Fritinancy

Weekend Link Pack

Longtime readers may recall my 2008 post about the British energy-drink brand Pussy (“Bad Brand Names: The New Champion!”). Now the UK’s advertising regulator has ruled on complaints about Pussy ads. The deadpan ruling is worth your time for passages like this one:

We noted that the slogan in ad (a) stated “The drink’s pure, it's your mind that's the problem” and considered that strongly suggested that the term “pussy” had a secondary meaning which was not “pure” and was a “problem”, and considered that slogan reinforced the colloquial meaning of “pussy” to those older children or implied that that secondary, colloquial meaning was in some way impolite or even offensive or sexually explicit.

Hat tip: S. Quinn on the American Name Society listserv.

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On DuetsBlog (where I am an occasional contributor), Mark Prus of NameFlash considers the names of minor-league baseball teams. I learned a thing or three: for example, the Las Vegas 51s are not so called because they’re one card short of a deck.

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You’d think a new debit card with “Visa Paywave” would involve some sort of waving activity, right? Gotcha! “Sometimes a product name can sound really good, but it can send the wrong signals,” sighs Australian linguablogger Superlinguo.

Past Due

Signs of the (past) times:

 

Oakland, California, April 17, 2012.

 

That’s an original BankAmericard sign, probably about 40 years old. And that’s Master Charge, the predecessor of MasterCard. According to a nice fellow named Paul, who answered the phone at Lee Myles when I called, the signs have been hanging there since they were new. (Lee Myles Transmissions opened in Oakland in 1957.)

 

“Think of it as money”: 1972 BankAmericard ad from eBay. Would a copywriter today use “like” instead of “as”?

 

Bank of America—which had been founded in San Francisco in 1904 as the Bank of Italy—introduced BankAmericard in 1958, mailing it to 60,000 households in Fresno, California. It was the world’s first all-purpose credit card and the first successful credit-card “drop” (unsolicited mailing). Until 1965, the card was offered only in California.

 

1972 metal BankAmericard sign similar to the one I photographed. This one’s for sale on eBay.

 

An early BankAmericard TV commercial, which I tried unsuccessfully to locate online, featured a cartoon orchestra conductor and a catchy symphonic jingle. According to Lawrence R. Samuel, author of Brought to You By, it was one of the first uses of animation to promote a “serious” product such as a credit card.

Bank of America gave up the BankAmericard program in 1970, when issuer banks took control. In 1975 BankAmericard united with three other credit cards to become Visa, a name conceived by Visa International founder Dee Hock.  (This is an abbreviated version of the Wikipedia history, much of which is based on Joseph Nocera’s 1995 book A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class.) Hock said the name was “instantly recognizable in many languages in many countries, and that it also denoted universal acceptance.” (Wikipedia)

Master Charge, born in 1969, was the successor to the Interbank Card Association, which had been formed in 1965 by several California banks to compete with BankAmericard. The name was changed to MasterCard in 1979. (Source: Credit Card Forum.)

 

Before there was Klout, there was clout. 1977 Master Charge ad from eBay.

 

In 2007 Bank of America—now headquartered in North Carolina, alas—brought back the BankAmericard name as “BankAmericard Rewards Visa.”

Read my 2010 post about another ghost sign in Oakland.

Names in the News

Items that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks:

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HotelChatter spots a recent trend in hotel naming: single-word brands “that hardly even communicate that these are hotels where you can spend the night.” The newest example they cite is Even (which does, actually, suggest evening activity); others include Public, Edition, and Commune. “Commune”? As in, “Tonight it’s your turn to make the lentil-millet stew”? (Via Name Wire.)

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I can’t pass up another opportunity to write about Fifth Third Bancorp, the Cincinnati-based bank whose name is legendary in verbal-branding circles. (It’s the result of a long-ago merger, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make jokes about it.) This week the bank revealed its new tagline, which exhibits a refreshing element of wit rarely seen in financial marketing: “The Curious Bank.” The bank’s chief marketing officer claimed the tagline had something to with “our DNA” (yes, it’s that old biological determinism again!), but he isn’t fooling me. “Fifth Third” is a curious name in the funny-peculiar sense, and if the people who work there are curious in the asking-better-questions sense, so much the better. In taglines, unlike in other corporate communications, a little ambiguity is a good thing.

