How Oath carries its Yahoo legacy is pure comedy

In 2015 Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion and settled in February (2017) to buy Yahoo for $4.45 billion. Sending the internet memes in an uproar of funny banter, the new merged AOL and Yahoo will be renamed "Oath".

That Time Verizon Made a Funny Campaign to be an Advertizing Giant

What can a $9 billion promise amount to in the world of advertising, isn't quite clear. AOL brought Verizon ad-tech and supposedly can work well with Yahoo's content. With multiple revelations on historic and pretty significant data breaches at Yahoo, to call the merger "Oath" is a pretty hilarious choice. #TakeTheOath

It's a pity, but this will be one party Marissa Mayer won't be invited to.

It Takes Guts to Make Promises in 2017

Enter the disruptive advertising world of 2017, where YouTube and Google are boycotted, and Facebook is synonymous with "Fake News", and this makes #TakeTheOath not sound so significant, or even on point.

While some of us might remember Yahoo Sports or Huffington Post fondly. Do you even remember what Yahoo is?

Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, Google Employee number 20, and Google's first female Engineer, serves as CEO and President of  Yahoo.

Yahoo buying Tumblr back in 2013, didn't seem like a terrible idea, but Marissa Mayer won't go down in history as the most talented CEO of our generation, unfortunately.

On Golden Parachutes and Data Breaches

The salaries CEOs and top execs make is no longer tied to the profits they generate, this isn't reality; wait for it - Marissa Mayer gets to walk away from it all with $122,578,795, according to CNN Money.

Golden parachutes non-withstanding, #TakeTheOath, and tell me this is the next disruptive advertising giant?

Whatever next-gen Yahoo wants to call itself is fine, but people don't and won't forget a 1 Billion account breach, or a $123 million Verizon Payday for a leader that basically failed.

We can make Mayer epitaphs in our history of tech, but don't call it an Oath. Don't promise us that you will be a 'disruptive' ad-tech firm, in an age of such digital corruption that even we must boycott the advertising soft monopolies to send them messages.

Given how the 'Oath' name has attracted such humor and attention on social media, it's probably not the ad-campaign Verizon was hoping for.

Trust actually matters, and resurrecting dinosaurs like AOL and Yahoo, is a cruel and funny joke.

If Advertizing is a Game; this will be a Funny One to Watch

TechCrunch even wrote a serious article about the pros and cons of the name Oath. Your corporate identity and branding tone actually matters, and unless this was intended to go viral on late night talk-shows as a funny topic, I'm not seeing advertising genius behind it myself.

The Verizon-owned megalith company must have cursed when they heard about Yahoo's epic data breaches, indeed they must have been so up-in-arms that then and there, they took an Oath.

What or rather, Who is Oath Anyhow?

Dearly departed Altaba non-withstanding, there's a lot of companies lost in the $9 billion sum. Maybe you didn't realize some of your favorite online characters live here.

1. TechCrunch
2. Huffington Post
3. Tumblr (now half of its original value)
4. Flickr
5. MapQuest (I don't remember what that is)
6. Yahoo Fantasy Sports (good times in 2006)
7. AOL and Yahoo instant messengers
8. MovieFone
9. BrightRoll

If in 2017 the internet shows true signs of becoming a dystopia of spam (worse than the echo bubble of 2016), Oath in the sense of a "blasphemous interjection", might just be what the world wide web ordered to make sense of it all.

Yahoo will remembered for addictively bad content (circa 2007), burner E-mail accounts that never died, and a host of poor acquisitions. But it's time we trust the future and #TakeTheOath. Yahoo is dead, to join her grandmother the Baby Bells. God save America, may artificial intelligence save advertising.

Verizon had a revenue of $126 Billion in 2016, and with 146 million subscribers in 2017, Verizon Wireless is the largest wireless telecommunications provider in the United States. Yahoo, is still ranked in the top 10 most visited website (7), according to Alexa.com with engagement comparable to that of Wikipedia.

I'm the 2nd ranked LinkedIn Top Voice in Marketing and Social, and cover mergers and acquisitions related to the future of digital. I live at the intersection of technology and the future. Follow me to stay in touch.

Further reading | A nightmare ad-tracking machine |

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How do you feel about the new merger and the brand identity of "Oath"? How will you remember Yahoo?