Posts from: May 2005
As the shake-out in the ad industry continues, traditional agencies and their names are vanishing, being replaced by agencies whose very names demonstrate that a new day has (finally) dawned:
The advertising business is undergoing an upheaval, forcing executives to radically change how they do business. Marketers are trying desperately to stay ahead of the technological innovations that are changing how consumers view their messages – and are putting pressure on their agencies to adapt.
The ad firms are more eager to please than ever. The major agencies face shrinking profit margins and sagging stock prices, leading to a shakeout and a frenzied effort to cut costs.
It is unclear if the traditional agencies will be nimble enough to halt a slow decline. Already, many famous names are vanishing: N.W. Ayer; Bates; Bozell; D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles; Earle Palmer Brown; Lintas; Warwick Baker O’Neill.
The big agencies also face hip, new rivals, which have pounced on the opportunity to steal business. Those boutiques use their oddball names – like 180, Amalgamated, Mother, Nitro, Soul, StrawberryFrog, Taxi and Zig – as branding devices to signal they are not about business as usual.
These so-called “oddball” names do quadruple duty — they demonstrate a different mindset and approach, they are less confusing, and they provide the agencies with a wealth of imagery for years to come in their own promotional campaigns. Such names also end the endless problems that ad agencies named for founders incur when there’s a shake up at the top.
The problem with a name like, “Bartleby, Scrivner, + Budd” is that when Bartleby is sacked for ethical transgressions that make their way into Adweek, the agency suddenly becomes Scrivner, Budd, Typee + Omoo, until of course the lusty affair between Scrivner and Typee culminates in a full-blown sexual harassment suit.
Founder-named names also have the problems that they:
- are chosen primarily to stroke the egos of the founders
- demonstrate a complete lack of creativity by a creative agency
- all sound alike
- ultimately result in clients demanding face time with the principals.
It’s all bad. And now these names just demonstrate “old school” — even the clients are tired of them.
Of the new batch of names, our favorite is Mother, because it works on the greatest number of levels and is at once benign and comforting and completely outrageous. Here is just some of the collective consciousness that Mother taps into:
den mother
earth mother
fairy god mother
love your mother
mother and child
mother and son
mother ann
mother bulb
mother bunch
mother cabrini
mother carey’s chicken
mother carey’s goose
mother carey’s hen
mother cell
mother child relations
mother church
mother clap
mother colony
mother complex
mother country
mother cyst
mother douglas
mother earth
mother figure
mother goddess
mother goose
mother goose rhymes
mother hen
mother house
mother hubbard
mother hubbard clause
mother huddle’s oven
mother india
mother instinct
mother jones
mother jones magazine
mother knows best
mother language
mother liquor
mother lode
mother love bone
mother mary bernadette
mother mold
mother naked
mother nature
mother night
mother nuclide
mother of all bombs
mother of bastards
mother of believers
mother of books
mother of cities
mother of god
mother of invention
mother of parliaments
mother of the chapel
mother of vinegar
mother outlaw
mother plant
mother queen
mother russia
mother sauces
mother seton
mother ship
mother shipton
mother sick
mother spleenwort
mother star
mother superior
mother superior complex
mother surrogate
mother teresa
mother tincture
mother to be
mother tongue
mother water
mother wit
mother with child
mother wort
mother yaw
mother’s apron strings
mother’s day
mother’s helper
mother’s little helper
mother’s mark
mother’s milk
mother’s son
motherboard
mother-cell
mother-child relations
mothered
motherese
mother-fucker
mother-fucking
motherglass
motherhand shiatsu
motherhood
motherhouse
motherhouses
mothering
mothering sunday
mother-in-law
mother-in-law apartment
mother-in-law joke
mother-in-law’s
mother-in-law’s tongue
motherland
motherlands
motherless
motherlessness
motherlike
motherliness
motherly
mother-naked
mother-of-pearl
mother-of-pearl cloud
mother-of-thousands
mother-of-thyme
mothers
mothers boy
mothers daughter
mothers of invention
mothers of pearl
mothershead
mothershed
mother-sick
mothers-in-law
mother-water
motherwell
motherwell and wishaw
motherwell football club
motherwell robert
motherwell william
mother-wit
mother-wort
motherworts
mothery
queen mother
whistler’s mother
Now try the same exercise with the name “D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles”. Go ahead, take all the time you need.
