Fun With Branding.

Y'know, for all my disdain for marketing, I sure do dabble in enough of it, don't I?  I'm the world's only one-man conglomerate, so pay attention.

During the first quarter of 2010 I'm going to be phasing out the MonsterDog brand and replacing it with Mystery Ship Radio.  Why "radio"?  I have plans for the brand that involve content-delivery through podcasts and other voice-delivery systems, plus "Mystery Ship", an homage to the old Blues Image song "Ride Captain Ride", was my original social-media brand during my much younger days.  Just trust me, it makes sense, even if I'm going to eventually have to pay someone a license fee for it.  Not like "Monster Dog" is any better because apparently the Oakley Sunglasses people had a line with that name before I started using it on my own.

Most people aren't really going to notice (this blog will still be "CPA By Forty", for example), but readers on Slate, Twitter, and ESPN.com will find a phase-in process that will start this Thursday with the newest edition of TL;DR Prudence.  People who know me from my gaming stuff will still be seeing the SimuLord brand name (my oldest continually operating brand, in use on video game-related sites and, somewhat amusingly, on Skype since I chose my Skype username to communicate with gamer friends first).

This is all part of a reordering of things so that the major compartments of my online presence will make more sense.  I predict a grand total of maybe eight people will notice or care...and that's probably counting quite high.  TL;DR is a brand in itself by now, so I hardly think people will note that the username on the post is different.