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Reports AdAge:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Online advertising company aQuantive Inc. has agreed to buy SBI.Razorfish from New York-based SBI Group for $160 million, according to the company.
The acquisition will “create one of the largest interactive agencies,” Brian McAndrews, president-CEO of aQuantive, said in a statement.
…Seattle-based aQuantive said it plans to combine its media-buying division, Avenue A, with Razorfish. The combined entity will be known as Avenue A/Razorfish, and will be the new brand for the company’s interactive agency. Razorfish specializes in corporate Web site design. Avenue A specializes in media buying.
Has anyone involved with this merger stopped to consider the merits of the new company name, consisting as it does of a random combination of an evocative name (Avenue A) with an arbitrary name (Razorfish)?
Actually, this is pretty typical agency behavior that you see over and over in the advertising world when companies commit merger: usually the result is a combination of partner surnames (dimassimo carr), occasionally a mix of surnamed with non-surnamed (Hal Riney Publicis, now altered to Publicis.Riney), and once in a blue moon two non-surnamed companies that get fused together (Avenue A/Razorfish).
In this industry its all about reputation — that is the brand equity these two companies are desperate to preserve. If either company pulled in a majority of the equity, it would be the chosen name for the combined entity, since there are no surnamed egos involved on the marquee to force a combination of names. Most likely, the Avenue A brand has more cachet in some markets, and Razorfish in others, so they hedged their bets and combined the two names.
We wouldn’t be surprised if this awkward coupling of names turns out to be just a temporary measure for a year or so to get everyone used to the merger, and then re-brand the company with a new, single name. Let’s just hope that when such a day arrives, they don’t saddle themselves with a name like marchFIRST (now defunct), Alventive (now defunct), Scient (now defunct), or Viant (now defunct), or we’ll be left pining for the good old days of Avenue A/Razorfish.
Vaseline hired brand guru Roger Chamberlain and set him loose to create some buzz via a guerilla marketing campaign. Once again, Roger shows us why he is the best. As reported by 1010 Wins:
Roger Chamberlain may have thought he managed to slide by police when he switched motels.
But when he was allegedly found a short while later glimmering from head to toe in petroleum jelly, authorities believed they had their man.
Chamberlain, 44, of McClean, Va., is accused of coating nearly every available surface in his room at the Motel 6 near Binghamton with the unctuous substance.
Then, after checking out, a cleaning crew discovered the gooey mess — one that included mattresses, bedding, a television set, furniture, carpeting and towels all slathered with petroleum jelly.
Damage to the room and its contents was estimated at more than $1,000, and once police arrived, they found 14 empty petroleum jelly containers and numerous pornographic magazines in the trash can, according to WNBF radio in Binghamton.
A short time later, a sheriff’s deputy found Chamberlain in a room at another motel, his body smeared entirely in the greasy stuff, authorities said.
Chamberlain was charged with felony criminal mischief and ordered held in Broome County Jail.
Meanwhile, back at the Motel 6, the manager said Chamberlain’s old room remains unusable.
If you’re the type of person Motel 6 should be marketing this beslimed room to, contact the Binghamton NY motel before they clean it up.
After years of insisting that Ivory soap’s ability to float was the product of a production error, Proctor and Gamble is now conceding that it was in fact due to a calculated marketing effort. This is just a one of the dirty little secrets revealed in Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble, due out on July 8.
Of course, Ivory wasn’t the first floating soap, it was merely the first soap to actively promote its floatiness back in the 19th Century with the tagline “It Floats,” which may well be the longest continually running tagline in existence. What keeps this book an edge-of-your-seat page burner is some of the newly discovered internal documents from the P&G archives. For instance, here’s the one that nailed them on the floating controversy that has been dogging the company for 125 years:
Ed Rider, P&G’s company archivist, said he has discovered a notebook entry from 1863 by P&G chemist James N. Gamble, who wrote: “I made floating soap today. I think we’ll make all of our stock that way.”
