I personally don't see how it was ever going to work, but it's not my business and I don't know what I'm talking about. They clearly thought they had a chance, tried it, saw it flop, and are willing to quickly admit the mistake and stop the bleeding. You can't succeed if you're not willing to fail.
Oh but it did! That's the problem when you pay people a lot of money to find the evidence you tell them you want
Unfortunately, reality does not care about said "studies".
But upon closer examination part of me wonders if this particular project was a victim of creation by committee, where there was only one person, who could make decisions and the rest were well-paid bobbleheads.
I have no doubt marketing did their research ( and as much as I hate ads, marketing people look for how things really are ), it is possible only some pieces filtered up and/or dissenting voices were just drowned out by 'why are you holding us up?' type of responses.
I am obviously speculating here, but elites ( however you define them ) are people too and subject to most of the same issues as most of us.
Having been in the trenches on a large scale initiative gone awry, my hunch would be the same as yours: the lack of strong/well informed leadership leads to bad decision-making despite all the checkboxes being checked (market research, etc).
In that case, it's easy to blame the "elites" (who certainly do deserve blame). Doing so blindly without deeper reflection is cathartic but not too productive or meaningful. A lot of times, the "elites" are victims of a system bigger than them (established culture, procedures, politics, etc). Spending energy to change said system would IMO be more productive than playing the blame game.
This is another sign that CNN is on life support.
What ever happened to 'pivoting' rather than giving up and throwing in the towel?
I don't think any investors would be happy with projects just giving up and losing their money like what had happened to Quibi. The difference is, that the raised money for Quibi was returned back and CNN+ lost. it. all.
Totally giving up even after what happened to Quibi is inexcusable for CNN. It means that they have not learned anything and have admitted to repeating the same mistakes they did and lost more money and shut down quicker than Quibi.
Now they are part of list of the worst launch failures in history. Oh dear.
It was 300M in complete losses. That's a crazy amount of money.
They didn't fail, they got a new owner with different brand vision.