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MATTER is a new online magazine with an unusual focus: each week it will publish a single piece of long-form journalism about science or technology. If that sounds to you like an iffy proposition in an era of tweets and sound bites, consider this: the magazine was fully funded on Kickstarter, to the tune of $75,000, in just 38 hours. As a lapsed journalist myself, I’m eager to see what the editorial team (based here in the Bay Area) will produce. I’m also enthusiastic about the name, which works—like most good names—on multiple levels: it simultaneously suggests reading material, the physical sciences, and “to be of importance.”

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Speaking of good names—and of focus—the ambitious new camera called Lytro began shipping this week. Lytro looks like no camera you’ve ever seen, and its technology is equally innovative: it allows you to focus after you’ve captured the image. (Read a New York Times Gadgetwise post that called the camera “astonishing”; see a diagram of how it works.) The name is brilliant—far better than the drearily descriptive original name, Refocus Imaging. “Lytro” suggests “light” and “nitro”—as in exploding old ideas—and the slightly tweaked spelling makes it feel revolutionary but not difficult. Even the letterforms contribute to the name’s effect: the sharp angles of the L, Y, and T are balanced by the lenslike O (subtly emphasized in the logo). Great work by Anthony Shore of Operative Words, who was hired by Sequence Branding of San Francisco to do the naming.

AmEx Strikes Out

Another example of deletion in advertising, this one from the American Express home page:

 

 

Here the graphic device is supported by echoing word choice: “far away” becomes “on the way.”

I’m rather pleased to see the official (“pig’s tail”) deletion symbol, which is the one I learned as a newspaper editor.

WTH, ING?

I spotted this sign last week at the ING Direct outpost* in San Francisco’s Financial District (Post at Kearny):

 

 

Huh? “H… E… double hockey sticks”? A prissy euphemism for “hell” that I associate with the likes of Ned Flanders? Kind of anachronistic in an invitation to take a photo of a QR code, isn’t it? But maybe stop-you-in-your-tracks incongruity is what ING Direct is, um, banking on.

Of course, if that fails, there’s always shouting.

 

Dear ING: Few things make me less likely to patronize your institution than being addressed as “Hey” before we’ve been introduced. Or after. (When I receive emails from strangers that begin “Hey, Nancy!” I immediately delete them.) As for  “Why not be a stopperby,” I have a limit with cutesy made-up words, and you, ING, just crossed it.

But wait! ING is willing to try another tactic: the Zen koan.

 

I have absolutely no idea what this means. But hey (!), I’m for it!

 

Then there’s this “Declaration of Financial Independence” on the corner:

 

What do you mean “we,” Direct Man?

It’s a manifesto, but not ING’s: it’s intended for “us” passersby. Apparently “we” are supposed to solemnly intone the declaration until we’ve committed it to memory. Because, after all, it was “our” naughtiness that caused the financial mess in 2008, right? Certainly no fault of the financial institutions. Heavens, no.

I wanted to go inside the building and find out more about the signs, but the storefront was locked and vacant. Back in March, ING—the world’s largest direct bank, with US headquarters in Delaware—had announced that the 17,000-square-foot property at Post and Kearny would become an “ING DIRECT [more shouting!] Café” in partnership with Berkeley-based coffee retailer Peet’s Coffee and Tea. From the press release:

The Cafés are designed to educate, inspire and share the values of ING DIRECT by providing a face-to-face and interactive retail experience. In addition to information about ING DIRECT and talking to knowledgeable Associates, the Café will offer free Wi-Fi Internet access and office space for local information technology developers to work. It will also serve as a location for community meetings and events, including local consumer, lifestyle, arts, social and non-profit organizations.

Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? But here we are, nearly seven months later, and all is silent behind the big orange signs. What the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks, indeed.

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* It can’t be a “branch” if it’s direct banking, can it?

Oscars Ad Recap

While the rest of you were DVRing past the commercial breaks or using them to refill your popcorn bowls, I was taking notes on the ads that ran during Sunday night’s Academy Awards broadcast. Here’s a summary.

Lows

1. I detested the endless barrage of unimaginative JCPenney ads. Their only marginally interesting feature was the company’s new logo, which made its on-air debut Sunday night. The Brand New blog revealed last week that the logo had been designed by a third-year graphic-design student at the University of Cincinnati. Because that’s how 109-year-old multibillion-dollar nationwide chains now roll, apparently.

New JCPenney logo

As if the ads weren’t enough, a JCPenney sign even appeared during the opening montage with actors Anne Hathaway and James Franco. (Watch the montage—arguably the high point of a mediocre awards show—here. JCPenney is in the Back to the Future sequence, around 5:27.)

Naming note: JCPenney (no more periods or spaces; we’re young and hip now!) was called Golden Rule when it was founded by James Cash Penney in 1902.

 

2. ING Direct’s ads featured the staggeringly inane tagline “Touch the ball.” Yep, that’s going to restore my faith in the American financial system.

 

Highs

1. Kudos to JPMorgan Chase for “Change,” which employed 3D paper animation to create a sophisticated version of a child’s pop-up book. The agencies responsible were Psyop and McGarryBowen. (Hat tip to Purple Penning for that info.) Watch the spot at the Strictly Paper blog.

 

2. After that weird cross-dressing spot that aired during the Super Bowl, Living Social must have decided—wisely—to change course. The two new ads that debuted on Sunday had an infectious score and a charmingly homemade look, like a deconstructed version of last year’s “I’m on a horse” campaign for Old Spice. And they kept the brand promise front and center.

 

One final note: Twitter was the place to be for Oscar watching (and snarking). Here’s a favorite tweet from Slate political reporter Dave Weigel in response to a Stella Artois spot.

So Much “Not So Much”

There’s a lot of “not so much” going around.

 

Bank of America tells a home truth. (Oakland, San Francisco)

 

 

 

Scott, Cole & Associates, an Oakland law firm. (Apologies for the blur.)

 

 

 

Adimab “offers the first fully integrated yeast-based human antibody discovery and optimization platform.”

 

“Not so much” is relatively new in advertising—and especially in ads for industries as traditionally conservative as banking, law, and basic science.¹ But “not so much” to mean “not at all”² has been part of US slang for at least of couple of decades. It’s usually employed as an independent tag, but occasionally shows up as a lead-in to a sentence, as in a Christian Science Monitor headline from last December:

Mortgage relief? Not so much from Obama program.

Where “not so much” came from is anyone’s guess, but how it spread—well, that’s the focus of an entire field of inquiry.

Disagreeable

Ah, Capital One: Just when I think you’ve exhausted all your weird copywriting tricks, you bring out Jerry Stiller to lay another one on us.

 

 

Forget the Stone Age. I’m stuck in “is your savings” and I can’t un-mire myself. Surely I’m not alone in seeing a problem here with subject-verb agreement.

True, savings is a funny word. According to Garner’s Modern American Usage, it’s “technically” a plural, but “the phrase a savings occurs so frequently in modern usage that to label it an error would be futile.” Case in point: We give “a savings of $100” a grammatical pass.

But I’m less willing to condone “Is your savings…?” in the absence of a noun such as account after savings. Nearly all the examples I found online used a plural verb with savings when the construction was a question:

Are Your Savings Safe? (Telegraph, UK)

Are Your Savings Ready for Anything? (Credit Union National Association)

Assessing Bank Assets: Are Your Savings Safe? (Investopedia)

Are YOUR Savings Going Up in Smoke? (Rutgers Cooperative Research & Extension)

Are Your Savings Protected? (Moneywise)

I did see a declaratory exception on the home page of Savings Square*:

“This is your savings.” [Visual of a small black square.] “This is the interest applied to your savings.” [Visual of a green border added to the black square.]