Gripping stuff. If you can’t wait a whole two weeks for the book to come out, the Cincinnati Enquirer has more sudsy bites right now.
About eighty years ago the ruling communists forbade the use of surnames in Mongolia as part of an effort to destroy the political power of the traditional tribal system. It took seventy years for the effects of tens of thousands of people having exactly the same name to get really annoying, so in 1997 a law was passed requiring everyone to choose a last name.
Trouble is, Mongolians are largely choosing the same surname, Borjigin, the tribal name of Ghengis Khan. For more on confusing Mongolian naming conventions, check out the entire article in the Globe and Mail.
The key to any effective naming, branding or marketing effort is to change and take ownership of the conversation. The U.S government has revealed an evolved sense of marketing in some of its name branding efforts recently, as demonstrated in the naming of The Patriot Act. Anyone who opposes the act is immediately under suspicion of being unpatriotic–regardless of the substance of The Patriot Act. This is a prime example of leveraging the full power of a name to take ownership of a conversation. (See Igor’s discussion of branding laws from the New York Sun.)
But the government has also demonstrated a well-honed sense of the absurd, as evidenced by the USDA’s classification of batter-dipped, fried and frozen sliced potatoes as “Fresh Vegetables.” As reported in Myrtle Beach Online:
U.S. District Judge Richard Schell last week endorsed little-noticed changes by the USDA to federal regulations that govern what defines a fresh vegetable. The changes were made at the behest of the french-fry industry, which has spent the last five decades pushing for revisions to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act.
…In his ruling last week in a lawsuit that challenged the designation, Schell sided with the USDA argument that the PACA law is so ambiguous on the definition of fresh fruits and vegetables that it should be left to the agency to define what it means.
The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under the law to include batter-coated, frozen french fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.
“The equivalent of waxing a cucumber” indeed.
Before we get a ton of hate email, this posting is not a commentary on any religion in any way, shape or form. It is also politically neutral. So why would you want to read anything that promises to be that boring? Because it’s about brand positioning and message consistency. And because today is the fourth anniversary of Jesus Day in Texas as signed into law by then Governor George W. Bush in April of 2000 (A.D.).
This is not quite the “Christmas in July” idea that’s been used for years to advertise clearance sales, but it’s darn close. Wondering what kinds of effects an official Jesus Day on June 10th would have on the brand equity of the competing Jesus Day scheduled for December 25th, we dove in.
OK, it hasn’t had much effect yet. But keep in mind that the December event has been building name recognition for at least as long as Coca-Cola, and with a much bigger budget. Intrigued by the “can-do” spirit of the feisty summer startup, we visited their website. Sure the site is fairly basic, but the competing winter festival doesn’t even have its own website! Anyway, the creator of the Jesus Day site is a company called By His Designs, which leads-off its own website with this copy:
Your church, ministry or small business website is sending a message. Do you know what it is saying? Is it saying what you think it is? Does it truly express what you are about? It Can.
Take a look at the face that adorns the homepage and decide for yourself what message By His Designs is sending: “Peace on earth?” “Good will toward men?” “Kumbaya?” “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore?” Or, “If I Had a Hammer, I’d bash your head in?”
OK, OK, go ahead and send us your hate mail.
“Teoma” means “expert” in Gaelic, but then so does ealamh. In any event, the search engine Teoma has reinvented itself again, and they are closer than ever to getting it right. Results are now returned in three categories: Results, Refine, and Resources. The results are incredibly relevant, dare we say more so than Google? Almost. Here’s how Teoma describes the proprietary voodoo behind the curtain:
To determine the authority — and thus the overall quality and relevance — of a site’s content, Teoma uses Subject-Specific Popularity(SM). Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity. In a recent test performed by respected industry publication Search Engine Watch, Teoma’s relevance grade was raised to an “A” following the integration of Teoma 2.0.
