The corporate rebranding, as an art form, has traditionally required at least a passing relationship between what a company was and what it claims to have become.

On Monday, the publicly traded media company formerly known as The Arena Group, which owns Parade, Men's Journal and The Street, announced that it had rechristened itself Paradium and was now, in its telling, an artificial intelligence company. The announcement accompanied second-quarter earnings that might charitably be described as challenging.

The pivot will likely take its place in the annals of corporate reinvention alongside Allbirds' recent embrace of artificial intelligence and Long Island Iced Tea Corporation's memorable 2017 decision to become a blockchain company. (That one, you may recall, did not end particularly well.)

It is not unprecedented for a struggling media company to recast itself as a technology firm in hopes of improving its stock price — BuzzFeed has tried variations on this theme — but the Arena Group's claim is among the less persuasive attempts. The market, for its part, seemed unconvinced: shares briefly rose to $2.20 on Monday before settling to $1.30 by Wednesday, approaching the company's 52-week low of 81 cents.

The rebranding nearly succeeded, however, in drawing attention away from the underlying numbers. Revenue fell to $22 million from $45 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Gross margin declined to 39 percent from 56 percent. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization dropped 76 percent.

The company carries nearly $98 million in debt against $11.2 million in cash.

"We are fundamentally pivoting from a search-dependent publisher to an A.I.-powered technology company," Paul Edmonson, the chief executive, said in an email.

Mr. Edmonson, who founded HubPages — one of the companies that merged to form the entity that became The Arena Group — has been in the role since March. His tenure has coincided with the period in which artificial intelligence began redirecting the traffic patterns on which his company's advertising revenue depends.

Whether calling oneself an A.I. company constitutes a response to that problem, or merely a description of it, remains to be seen.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Why The Arena Group Has, Implausibly, Rebranded Into an AI Company"