’s no down the line thinking or future. Planning it just very spur of the moment whatever he wakes up and feels like he wants to do that day to get headlines and shock the world
Don Mock 5:18
I agree. Yeah, it kind of feels like we’re just beta testing in real time and it’s like oh Twitter is broken again today, whatever. Yeah, you know, like oh but this is busted.
Rob Broadfoot 5:27
And even to me feels like a step before beta testing. Like they have decided it’s something they should test. It’s just one Renegade. Literally waking up and going what do I want to do today?
Don Mock 5:41
Yeah, we’re gonna change that. Yeah, exactly.
Rob Broadfoot 5:42
And I think when it comes to, you know, rebranding twitter.
Don Mock 5:52
Yes.
Rob Broadfoot 5:53
I think about it from well, first off, the Twitter brand is great and has a lot of equity and a lot of value. I think we could all Jack Dorsey did a great job and built the thing, and it’s wonderful. And even the design of the bird. I mean, we had however many designers just to get to that simplified bird. From a visual standpoint it’s great. It’s a great logo. It still stands out on your phone amidst the sea of apps and everything else I think. And What my first, I guess, when I saw it, or I heard that oh we’re rebranding it like, right, wrong, or whatever it was, have they thought about the implications of rolling out a new brand?
Don Mock 6:38
No, clearly not.
Rob Broadfoot 6:40
So I thought that’s how I first thought about it was in terms of like, Oh, I’m not sure he knows what that entails. And it was like, Okay, great. We projected an X on the side of the building at night. And we took down signs, and we didn’t tell anybody and they’re doing all these Elon, very Elon Musk thing. But then it dawned on me like even today, as I was working on some things today, I’m, you know, I’m in all of these other applications linking to twitter like it was dawning on me, it trickles down so far. In order to roll out just the production side of that digitally, physically, and everything else is a monumental task.
Don Mock 7:26
Absolutely. It’ll touch millions of organizations globally.
Rob Broadfoot 7:33
Yeah, globally. And I think, I don’t know if he believes this or not, but it seems like he thinks, oh, I just changed the logo and hit a button and it just bloop. And now it’s just X everywhere. So that seems really odd to me. And there was no, again, going back to the like Elon it seems like he wakes up in the morning and decides he wants to do something and then just does it. There was no like, lead up to it
Don Mock 8:05
No, surprise.
Rob Broadfoot 8:07
Surprise. That’s how I first reacted to it was the production part of it.
Don Mock 8:15
Okay. Now you leaded your preamble with good, bad or indifferent. What do you think it is, as of right now, the moment that we’re recording this
Rob Broadfoot 8:23
I mean, as of right now.
Don Mock 8:24
You think that it’s a good decision, a bad decision?
Rob Broadfoot 8:27
I think that I mean, my gut tells me it’s not a great decision. And I think the reason for that is primarily because you took all of this value and equity. Right? That generally positive.
Don Mock 8:44
Yeah and that’s part of the cost of why you bought it right?
Rob Broadfoot 8:47
Oh, yeah. I mean, the brand value alone its however many billions of that 44B. And to take that and flush it down the toilet, it seems like an impulse move from somebody who doesn’t necessarily know the implications of doing that. It was kind of my first thought, I mean, I get the like, Hey, you want it to be something different like I understand the mindset you want it to be this holistic, much broader thing and you felt like Twitter somehow limited that vision, which I don’t think it did.
Don Mock 9:25
I don’t think it did either.
Rob Broadfoot 9:25
I think you just built your vision into the brand’s. So yeah, I mean, I would say, if you asked me right now, I would say yeah, probably not a great decision.
Don Mock 9:36
Yeah, I’m gonna echo that decision. And my take on it is not dissimilar to yours. I mean, I do think that, you know, you’ve got billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of brand equity that’s recognized globally, right? Even in multiple languages, right. People still you know, I’m in Bangladesh, I’m in wherever or Eastern Europe or I’m in South America or whatever it’s tweets, you know, you have created a word, right? That is a it’s a noun, it’s a verb. It’s an adjective not dissimilar to Google, right? We have created sort of our own language, you Google that now, you know, it is a little bit of everything, right? And brands would I mean, people would kill each other to be able to get that level of market penetration, right? I mean, Kleenex forever, you know, even when we were were kids growing up in the biz, right? Kleenex was always utilized as the preeminent example of we have named something that has now become ubiquitous with tissue paper. And it doesn’t matter, you’re buying other boxes of tissue paper, no one calls it tissue paper, everyone calls it Kleenex. Right? The next great example of that is definitely Google. Right? I mean, Google is just, you know, it’s become its own thing, right. It’s you Google it, whether you’re in Safari, or Bing, or wherever the case may be, right. I mean, there’s other example
Rob Broadfoot 9:48
Bandaids, post it notes.
Don Mock 11:02
Yeah, yes. saltines. There are things that have become but well, Twitter is definitely that, right. It is its own name. It’s its own action. That’s its own language, right. And then to replace that with something that you don’t really know how to say, right? Like, okay, it’s no longer a tweet. It’s a zt, It’s an X, you know What I mean? And I get a kick out of x is the universal symbol for No, x is the do not do this which I find interesting, right?
