Online advertising technology product name – Shinola
Have you ever seen an online ad appear for “Discount Airline Fares” while
reading an article about a plane crash? How about an ad for scuba lessons
served up next to a news account of a shark attack? It’s because
ad placement software works solely on keyword recognition. Or that’s
the way it has worked until now.
Textwise hired Igor to create the name for its revolutionary new online
advertising technology that can actually tell the
difference between good and bad contextual matches, and that name
is Shinola. Says Textwise:
Shinola is a contextual ad placement solution that automatically matches
highly relevant advertisements (product descriptions) to web content
generated from Trainable Semantic Vectors (TSVs). Trainable Semantic
Vectors are a major breakthrough in representing and analyzing textual
information.
Until now, reliable semantic analysis always came at the expense of
scalability. Shinola is the first and only product placement technology
that is accurate enough to capture semantic meaning, fast enough to power
real-time applications, automated enough to maintain in dynamic environments,
and scalable enough to handle web-sized problems.
The
name Shinola originated as an early- to mid-20th century American brand
of shoe polish. But its lasting fame derives from a still well-known
expression, as Wikipedia
notes:
Its immortality in colloquial English comes from its use in such alliterative
phrases as [He] doesn't know shit from Shinola. Implied is that shit
and Shinola, while superficially similar, are quite different in effect
when applied to shoes or carelessly stepped in. One who fails to distinguish
one from the other is therefore notably unwise or of substandard mental
ability. The phrase is famously uttered, and demonstrated, in the 1979
Carl Reiner film, The Jerk, starring Steve Martin.
Similar meaning can be found in the expression, He
doesn't know his ass from his elbow, or the variant, He
doesn't know his ass from a hole in the wall/ground.
When naming a groundbreaking product that has the potential to completely
change how an industry operates, anything short of a strongly evocative
name that also maps directly to the core product function would detract
from the brand's power. The advertising-centric metaphor of shoe polish
and putting a shine on a product provides additional layers of depth
and consumer connectivity. Our client wanted a viral, self-propelling
name that would minimize the need for an advertising and P.R. budget,
and they got one.