However, one major bug persists. Company websites that try to fool search engines into thinking that they are more relevant than they are have long engaged in the practice of posting “mirror sites”. A mirror site is a duplicate of a website, hosted at a different domain. Sometimes a number of mirror sites are linked together in an attempt to aggregate duplicate content and appear more relevant. Google has a system for ignoring the mirror sites that once gummed up its results; Teoma appears not to have a fix for this annoying practice. For example, search Teoma for the term “company names” and the “Resources” result column lists ten websites, seven of them being the identical mirror sites listed below:
ahundredmonkeys.com
naming-company.com
namingcompany.com
name-branding.com
companynamesbusiness.com
hundredmonkeys.com
onehundredmonkeys.com
In the meantime, Google continues to get more and more accurate, as the number one result of a Google search for any of the following phrases reveals:
naming parody
corporate identity parody
corporate merger parody
brand identity parody
name identity parody
visual identity parody
branding system parody
naming systems parody
UPDATE 6/18: Thanks to everyone in the search engine watch community who helped alert Teoma and their parent Ask Jeeves about this problem, which Teoma has now fixed.
Are you one of millions of American parents that just can’t seem to get your kids to eat enough bacon? Fear not — Pork4Kids is here. No need to call the F.B.I., it’s from those wacky folks in the pork — not porn — industry. The site has lots of helpful tips that will soon have apprehensive children licking their chops:
Get Kids Involved:
Kids are much more likely to eat something they helped prepare. Let them mix ingredients, sample spices and taste test along the way.
Let Kids Play With Their Food:
Fun shapes and cool colors catch kids’ eyes and make them more receptive to unfamiliar foods.
Tell A Tale With Food:
Most foods have an interesting history behind them. Share a bit of background with your kids.
Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt:
Let your kids track down new foods when you visit the supermarket. Invite them to buy one new food each time you visit the store.
Pork4Kids launched in the glittering wake of success plowed by Cool-2b-Real, now known as zip4tweens, a website funded by The Cattlemen’s Association and devoted solely to getting pre-teen girls to eat more beef. On second thought, call the F.B.I.
In a related bite, Pork4Kids is brought to you by oddly named Pork Checkoff. The beef and pork industry “checkoff” programs use money from livestock sales for ad promotions, but we can’t help thinking of everybody’s favorite Russian playwright and storyteller, Anton Checkov. To celebrate this newfound connection between pork and Checkov, here’s a sample from the author’s story, “The Shoemaker And The Devil”:
What wealth! The footmen handed him a big piece of roast mutton and a dish of cucumbers, and then brought in a frying-pan a roast goose, and a little afterwards boiled pork with horse-radish cream. And how dignified, how genteel it all was! Fyodor ate, and before each dish drank a big glass of excellent vodka, like some general or some count. After the pork he was handed some boiled grain moistened with goose fat, then an omelette with bacon fat, then fried liver, and he went on eating and was delighted. What more? They served, too, a pie with onion and steamed turnip with kvass.
If that whet your appetite, try the Pork Checkov at Henrietta’s “Licensed Bar and Restaurant”: “Pork Chekhov: Pork fillet cut into medallions and cooked with shallots and dried cherries, then flamed with kirsch, stock & cream. $9.25.”
Naming process demystified: Finally, someone has stepped up to the plate and simplified the naming process for us all. Alas, it is one of our worthy competitors, but we’re the first to give credit where credit is due. As decrypted and presented by Nametag, here is the entirety of their methodology:
Methodology
We utilize our proprietary Ideonics™ process which encompasses BrandVision™ phase, strategic ideation, market feedback, analysis and refinement, cogent presentation of actionable results, and brand roll out assistance.
Thwack! Congrats to Nametag for boiling it down so succinctly. For shame! Not only is our naming process over 3,600 words long and our naming guide in excess of 60 pages, we completely forgot to make up a bunch of words and attach those cute little TMs to them. Idiotics™!
PowerByHand, which distributes electronic books (or, as the company likes to call itself, “the premier provider of mobile content delivery solutions”), has changed its name to eReader:
The new site, www.eReader.com, offers customers a choice of more than 13,000 popular titles from more than 40 categories, with hundreds of new books added every month. eReader eBooks can be viewed not only on the Palm OS, but also on Pocket PC, Windows and Macintosh platforms.