Rob Broadfoot 11:36
Well, that would be X marks the spot.
Don Mock 11:38
Yeah. No, Agreed. Agreed. But I think in terms of universal The point I’m making, I guess, in terms of universal brand recognition, and visual language all around the world, right? Like the bird, the tweet, it is a thing, right. Universal symbol X generally means do not do this, check mark is a good thing, it’s a go. Again, I love the letter X, too. It’s a cool letter, you know, whatever. So, I think I’ve been joking, throughout the last couple of days. Like, I thought that the HBO removal from HBO Max might be the biggest brand decision like topical wasn’t a horrible mistake, you know, and I get it we’ve got the Discovery Channel, we got other stuff besides HBO. I mean, I understand that, but the power of the HBO brand, that was such a big deal when they decided to just go with a general term, Max, right. I thought, oh, that might be the most controversial branding decision. No way. This totally blows it out of the water, in my opinion, like, and I don’t know, like, take a poll of the top 500 CMOS of fortune, whatever, I don’t know that anybody would agree that it was a great idea to just wake up one morning and flush away all my brand equity
Rob Broadfoot 12:52
I think part of that is because there’s no logic behind it.
Don Mock 12:55
Yeah it’s subjectivity, it’s I like X
Rob Broadfoot 12:59
Right. So and the other thing, too, is like it it I’m thinking about like, like, the like Twitter, the idea of Twitter, the brand of Twitter and tweet and like, that’s not just gonna die.
Don Mock 13:15
Yeah, microblogging
Rob Broadfoot 13:16
Like that’s gonna well, I mean, the brand itself, like the word tweets and Twitter, like, yeah, it’s not going to die. Here’s where I’m going with this. Let’s talk about another x rebrand. So I remember back when Comcast rebranded and turned into XFINITY and that was, I don’t know, I mean, how many years ago
We were working on it. I mean, that would have been
Don Mock 13:43
I mean, that would have been 15 years.
Rob Broadfoot 13:45
15 years ago? So 15 years of brand development around XFINITY and to this day, I still call it Comcast everybody calls it Comcast, comcast.com takes you to xfinity so the idea that, and Comcast as a word, as a kind of made up word has a nice feel to it, calmness, XFINITY is this weird made up something that doesn’t really roll off the tongue and it’s doesn’t have a whole lot of personality.
Don Mock 14:26
Do you remember why they did? I mean, I’m showing my ignorance.
Rob Broadfoot 14:30
I don’t know.
Don Mock 14:32
Because I remember working on this stuff with you like it wasn’t like oh, now we have a voice and we have internet and we have TVs so the bundle is called XFINITY, you know, because we did all the bundle stuff, but it was still Comcast. So I don’t know if it was a hierarchy thing.
Rob Broadfoot 14:50
Someone pissing on a fire hydrant somewhere.
Don Mock 14:52
I mean, technically Google is owned by alphabet and you know Yeah, I don’t go to meta to check on my aunt’s posts. You know, even though everything is branded Meta, nobody calls it meta, we call it you know, Facebook
Rob Broadfoot 15:04
It’s so like, Twitter. I mean, great name.
Don Mock 15:08
Yeah. Retweets
Rob Broadfoot 15:10
Great logo, great visual system is so unique and just playful and fun and great. And it has so much personality in the name and the design of it. And then you go to X
Don Mock 15:21
It loses all that.
Rob Broadfoot 15:23
It just loses a lot of personality. So it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it. I don’t know that there’s a plan.
Don Mock 15:31
Well, you know, I don’t know either. It’s still is as much as everybody hates it still is the 800 pound gorilla of the microblogging. And by that, I mean yeah, okay, so all those people were fired from Twitter, they all got hired by meta speaking of meta, right. And they launched threads, it was launched maybe a couple of weeks ago, right. And it was, Oh, my God, they got 5 million people in a day. And then it was, Oh, my God, they have 100 million people, or 70 million, or whatever it was
Rob Broadfoot 15:56
I think it got to over 100 million.
Don Mock 15:58
Well, in one week, the user base, you know, basically, they went from 21 minutes a day, down to less than four minutes, in one week, you know, it went from 21 minutes a day to less than four minutes. And their daily active users crashed almost a full 80%. It was in the high seven, it was like 77% of users immediately stopped using it. Right. And part of that, I mean, I’m reading between the lines here, though, part of that is my meta crowd, my Facebook crowd, the groups that I follow because of my hobbies, and all my family members. That isn’t the same audience that you follow on Twitter, right? Twitter, people are not technically my friends, you know What I mean?
