Verizon gives AOL-Yahoo mash-up an even sillier name: Oath

Someone was paid good money to come up with possibly the worst rebrand in history

When Yahoo was founded back in the mid-1990s its founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, insisted that it stood for "Yet Another Hierachical Officious Oracle".

However, Yahoo's new parent company, Verizon, which also owns the tattered remains of AOL, has decided to give its new mash-up of these companies an even sillier name: Oath.

The rebrand will become effective as soon as the acquisition is completed.

In addition to becoming the umbrella brand for AOL and Yahoo, it will also cover almost 20 other brands that Verizon has created in order to build an internet advertising arm. A branding campaign will be launched as soon as the acquisition is completed.

However, Ymail is unlikely to be rebranded "OathMail" or OMail.

Rebrands are rarely popular, but this appears to be an umbrella company name, like Google's Alphabet. However, it's worth nothing that Alphabet still has to be called "Google's Alphabet" for context, as it is meaningless and confusing on its own.

The holding company owning the bits and bobs left behind after the Yahoo asset-acquisition by Verizon, meanwhile, will be called Altaba - a reference to the big stake in Chinese internet company Alibaba, which is valued at around $35bn.

While the deal still hasn't been completed, it is expected to be finalised before the end of June. Verizon's plans for all the rag-tag of internet properties it now holds will be clearer by then.

Opinion

I've already had a good moan about branding this year with Mozilla's decision to hire a fancy branding agency to rebrand them, stylised as Moz://a, which we needed like we needed like a hole in a Galaxy Note 7.

But at least they kept the name (more or less). The issue was never with that, it was the needless corporate expense on the typeface from a not-for-profit company where our quarrel lay.

But this is something different.

Verizon is trying to make a new name with a fake mythology attached. ‘Oath' is meant to sound like a promise to customers, but this from a company that never seemed to keep it own 'oath' to protect customer data particularly well.

An ancient synonym for "oath" is "plight". Somehow that seems more accurate.