New Jersey State Assemblyman Craig Stanley is taking issue with the name of the state’s National Hockey League team, which has won three Stanley Cup championships.
Assemblyman Stanley (no relation to Lord Stanley) is hellbent to change the name of the New Jersey Devils hockey team before it moves in 2007 from the Meadowlands in East Rutherford to a new facility in Newark, his legislative district.
He wants a new name for the hockey team chosen in a statewide competition. “This is an age where symbolism is very important,” said Stanley, a Baptist deacon whose resolution to rename the team is to be introduced in the Assembly next month according to media reports.
The team’s mascot is red, cartoonish figure with horns and a goatee.
However, the team’s name, chosen in a 1982 fan contest, comes from the mythical Jersey Devil, not the Christian symbol of the antichrist, according to Weird N.J., a travel guide to the state’s most offbeat attractions.
The mythical Jersey Devil—with bat-like wings, a forked tail and oversized claws—was said to terrorize Pine Barrens dwellers in the 18th-century after being born the 13th child to poor South Jerseyans and morphing into a dinosaur-like beast.
According to team ownership, there’s no chance in hell the team will change its name. New Jersey Devils CEO Lou Lamoriello explained, “It’s who we are and what we want to be.”
[ More posts about naming products | More posts about naming companies ]
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance in the United States of America for those who have died in our nation’s service.
In 1868, Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order Number 11 designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
The first national celebration of the holiday took place May 30, 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. Originally known as Decoration Day, at the turn of the century it was designated as Memorial Day.
On this day, we remember all those who have died in war by reflecting on words from In Flanders Fields And Other Poems commemorating those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.
From USA Today:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — IAC/InterActiveCorp Chief Executive Barry Diller likes his latest planned online acquisition. He’s just not that fond of its name.
Diller on Tuesday told an audience of media and executives that the more he learns about the search capabilities of Ask Jeeves Inc., which New York-based IAC is buying for $1.85 billion in stock, the more convinced he is that the firm can gain market share against search rivals Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.
Ask Jeeves will get an infusion of cash for marketing and development, but its brand name is unlikely to survive in its current form.
“We’re thinking about renaming it,” Diller said during a question and answer session at the D3 — All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad. “It probably won’t be called Ask Jeeves.”
The conference was sponsored by The Wall Street Journal.
“What will it be called?” asked conference host and Wall Street Journal columnist Kara Swisher.
“Might be one of those words without the other,” Diller answered. The new name has not been decided, he added.
So which one Ask or Jeeves? Jeeves wouldn’t be much of a change. Ask by itself presents its own issues, for starters it would have to fight for mind share with the just-launched Answers.com and the already-established About.com. They’d be looking at Ask.com, Answers.com & About.com — talk about muddy. And none of the three sites could ever drop the “.com” from their name, because all of their names are too generic to trademark without it.
Of bigger concern is the track record of generic brands on the web, especially in this space. Remember FindWhat, LookSmart, InfoSeek, AllTheWeb, etc? How about Pets.com, Drugstore.com or Business.com? And there are no intellectual property laws stopping anyone from launching AskAbout.com, AboutAnswers.com or AskAboutAnswers.com.
Any way you slice it, the choice between Jeeves and Ask is a real Diller pickle.
Igor’s Naming and Branding Meta Blog is here, aggregating posts from the other blogs published by Igor: Snark Hunting and Wordlab.
Other sources may be added in the future, but for now there’s lots here to chew on as we work to obsessively scrutinize, analyze and proselytize the world of naming and branding and our philosophy of what makes powerful names work.
Protesters are always dumping on the WTO, so we thought we’d take a moment to celebrate the valuable work this organization does. Hosting important summit meetings, for example.
Last year’s World Toilet Summit was held in Beijing, and the 2005 World Toilet Expo & Forum just wrapped-up in Shanghai.
