Pros and cons of “Oath: A Verizon Company”

@techcrunch / 6:01 pm PDT • April 3, 2017

Corporate identities! We love ’em. But boy is it hard to come up with good ones. Sounds like we decided to go with “Oath: A Verizon Company.” We already have a post, but I just did a focus group with myself and this is what I discovered.

Pros:

It’s an actual word, unlike some corporate identities.
Good brand if we decide to pivot to “Tinder for cults.”
The type is clean (can’t go wrong with geometric sans serif) and our blue is different from Facebook’s, Google’s and Twitter’s.
No gradients, for now.

Cons/other:

Oath is another name for doing a swear. Ancient oaths are actually very interesting. Did you know “gadzooks” is short for “by God’s hooks,” indicating the nails used to crucify Christ? That’s just one of many colorful oaths.
“Take the Oath” is kind of a scary tagline fundamentally. But when a company makes its money through intrusive ads and tracking (sorry) and monopolistic practices, telling customers to take it could be misconstrued as aggressive, e.g. Take the Oath and like it.
No oath is specified, even though there’s a colon. Kind of sounds like we haven’t decided what we’ve promised to do yet. “This is our undying pledge to you: PLEDGE TK”
Internal communications regarding “taking the oath” sound like suicide pacts, or at least something involving blood. I’m submitting this for the official Oath of allegiance:

Weave a circle round Tim thrice,
And click your mouse with holy dread
For he on revenue hath fed,
And drunk the MAUs of Yahoo sites.

Looks like we forgot to register oath.com.
Sounds like “oaf” and people with certain accents will pronounce it that way. Oafs unfortunately are generally not well thought of, which is too bad because it’s not our fault.
People take oaths during trials ostensibly to prevent them from lying. Also when taking office, but usually it’s stuff like, “remember, you are under oath.” Not a really good association for several reasons. Being “under Oath” may be the new “A-o-hell.”
OAuth joke.

In conclusion, it could be a lot worse. Almost everything online has a bad name, when you think about it. If we can get used to “Yahoo!” we can get used to Oath. Or Oath:. Or Oath: A Verizon Company. Not really clear on how that’s going to work.