What is brand equity in 2016?
It’s a legitimate question – and one we have been pondering ourselves in recent months.
Naturally, like the American-style beer lagered with beechwood chips, transported by Clydesdales and beloved by pet owners everywhere, we first started thinking about rebranding after brewing company Anheuser-Busch’s brilliant announcement that it intends to capitalize upon the brand equity of our great nation itself throughout the remainder of this rollicking election season.
As if that wasn’t enough, jolly old England decided to put down its teacups and pinky fingers long enough to borrow a move we ourselves perfected nearly 240 years ago. But, sorry, Limeys, as the meme attests, we had one of the best Brexits of all time and you’re simply not going to steal any of our independent American thunder.
Then, somewhere along the way, of course, came Tribune Publishing, which arguably upstaged “America” with “tronc,” and gave us even more food for thought.
We know all too well that brands in the digital era must disrupt or be disrupted – the latter destined for extinction like, say, a dinosaur…named Tronc.
As a legacy media person myself, I hate to say it, but if I had a pet dinosaur, I’d probably name it #tronc, too. https://t.co/Oaz3dvhlSH
— Ellen Gray (@elgray) June 2, 2016
Plus, we at WTFSEO are all about keeping up with the Joneses @ryanjones. And so our editorial staff, publisher and unelected European board of directors have seen some late nights as we questioned our brand identity, threw out the proverbial playbook, thought outside the box, rewrote the rules, redrew the map, got the playbook back out of the trash can, then threw it out again when we realized why we’d done so in the first place and, thus, envisioned our own bold new future.
Change is never easy. But, as Heraclitus noted, it is our only constant.
And that’s why we have two announcements:
1. Until November 9, WTFSEO will be known as WTFAmerica.lol.
2. Henceforth, we are no longer simply an industry-leading news site. Instead, we’ve been inspired by the Company Formerly Known as Tribune Publishing to embrace a forward-thinking no-caps strategy in which we pivot to become an SEO content curation and monetization engine focused on creating and distributing premium paradigm-shifting content across all channels.
And we’ve dubbed this new model “CoCuMo.”
This, of course, will never be conflated with Kokomo, but the latter is worth revisiting at this particular juncture as, honestly, what is more American than baseball, apple pie and the Beach Boys?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJWmbLS2_ec]Re: CoCuMo, we’re leveraging our relationship with RankBrain to combine our existing assets with AI to enhance the user experience (That means yours!), accelerate growth and disrupt the publishing industry as we know it. And, like tronc, we fully intend to launch a visual content portal of our own…with more premium SEO content than you can shake a stick at, well… maybe an oversized twig.
“Our transformation strategy – which has thus far attracted multiple dollars in ad revenue – is focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the user experience and better monetize our world-class content in order to deliver personalized content to our monthly user and drive value for all of our stakeholders,” is a quote we’ve made up and attributed to Publisher @simonheseltine.
Wet, Hot, Patriotic American Summer
But, like Budweiser, we, too, want to have the most patriotic summer of our lives – and not only to put EU-less England in its place. We also want to celebrate the hardworking readers who inspired our 2016 mission to Make SEO Great Again.
And that’s why we’re not only updating our corporate identity, we’re also integrating patriotic messaging throughout WTFAmerica.lol, like, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way,” “I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and my cardigan,” and “Got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in my hand. Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man,” to inspire our readers to celebrate our shared values of freedom and authenticity.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruNrdmjcNTc]WTFAmerica.lol’s bold new brand also marks the launch of our summer-long “SEO is in Your Hands” movement, which reminds SEOs from coast to glorious coast to embrace the optimism upon which this industry was founded.
“We’re kicking off what should be the most patriotic summer pre-Millennials have ever seen – including Finland’s Wife-Carrying World Championships in July, which will include participants from the great state of Maine, as well as the Air Guitar World Championships in August,” opined Ryan Jones, Editor in Chief of WTFAmerica.lol. “As if that wasn’t enough, the US is also home to the World’s Ugliest Dog Competition and the 2016 Just for Men National Beard and Mustache Championships. WTFAmerica, indeed. We’re proud to salute the great nation where our publication has been passionately produced for the past 23 months.”
America.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRUjr8EVgBg]