Rob Broadfoot 16:39
We argue
Don Mock 16:41
Well, yeah, we argue, we complain about things, we do customer service interaction, my flight is delayed, my luggage is lost, whatever, right? But I also follow the New York Times and The this, you know, like, I do those types of things, right? And, oh, I’ve got all these other hobbies are these other people I know through hobbies, and maybe I interact with them on Twitter, but I’m not Facebook friends, like I don’t need backyard photos of your grilling and this and that, you know, and also like, I don’t want my aunt or my grandma seeing What I’m tweeting about if I’m you know, microblogging either. So to me there’s limited crossover, I’m not surprised at all to see the meta numbers crash, because there’s not really a crossover of target audience in my opinion.
Rob Broadfoot 17:18
No, I don’t know anything about thread. I don’t know anything about Twitter, really.
Don Mock 17:26
You cut yourself short, because you do know about them. You’re just not
Rob Broadfoot 17:29
I’m not an active user.Is it thread integrated with Facebook?
Don Mock 17:36
Yeah. Because that’s how
Rob Broadfoot 17:38
I know they’re both owned by Meta. But I mean, they had to add integration between the two?
Don Mock 17:43
Yeah it’s a standalone app, but kind of similar to how Instagram was purchased by Meta. You could then go oh, hey, by the way, we know all your Facebook friends, follow them over here. You know, so there is an easy, seamless way to integrate. But I don’t need one ecosystem and 4 apps for the same people like Okay, so I’ve got all my Facebook friends now I’ve got my messenger, because that’s its own app. You know, now I’ve got Instagram. And now I’ve got threads. I have four separate apps, they’re all tying into the same level of friends. That makes no sense to me.
Rob Broadfoot 18:16
But you don’t think, what you’re suggesting is not, I don’t know What the word is
Don Mock 18:23
Im not surprised that the user base crashed
Rob Broadfoot 18:27
But they couldn’t pull enough Twitter users yet to jump the shark
Don Mock 18:35
Yeah, I mean, everybody’s miserable on Twitter and wants their blue sky codes and wants out and they want hive to be successful. They want other things to be successful, but it’s really until, you know, the larger corporations adopted until like, oh, Atlanta United or the 40 Niners, Braves and, you know, and all of the New York Times and San Francisco, you know, when all of the things really actually abandon Twitter that’s when Twitter, you know, that’s when whatever the alternate will take off I feel like, and blue sky, you know, you mentioned Jack Dorsey, that’s Jack Dorsey’s new version of Twitter, right.
Rob Broadfoot 19:09
You got your invite yet?
Don Mock 19:11
No, I mean
Rob Broadfoot 19:13
Sore spot?
Don Mock 19:15
It’s a little bit of a sore I was driving and missed an opportunity to snatch a code, I got a DM Hey, do you still need a code and I didn’t see the message until a couple hours later, because I was on the road. And my daughter got the code instead. And so now I’m waiting for her to invite me
Rob Broadfoot 19:36
She’s holding all the cards right now
Don Mock 19:38
I know exactly. I think each user on blue sky, I think you get a code you get maybe one or two codes every two weeks or something if you keep using it
Rob Broadfoot 19:45
But is up and running it isnt a beta thing this is just were slow in building it
Don Mock 19:50
It still is glitchy from What I understand. It’s not perfect but they did open it up for you know, invite codes so that they can start seeing the data start testing, because it’s my understanding. It’s, you know, similar to Twitter, but it is decentralized in terms of servers architecture
Rob Broadfoot 20:08
I think and just to wrap it up, but I think that getting back to X, you know and the rebranding of Twitter as x, the problem I see is that x, formerly known as Twitter, as a product is going through an identity crisis.
Don Mock 20:25
Absolutely.
Rob Broadfoot 20:25
Musk has no idea who it is What it is, he’s making up the rules as he goes, Do I get a checkmark? Do I charge for a checkmark? So until they figure out until any company knows What they do and What they are? The task of branding them effectively is near impossible.
Don Mock 20:44
Correct. That’s great. It’s an astute observation
Rob Broadfoot 20:46
You know, without them knowing who they are. How can they go tell the world who they are? Visually or otherwise.
Don Mock 20:52
Yeah and to your point. I mean, it was 20 bucks a month. And then he got an argument with Stephen King online and said, How about eight bucks? And then it became eight bucks for everybody to get the blue check, You know,
Rob Broadfoot 20:52
It’s insanity.
Don Mock 21:02
Yeah. So how can you brand something that kind of, you know, is a moving target, but also, they don’t have a firm understanding of who they are. You know, they’re kind of having an identity crisis, you know?
Rob Broadfoot 21:14
Well It’ll be interesting to see, this just happened yesterday, I guess July 24th if my date is right but so it’ll be interesting to revisit this six months down the road. A year down the road and see if we have egg on our faces or not. We’re giving it a thumbs down as of today.
Don Mock 21:30
I’m giving it a big thumbs down. I think it’s a horrible mistake from a brand architecture perspective.
Rob Broadfoot 21:36
Alright, well, let us know What you think.
Don Mock 21:38
Yeah. drop us a note. Where can everybody drop us a note Rob?
Rob Broadfoot 21:41
You can find us on the internet at mocktheagency.com Of course and on all the socials even X @mocktheagency . Will talk to you next time.
Don Mock 21:54
Thanks everybody.
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