(Bloomberg) -- It’s not TV. It’s not HBO. It’s HBO...Max.

This week, AT&T Inc. is rolling out HBO Max, its new supersized streaming platform, anchored by classic HBO programming and girded with lots of other stuff from WarnerMedia. Old movies, newer movies, comedy specials, broadcast sitcoms from the ’90s, a quarantine cooking show with Selena Gomez, a rom-com starring Anna Kendrick, and a children’s crafting competition series called “Craftopia.”

For fans of the vintage HBO brand, it all might feel a bit jarring. One minute, you’re watching Tony Soprano curb-stomp Coco Cogliano, and the next there’s some bespectacled kid thrusting his fists in the air and shouting, “Let’s get crafting!”  

To help everyone make sense of the reformulated, hyper-maximized HBO, AT&T has launched a new advertising campaign that plays up the world-colliding dissonance as a feature not a bug. The spots mix and match recognizable figures from HBO shows with new arrivals to the platform and present them all as one big, harmonious, eccentric, winsome TV family. “Where Lions and Tigers and Bears meet Friends and Heroes and Princes,” explains one of the ads. Cue the HBO Max tagline: “Where HBO meets so much more.” 

“We didn’t feel like we needed to beat our chest about quality because it’s right there on the screen,” said Chris Spadaccini, the chief marketing officer for WarnerMedia Entertainment. “What we did have to do is explain that HBO Max is more than HBO. It’s not more of HBO.”

The ad blitz is putting in work on several levels. Not only is the campaign introducing viewers to the latest major entrant in the streaming wars, but it is also helping AT&T to smooth over the tricky branding question that the telecom carrier has been grappling with since acquiring HBO’s former parent company Time Warner for $85 billion. 

How do you leverage a prestigious, upscale brand like HBO to make it feel more accessible and appealing to the hordes of middlebrow viewers now abandoning traditional TV en masse without lowering its elite status or its upscale price tag?

Although it may sound like a daunting task, AT&T would hardly be the first company to pull off such a maneuver. The strategy — taking a high-end prestige brand intentionally down market in order to sell a broader array of more cheaply produced goods to a mass audience at an elevated price point — has been attempted enough times by various retailers over the years to have earned its own portmanteau. 

Welcome to HBO’s new life as a “masstige” brand.

“There’s a great tradition of using class to get to mass,” said Andrew Essex, the co-founder of the marketing services company, Plan_A. “This idea of HBO launching a mass-prestige platform has plenty of precedent. Think about premium fashion brands like Ralph Lauren and Prada. A strong brand does have equity to be stretched in search of higher margins.”

Let the stretching begin.

For decades, executives at Time Warner built HBO into a globally renowned, highly profitable brand with a simple, narrowly defined proposition. HBO was the un-TV. “It’s not TV,” went the classic tagline. “It’s HBO.”

Everything that regular network television did, HBO would do differently. Network TV had ads. HBO didn’t. Network TV was free and appealed to the broadest possible audience. HBO was pricey and catered to selective pockets of passionate fans. Network TV was safe and clean. HBO was full of cursing, nudity, narrative ambiguity and violence. Networks brands cranked out huge amounts of vaguely interchangeable shows. HBO made small, pungent batches of distinctive, often peculiar programming.

The strategy worked well in a world in which HBO was defining itself against the traditional, broadcast TV networks. But then along came Netflix and gradually the frame of relativity shifted. With time, HBO started looking a little thin by comparison. As streaming took off, consumers grew accustomed to having endless choices of stuff to browse from, all stretching out endlessly under a single, overarching brand. 

By the time AT&T completed its acquisition of Time Warner in 2018, the company was chomping at the bit to create a big Netflix competitor. To fill the vast shelf space expected of a modern streamer, AT&T chose to pool together huge amounts of the new and archival programming created by the conglomerate’s various, formerly separate entertainment brands, including not just HBO but also TNT, TBS, and the movie and TV studios of Warner Bros.

What to name this gigantic new platform aimed at appealing to the masses? Eventually, after much consideration, they decided to pile everything under a modified HBO brand.

“We did a lot of research on what the consumer feels about the brands that we have — from Warner to Turner to HBO,” said Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment and the direct-to-consumer operations. “HBO is really the consumer brand that resonates through the roof with people, not only here, but around the world. It makes sense to start with that as a foundation.”

“The more you stretch a brand, the more dilutive and confusing it becomes.”

Basing the new platform’s name on HBO makes a kind of basic, economic sense. Building awareness of an entirely novel entertainment brand from scratch, with no prior attachment to consumers, would be incredibly expensive and difficult to pull off, particularly as a late entrant into a field already crowded with well-established household names like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+. Just ask Quibi.

“HBO is the gold standard of premium original programming,” said Spadaccini. “We are riding all of that momentum and leveraging the equity that’s in the brand.”

It’s a strategy with plenty of risk. Taking a prestige brand like HBO and stretching it to accommodate a giant expansion of products, including the kind of traditional network TV shows that HBO spent its formative years defining itself against, will put its durability to a severe test. Allen Adamson, the co-founder of Metaforce, a marketing strategy firm, said that the history of retail is littered with cautionary tales of formerly best-in-class premium brands — think of Cadillac or Calvin Klein — that lost their cachet after wandering too far down market in search of more customers and broader appeal. 

If things go awry, he warned, the same fate could await HBO.

“The risk they’re taking is that instead of giving you more HBO, more award-winning un-TV, they’re throwing the kitchen sink at it and putting everything under the one brand,” said Adamson. “The more you stretch a brand, the more dilutive and confusing it becomes. Once you start taking a brand from premium to mass, it’s often a downward spiral. It could do phenomenal damage to what HBO has spent decades building.”

Spadaccini said he isn’t worried, in part, because WarnerMedia is taking protective measures to keep HBO Max and HBO as separate, distinctive-feeling brands.

“It’s not like we are trying to blend everything together,” said Spadaccini. “We’ve been very deliberate about keeping HBO separate, even in the communications strategy. Both in terms of the messaging and the tonality of the campaign, we took extra steps to make sure that this felt differentiated from HBO — so that HBO could continue to stand on its own.”

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