This doesn’t bother me; here, “savings” is a singular entity. I certainly wouldn’t change the sentence to “These are your savings.”

But Capital One’s headline does seem peculiar, if not strictly wrong. I’m itching to rewrite it as “Are your savings…” I wouldn’t protest “Is your money stuck in the Stone Age”? And why not “Is your banking...”? After all, this Capital One campaign has been banging the “banking” drum, linguistically speaking, since the first ads appeared: see my previous posts on “banking like a Babylonian” and “1.30% vs. bupkus.”

Any grammar mavens care to weigh in?

From here, via TechCrunch.

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* Yes, it’s another square name!

That Word

It sorta-kinda means what they think it means. And yet . . .

San Francisco Chronicle, page A10, November 7, 2010.

Yes, it’s our good friends at CapitalOne with a new print ad in the “New School Banking” campaign I wrote about last month. In the BART station ads (which are still up), CapOne mocked customers for banking “like an Egyptian” or “like a Pilgrim.” Now we’re presumably being told not to bank like our beloved bubbe and zayde.

I refer, of course, to that word bupkus, which can also be transliterated as bupkes, bobkes, bobkis, or any of several other spellings. It’s a Yiddish word (originally from Russian), that Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, carefully tells us means “something trivial, worthless, insultingly disproportional to expectations.” In the ad, bupkus is used as a synonym for “nothing.” Rosten translates it as “beans,” adding that these beans are not the kind you put in the soup pot.

No, they certainly aren’t. The Joys of Yiddish was published in 1968; nearly 40 years later, Michael Wex provided an unbowdlerized definition of the word (which he spells bupkes) in Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods:

Bupkes means “nothing,” all right, but it’s a rather specific kind of nothing, as different from gornisht, the dictionary Yiddish for “nothing,” as “nothing” itself is from “sweet fuck-all.” The basic meaning of bupkes . . . is dung, specifically the dung of sheep  or goats. Like the English “bullshit” or “horseshit,” bupkes was once fairly widespread as an expression of disbelief. A response of bupkes meant that you thought someone was talking nonsense; whatever he was saying, it was crap. . . .

Like much of the Yiddish that has found its way into English, bupkes has been downgraded from vulgar to cute; but unless you were discussing barnyard waste, you’d try to avoid the word in polite Yiddish conversation.

It’s not as though bupkes hasn’t already surfaced in polite American conversation. Back in 1965, there was an episode of The Dick Van Dyke show titled “Bupkis”; it centered on a song (also titled “Bupkis”) that Rob (Van Dyke) and his buddy had written during their army days.* Bupkes—along with a lot of other Yiddish words—has also been uttered on The Simpsons (notably by Krusty the Clown, the son of a rabbi).

And Yiddish has cropped up in a few ads, too: See my April 2010 on spritz as it’s used in ads for Poise pads (for “light bladder leakage”).

But as far as I can tell, this is a breakthrough (you should pardon the expression) for financial-services advertising. I’m not sure, though, whether it’s cause for kvelling or kvetching.

For more on Yiddishisms in the American vernacular, see Mark Peters’s “Yiddish, Schmiddish!”, “an ode to the wonderful ‘schm’  sound,” in GOOD magazine.

Elsewhere in the That Word files: unrequited and sophistry.

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* In his chapter on bupkes and other Yiddish barnyard slang, Michael Wex quotes a line from the song: “Bupkis means a lot of nothing, and that’s what you’ll get from me. Bupkis!”

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Where the title of this post comes from.

Hip to Be Square

Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, has been in the news recently for his latest venture, Square, Inc., a payment service for mobile devices.

Square, Inc., logo.

The company was born in late 2009; the device—a small square plug-in—became available last month. The company’s URL is SquareUp.com.

As I was reading about Square. it occurred to me that there’s a lot of squareness going around in company names. For example: