Not the smoothest launch: Monday’s Daily Brief

A bumpy start for Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.

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Good morning, Marketers, and it wasn’t the smoothest launch was it?

Where to start? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the most natural on-camera performer and it was probably beyond his capabilities to make the video announcement of Meta (as the Facebook company, not the app, will now be known) anything less than kind of creepy and weird. When I hear Meta, I think Matrix.

And then there’s the logo, to which many people have already made unmentionable revisions on Twitter and (ouch) Instagram. And, for pedants, there’s the reminder that “metaverse” is an awkward collision of Greek and Latin that literally means “turned back on, or into, beyond.”

But let’s hear from the professionals. Jimmy Fallon: “Spectrum, we used to be TimeWarner and people still hate us.” Stephen Colbert: “As in, your Aunt Gloria ‘meta’ guy on Facebook…” and the rest of that joke is unmentionable too. Find it here.

We hope you like the new, streamlined newsletter design, even though we haven’t re-branded it (MetaTech?), and have a great week.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

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About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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