[chawco]

I’m going to assume I wasn’t part of their target audience, given what I’m about to say, but the whole thing looks like a bunch of amateurs with a ton of money.

First off you’re spot on with the name — what a terrible decision. Secondly because the name doesn’t tell you anything about who they are or what they do they needed to have advertising spots that got that across quickly. Except for some completely inexplicable reason they ran ads from a show about a mobile app, requiring you to watch for over a minute (!) before realizing the spot was for a show, not for some new app named Quibi. I literally saw their ads dozens and dozens of times before accidentally letting it run long enough to figure out what the hell it was. Did they recruit marketers from Microsoft or something? They’re the only other people I’ve seen capable of causing that degree of product confusion in marketing decisions.

Next, where the hell did the focus on short form content come from? If anything the trend has been for longer and longer form content as seen by the success of HBO, where a shorter medium (cinema) has moved into a longer form medium (television) in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Given the focus on celebrities I’m sure I wasn’t their target audience, but what mobile-first audience WAS the target anyway? Why wasn’t YouTube serving their needs? Why weren’t there production companies making and promoting this form on YouTube and other platforms already? The mind boggles. The whole thing reads like a bunch of amateurs with too much money.