Given the huge lift in positive brand image these Chinese destinations garnered from the events, the competition to determine where this year’s World Toilet Summit will splash down has been turgid. The all-out warfare between the State of Kansas, the city of Sao Palo and the former Yugoslavia spilled out over the rim on several occasions.
In the end, Belfast wiped clean the competition and was chosen to host the next Summit this coming fall. Here’s a whiff of what to expect:
- Wide ranging toilet-related topics covered by the Experts!
- Benefit from an interesting mix of plenary sessions covering in-depth situational studies and invaluable experiences from not less than 25 international and local speakers…
So c’mon, take the plunge, and reserve your seat today!
Logo is the name of MTV Networks’ new Gay / Lesbian / Transgender-themed channel. Logo comes out next month, but for those of you who can’t wait for a logo outing, the folks at b3ta have outed a bunch of logos this month via their Phallic Logo Awards.
Reports the Twin Cities Pioneer Press:
After nearly four months of research and thousands of options, American Express Financial Advisers on Wednesday plans to unveil a new corporate name to its employees and independent advisers.
Company officials are keeping the moniker close to the vest, but they say it won’t include the three letters “IDS,” which stand for Investors Diversified Services, the regionally famous name of American Express Financial’s predecessor company.
“I feel the name that we landed on really conveys the attributes that we will be advertising and talking about as we build the company,” Chief Marketing Officer Kim Sharan said Monday in an interview….
…The name search included American Express Financial’s 18,000 employees and financial advisers nationwide and the New York branding agency of Lippincott Mercer. Forty percent of employees and advisers participated in an online survey to determine what characteristics they most associated with the company, Sharan said.
“There has been such buzz about this place shortly after the spinoff was announced,” said David Kanihan, a spokesman for American Express Financial Advisors. “The name is something people can really latch onto.”
The company determined its name should reflect these characteristics: personal and approachable, authentic, pro-active, creative, knowledgeable and vast, Sharan said.
Amex won’t say what the new name is, but we can give you a peek. Between April 11-13 of this year they filed the following trademarks under “financial services”:
Archetype
Amplify
Amworth
Ameriprise
Luminous
Oakbridge
Sageborne
Sagemont
Riversource
Tiller
Filing multiple marks at the end of a naming process is a typical procedure, giving American Express multiple options during the global vetting process. So which of these names will be THE name?
We’re going to guess that it will be Ameriprise, though we hope it won’t be. Anyone else?
Marquette University reaffirmed its refusal to reinstate the Warriors nickname, though it’s having trouble coming up with a widely acceptable replacement.
The administration’s recent attempt to rename the university’s sports teams the “Marquette Gold” was met with protest demonstrations of students and alumni. Wordlab responded with a parody of this brouhaha, suggesting that Notre Dame’s “Fighting Irish” were about to change their name to the “Gold and Blue” in a bold move to achieve political correctness.
Marquette obviously hopes to end-run Notre Dame’s claim to this colorful name by putting forward “Blue and Gold” as the #1 name on the ballot in a binding referendum. Marquette University students, alumni, faculty, staff and season ticket holders will begin voting Tuesday in an online survey to select the school’s athletics nickname from this list of nickname choices and descriptions. In addition to the short list of approved names, there’s a chance for some other name, except Marauders, to be selected from “write-in” ballots.
To be counted, write-in nicknames must be consistent with the University’s Catholic, Jesuit mission and the Board of Trustees’ resolution forbidding Native American imagery and references. Additionally, write-in suggestions of nicknames that are intended to embarrass the university will not be counted. Any nicknames under review by the NCAA for their relationship to Native American imagery will not be counted. Examples of nicknames that will not be counted include Warriors (or any variation of the word, i.e., war) and Jumpin’ Jesuits.
Christine Hurt, an assistant professor of law at Marquette University Law School, is writing in Muskies, which makes sense. Except, the name of the game is not to choose the best name, but to beat Notre Dame at the naming game.
Blogging at Wordlab will resume as soon as we get this new autoblogger thing working. In the meantime, please keep reading the old posts with new and improved headings.
Posted: May 31st, 2005 |
Category: Uncategorized