Are you ready to check in with your fantasy football club on Oath Sports? Or your stock portfolio on Oath Finance?
Don't worry, you won't have to. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's tweet that announced the creation of a new company — Oath — under parent Verizon to hold assets including AOL and soon-to-be-acquired Yahoo is something more marketers than consumers will have to wrestle with.
Armstrong on Tuesday stressed that the brands will stay the same. We are going to be “all in in terms building awesome products and services among the biggest brands we have," Armstrong told CNBC.
Here’s how the Oath news might impact you.
Q: I’ve had a Yahoo Mail account for years. Is my email address going to change?
A: Extremely unlikely. As Armstrong said on CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning, the Yahoo brands are not going anywhere, and that includes an email account some people have had since Bill Clinton was in the White House. Of course, Yahoo Mail is already under a cloud, given the separate hacks disclosed by Yahoo that have impacted more than 500 million and 1 billion accounts, respectively. Keeping that in mind, some of you might want a fresh email start anyhow.
Q: Will Verizon supply that new email account?
A: I’m not exactly betting on a retro resurgence of AOL Mail, though millions of people still hear the familiar “You’ve Got Mail” refrain, including folks who recently moved over from the discontinued Verizon.net email service.
Q. I’m an avid Yahoo Fantasy Sports participant? Will I be playing Oath Fantasy Baseball? Or Oath Fantasy Football?
A. Again, unlikely. Yahoo Sports properties are enormously popular and the same principle applies here: the Yahoo brand doesn’t go away that holds true for all the fantasy games you can play from within Yahoo covering baseball, football, hockey, basketball, golf and other sports.
Q. How about Yahoo Finance?
A: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Yahoo Finance isn’t going to disappear either. You’ll be able to head over to the site to check on your portfolio, the markets and other financial news, just as you always have.
Q. Will any of the other brands under Oath morph into something else?
A: Armstrong has described Oath as a B2B brand, overseeing the names that you are all familiar with. Beyond Yahoo and AOL, those names include Tumblr, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget. In all, about 1.3 billion consumers use the company’s collection of brands making these among the most powerful digital brands on the Internet.
"We like to say branding wise if you look at a hat, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Yahoo Sports will be on the front, Oath will be on the side,” Armstrong said.
Besides the early reaction to Oath hasn’t been all that flattering, with the new name the subject of numerous jokes out on social media.