To illustrate the lack of differention a name like “eReader” brings to the game, here are just a few of the competitors for the “eReader” headspace:
- Adobe Reader: for reading PDF docs, one format of eBooks — indeed, Adobe has a whole section of its website devoted to eBooks, called eBooks Central.
- Microsoft Reader: Sure they’re a tiny company, but they may be big someday. Their tagline for this product? The new standard for eReading.
- Amazon eBooks: eReader claims to be “The World’s Largest eBook Store.” Even if that’s true and they have a larger selection than Amazon (which began selling eBooks nearly four years ago with 1,000 titles) that situation could change very quickly. Yes, eReader IS in fact a store, as their tagline reminds us; but Amazon is a powerful BRAND, and they have demonstrated repeatedly that they can move into an online retail sector and own it. How is a humble, descriptively named product with a descriptive tagline going to capture the imagination of the consumer when Amazon is only a click away?
- E-Reads: “Quality Books for Quality Readers,” just not quite enough quality to land a conventional print publisher.
- eBooks.com: Their tagline, “the digital bookstore,” is very helpful for those who could suss out from their name what they sell.
- ibooks: Your source for ebooks. Say it altogether: “ibooks - your source for ebooks.” As we’ve said repeatedly, we don’t make this stuff up.
- TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home. Advocating Well-Stocked National Digital Libraries.
- ebook.com: Belongs to the eBook software product DeskTop Author.
- estory.com: Interactive books for kids.
- in e books (.com): Where, “You become the hero of your favourite books….”
An important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the world what business you are in or what your product does. Intuition dictates that this will save you the time and money of explanation, which actually turns out not to be true. Why not?
Let’s consider the larger sector of online bookstores, to which eReader also belongs. Here are a few of their names:
| 1bookstreet |
Classbook |
| A1Books |
CoolBooks |
| allbooks4less |
Ebooks |
| AllBookstores |
eCampus |
| alotofbooks |
eSuccessBooks |
| BookCloseOuts |
gobookshopping |
| Bookland |
Gobookshopping |
| BookNetUSA |
HalfPriceBooks |
| BookPool |
nwbooks |
| BooksAMillion |
Textbooks |
| BookSense |
Textbooksatcost |
| books-forsale |
Textbooksource |
| BooksNow |
Textbookx |
| Bookspot |
TheBookPeople |
| Bookwire |
TrueBooks |
| CheapyBook |
VarsityBooks |
When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, it was billed as an “online bookstore” just like all of the above, and since it was one of the first such companies, there was even more reason to go with a descriptive name, right? Otherwise, how would anybody know what the business was about?
Bezos knew that someday his company might want to sell more than just books, and that someday it might even have an offline, not just online, presence. In short, he understood that the name should be bigger than just “books” or “online,” and further it needed to distance itself from all the competitors who would surely follow. He needed a name that could become a powerful brand. In “Amazon,” he found just such a name, and the list above confirms that the competition came in droves, though a key difference is that they are forever relegated by their names to selling only books.
The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support, which, when you think about it, is impossible. The name will appear on a website, a storefront, in a news article or press release, on a business card, on the product itself, in advertisements, or, at its most naked, in a conversation.
There is simply no imaginable circumstance in which a name will have to explain itself. This is fortunate, because having a descriptive name is actually a counterproductive marketing move which requires an enormous amount of effort to overcome. A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack. It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors. Which brand are you more likely to remember, Amazon or one from the list above? Where are you more likely to go online to buy a book?
In a related back flip, eUniverse, Inc. announced plans to change the Company’s name to Intermix Media, Inc., which at least doesn’t begin with the dreaded “e”, though they do, unfortunately, produce “sites and solutions that engage.” If only someone would come up with a “solutions” solution. Perhaps it would have to be an “eSolutions” solution.
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