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As we head out on our Independence holiday this afternoon, let’s take a moment to reflect on one sliver of what makes America uniquely American.
Here in the U.S., violence is preferred over sex when it comes to what is acceptable for our kids to see on TV. Conversely, Europeans have the screwy idea that sex is normal and it’s violence that is abhorrent. Go figure.
This idea is poignantly demonstrated via this classic Travelocity U.K. television spot.
(yes, this post is a re-run from more than three years ago, but we’re headed out the door)
Hugh Macleod writes about marketing, advertising and the wine business. His weblog
gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" has been added to our favorite links blogroll because he's simply brilliant.
He freely gives away his marketing knowlegde on the backs of business cards, and he makes a modest living off the backs of his friends who look good wearing the shirt off his back.
Hugh was asked to create an ad for his friends at
Stormhoek, to be published in the well-known international wine and spirits trade magazine,
The Drinks Business.
Instead of giving them the usual "Here's why you should buy our product" bilge, we decided to give the readers something they might actually find useful. Yes, and that means useful for our competitors, as well.
Hence a 16-page insert, "The Stormhoek Guide To Wine Blogging". Inspired by Robert Scoble's seminal "The Corporate Weblog Manifesto", of course.
It hits the newstands sometime this week. In the meantime, you can download the PDF here.
Simply brilliant.
Ed Helms investigates the controversial double entendre behind the name of the Pink Taco restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona, in this
faux news package --
Box Lunch. From the sound of this interview with the restauranteur, which aired on
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central this week, you might wonder if, perhaps, they liked the
Pink Taco post on Wordlab.
MasterCard has changed the name of its operating subsidiary from
MasterCard International to MasterCard Worldwide. Company executives at the global headquarters of MasterCard Inc., 2000 Purchase Street, Purchase, NY declined to release the costs of the name change.
We've just had a nice visit to the
Media Influencer blog, and would like to share with our readers some of the insights discovered there.
Where to begin? You might take a look at "
Comcast awakens... after YouTube video" for a hilarious lesson in branding.
And watch
AmazonBay, a short film about where technology and trends in financial markets might take us by 2015. Incidentally, an insightful look at naming and branding of financial services, and brand name recombinations.
Good stuff.
[ More posts about AmazonBay | More posts about Amazon Bay ]
Canada's National Tower turns thirty years old today. The tallest freestanding structure in the world, the
CN Tower is the signature icon of the City of Toronto, and Canada's Wonder of the World.
CN originally referred to the Canadian National Railway, but following the railway's decision to divest non-core freight railway assets before the company's privatization in 1995, the CN Tower was transferred to the Canada Lands Company (CLC), a federal Crown corporation responsible for real estate development. Since the citizens of Toronto wished to retain the name CN Tower, the abbreviation CN now officially stands for Canada's National rather than the original Canadian National.
Today is officially CN Tower Day in Toronto, or as the kids say,
the seein' tower -- can we go dad?
No, it’s not an ad for an Asian massage parlor. SHAG is the name of Cardiff University’s Sexual Health Awareness Group.
[ More posts about sexual health | More posts about healthcare branding ] [ More posts about naming | More posts about acronyms ]
Today ’s Belleville News Democrat brings us a nauseating little nugget about the food ingredient named “Carmine”:
Scan the package ingredient list next time you buy candy, ice cream or beverages with a reddish hue. The color may have come from ground-up insects.
That’s right. Instead of artificial red dyes, some food manufacturers list “natural” colorings called “carmine” or “cochineal.”
The pigments are derived from female cochineal insects, which are raised on farms in Peru, Mexico and the Canary Islands. It takes 70,000 of them to make one pound of carmine, according to the Wall Street Journal. The abdomens and eggs of the females contain the most intense color; those parts are dried, ground and heated to produce the dye.
Carmine is in the box of pink and white Good & Plenty candy I have sitting on my desk. It’s in the Dannon Fruit on the Bottom boysenberry yogurt I had for lunch last week. It’s in the Tropicana Orange Strawberry Banana juice I recently served to overnight guests.
Not all manufacturers that use carmine or cochineal are upfront about it on the package ingredient list. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows some food tints to be obfuscated under terms like “color added” or “artificial color.” So the snack you are eating may have bug bellies in it. You just don’t know it…
…Besides the products listed above, you can find carmine and cochineal in some Popsicles, strawberry milk drinks, port-wine cheese, artificial crabmeat, cherries in fruit cocktail, caviar, fruit drinks, yogurt and the alcoholic aperitif Campari, according to the Federal Register.
Wikipedia chimes in:
A request from the Center for Science in the Public Interest to require ingredient labels to explicitly state that carmine is derived from insects was declined by the FDA. Food industries were aggressively opposed to the idea of writing “insect based” on the label and they finally agreed to simply putting “carmine”.
“Carmine”, the most euphemistic food name since “gelatin” was coined as a substitute for “cow or pig bones, hooves, and connective tissues“
[ More posts about food | More posts about food ingredients ] [ More posts about naming | More posts about product naming ]
The New York Times has been accused of leaking top secret sources and methods in the
GWOT.
It has long been suspected that the Pentagon taps into Wordlab to find good names for military operations. Some of the potential names for military ops may have been compromised when they were posted on the Internet
here.
Others claim that names for military operations are developed by language machines, like the
American Military Operation Name Generating Device or the
Military Codename Generator.
The best names, however, like
Operation Mountain Thrust, can only be conceived by the human mind, and are kept top secret until the operations are underway and it is safe to issue a
press release.
[ More posts about military operation names | More posts about military operations ]
One of the most interesting uses of a domain name -- ever.
During the Olympics in 2000, one of the world's largest beer companies ran a television advertisement to promote a website at a generic domain name, Beer.com, the first to promote a beer drinking lifestyle rather than a specific brand name. The television ad with voice-over "mmmmmmm beer" animated the www of the internet address to read
mmm.beer.com, which continues to this day to point to the Beer.com website, "the ultimate guys' guide to what's sexy, funny and hot on the net."
Beer.com, as a domain name, has an interesting history, too. Originally developed by internet entrepreneur William E. Fisher, a.k.a.
BilFish, beginning in 1993, the Beer.com domain was sold in 1999 to generic domain name developer
InternetRealEstate.com for $80,000 in a deal that left Fisher with a 20% stake in the domain name. Within months, the Beer.com domain name was flipped to one of the world's largest beer companies for a cool $7,000,000, one of the highest prices ever paid for a domain name. The
story was recounted by Mike "Zappy" Zapolin, Chief Visionary Officer of Internet Real Estate Group and a keynote speaker at a recent T.R.A.F.F.I.C. domain name conference, as reported by
DN Journal, The Domain Industry News Magazine.
[ More posts about beer | More posts about domain names ]
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