What’s in a name: The story behind Stan

Stan, the Australian streaming service born out of a joint-venture between Fairfax and Nine has been live for almost a month now. Performance wise, Fiona King, Stan's Head of Marketing, told CyberShack that they're incredibly happy with the results thus far, and that the service is doing really well in terms of subscriptions. But unsurprisingly, Stan's somewhat left-of-centre name has also been somewhat of a talking point.

Stan, the Australian streaming service born out of a joint-venture between Fairfax and Nine has been live for almost a month now. Performance wise, Fiona King, Stan's Head of Marketing, told CyberShack that they're incredibly happy with the results thus far, and that the service is doing really well in terms of subscriptions. But unsurprisingly, Stan's somewhat left-of-centre name has also been somewhat of a talking point.

"Obviously, the name has had some questions," said King.

While Stan isn't an obvious name for video-on-demand service, King explained that this was part of the reason it was chosen.

"For us [Stan] was about differentiating and getting some cut through," said King, "It makes people stop. Even if people don't understand what it is right away, they question "what is this thing?"."

"We wanted to avoid any hybrid techy names, that's part of the accessibility and simplicity"

King told CyberShack that the goal with Stan was to come across as a simple, accessible and transparent. These key value were defined long before a name was even being talked about. The idea was that the service should be "straight-shooting", something the Stan team has tried to incorporate in everything from the branding to the whole number price point ($10 as opposed to something like $9.95).

Off the back of these key values, the Stan team came up with a short list of names. Stan was the one that stuck.

"It's an Australian name without being too Australian, unlike Bruce," King quipped. "We wanted a name that didn't have too much baggage or attachment. We wanted something really simply and trusty."

King said that the team ran some small research groups which found that wasn't much baggage around the name Stan – people didn't associate it with anything negative. But the name's masculinity posed its own problems, which is one of the reasons Australian actress Rebel Wilson was brought on as a brand ambassador. King explained that Wilson was chosen because she's known well on both a local and international scale. Despite this, King said the name Stan wasn't about a "gender proposition", but about accessibility.

"Stan's your friendly neighbour, he can fix up your TV and make things really easy."