A dynamic and expressive brand, against all odds.

In April of 2021, I was offered an opportunity to move from Prime Video, to come and lead brand at Amazon’s little known sister brand, IMDb TV. The free, ad-supported streaming service, while still very much in it’s infancy, had proven itself a viable business and worthy of deeper investment. While there was a lot of positivity and optimism, there was still so much work to do. It didn’t require more than a cursory glance at what existed, to understand that all of the success to that point, was achieved despite the lack of any semblance of a meaningful brand. So, with an understanding that I would be allowed to reevaluate everything, including the name, I made the jump.

The evidence that the name (IMDb TV) was a problem was fully apparent well in advance of my arrival. In fact, there had been three previous renaming attempts that had failed. Teams were growing increasingly frustrated and disenchanted. Everyone’s hard work felt continually compromised by the lack of coherent brand, and it was beginning to shake collective confidence that we we might ever see on the other side of this brand malaise.

Given this climate, we had the added challenge of needing to reboot expectations and provide internal teams fresh reasons to believe. Compounding matters, the previous attempts to get alignment on a new name had consumed a lot of time, ratcheting up leadership anxiety and making failure, not an option.

Under ideal circumstances, when building a brand, one would start by defining a clear brand positioning and that would inform everything else. Even the name. However, that wasn’t going to be possible in this situation; they’d need to be solved in parallel. Not ideal, yet, as we proved, not impossible.