Fritinancy

Name review: Five new(ish) tech companies

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these roundups, hasn’t it? Let’s take a look at some names making headlines in the tech world. In alphabetical order:

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Brands of the decade: 2010–2019

Ten years ago, when social media and blogging were still new and a rational person was in the White House, I did something ambitious and presumptuous: I published a list of the Brands of the Decade.*

And now it’s time to do it again.

To qualify for my highly subjective top-12 list, a brand had to meet these guidelines:

• Founded during the second decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Because I’m a name developer, I gave a little extra weight to brands with interesting or influential names.

A message to sticklers: Yes, I know that actually a decade begins in a year ending in 1, not 0. SORRY.

In alphabetical order, then:

Words of the year 2016: Fritinancy edition

This post marks my eighth annual foray into word-of-the-year (WOTY) speculation. My first such summing-up, in 2009, included birther, Tea Party, and FAIL, among other lexical units. How things have changed. Or not.

As in the past, my choices for 2016 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 6, 2017, at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public, and it’s hella fun.) There are a few new ADS categories this year – political word of the year, digital (tech-related) word of the year, slang word of the year, WTF word of the year – and there’s always the possibility of even more categories being nominated from the floor. (For my own list, I’ve created three new categories: Obscenity of the Year, Import of the Year, and Spoonerism of the Year.) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2016.”

The Fritinancy list, in alphabetical order:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Why Do So Many Brand Names End in -ly?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is about an ongoing fascination of mine: company and product names that end in -ly. Over the last several years I’ve pinned 256 examples of such names on a Pinterest board, from Adaptly and Amazely to Yarrly and Zaarly. But I’m not content with pointing in alarm; I want to know how and why one little suffix has assumed so much power—and, not for nothing, how it came to be a marker both for adjectives (friendly, lonely, writerly) and for adverbs (frankly, strikingly, immediately).

No paywall this time! Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Some categories of words never, in normal English grammar, take the -ly suffix. Verbs are the most prominent example. But despite or perhaps in defiance of this proscription, many new businesses deliberately have chosen to create names by adding -ly to verbs: the roster includes Findly, Seekly, Sendly (not to be confused with Sently), Referly, Knowly, Embedly, Respondly, Optimizely, and Recurly. (Recurly has nothing to do with hair; it’s a service for recurring payments.) Sometimes it’s hard to know which part of speech is being -ly-ified: Founderly is a site for company founders, but you could just as easily read founder as the verb meaning “to sink” or “to fail.”

Even odder are the -ly names formed from neologisms (BucketListly, a way to keep track of your “bucket list”—things to do before you “kick the bucket,” i.e., die), portmanteaus (Volcally, from “volunteer locally”), and coined words with no evident meaning (Scubbly, an online marketplace; Rosingly, a daily-deal site; Vimbly, an activity finder). One such name was created—well, winkingly: Irregardless.ly is a crowdsourced style and usage guide whose name is a nod to a notorious “non-word”; the site’s founder, Charles Best—who also founded the philanthropic site Donors Choose—told me that when he couldn’t buy Irregardless.com “despite repeated attempts,” he chose the .ly extension, “consoling ourselves that we at least had an even funkier construction in ‘irregardlessly’.”

Read the rest of “Truly, Madly, Deeply … BucketListly?”

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Want more? Read my blog posts about names that end in -ly.

“Just Say Know”

Leafly, which calls itself “the world’s largest cannabis information resource”—and which Business Insider has called “Yelp for weed”—took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times to congratulate New York State for passing the Compassionate Care Act, which legalizes the medical use of marijuana. The ad ran on Page 19 of the main news section.

 

The Times ad, via Leafly.

 

A version of the ad also appeared on the Times website. Someone with a puckish sense of humor placed it adjacent to media reporter David Carr’s Monday column.

 

 

Carr, in case you didn’t know, published a memoir in 2010 about his drug-and-booze-plagued youth and adulthood. Here’s a bit of the book review that ran in the Times:

Back in the 1980s, when he was a reporter for an alternative weekly in Minneapolis and later for a local business monthly, Carr had a cocaine problem that spiraled downward from snorting to smoking to injecting. He also drank too much, did some low-level dealing and was arrested innumerable times.

Of course, the ad placement could be a coincidence.

The Leafly ad works on several levels. It depicts smartly attired, purposeful-seeming young adults who, we’re told, have fought serious illnesses.  (Marijuana: It’s not just for stoners!) It strikes a serious, science-y tone with those faux periodic-table abbreviations for cannabis strains. (The tamer ones, to be sure. You’ll have to visit the Leafly website to read up on Matanuska Thunder Fuck, Jack the Ripper, or AK-48.)

And it puns effectively on “Just Say No,” the much-trumpeted (and mocked) slogan—inspired by a comment by Nancy Reagan, wife of the president—of the U.S. War on Drugs* campaign of the 1980s and 1990s.

Mrs. Reagan saying no with a smile. Via The College of William & Mary, “Mainstream Drug Use in America.”

 

“Just Say Know” is appropriate to Leafly’s “knowledge is power” brand. Here’s an excerpt from the company’s press release about the Times ad:

We want to help New York patients learn about cannabis and make responsible and informed consumer choices about the product best suited for their medical conditions. Patients need a reliable, mainstream information portal about cannabis that is free of classic stoner stereotypes, and we truly believe that Leafly is the resource for them.

Note the language:

Responsible. Choices. Information. Medical conditions. Resource. 

Very earnest. Very judicious. Very smart.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the Leafly name, one of the dozens and dozens of Names That End in -ly—apps, startup companies, news organizations, and more—that are so very popular at the moment. It’s a name that blends into the brand landscape so predictably, so boringly, that you’re hardly aware that it represents a substance that will still get you prison time in a majority of jurisdictions. (To date, only 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana commerce.)

Indeed, almost everything about the ad and the company speaks in reassuring tones and mainstream tropes. The only suggestion of rule-breaking—and it’s a faint one—appears in the tiny type under the #justsayknow hashtag: “A Privateer Holdings company.” Privateer—“a private equity firm shaping the future of the legal cannabis industry”—takes its name from a seventeenth-century term for an armed, privately owned vessel commissioned for war service by a government.

In short, the ad seems to be signaling a new era in legal, mainstream marijuana marketing.

Here’s what Jesse Walker wrote about the ad in the libertarian publication Reason:

The most striking thing about the ad is that it isn’t striking at all. It would be easy to flip past this quickly without recognizing that it's about cannabis—and even if you do pause long enough to see what's being advertised, the idea of an ad for a marijuana review site in The New York Times just doesn't sound all that bizarre anymore. That’s when you know a social revolution is succeeding: when it starts to feel banal.

 

Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender.

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* Or, as some of us prefer to call it, the War on Some Drugs.

Flowifying the Name Trends

A mysterious blogger whom I know only as The Least Shrew—her Twitter bio identifies her as Kaylin in Akron, Ohio—has done me the great honor of turning a peculiar research project of mine into a flowchart that she calls “How to Name Your Website.”

 

“Is your brand cutesy? Hardcore? Buddhist? None of the above?” View and embiggen the full chart.

 

That’s right: she studied my Pinterest boards of naming trends—Names That End in -ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and all the rest—and applied linear logic to them.

Of course, for strict accuracy, the label should be “How to Name Your Company or Product”—this is a lot bigger than websites. And until I told her about The Name Inspector’s Wall of Namifying—the project that inspired my own collections—The Least Shrew hadn’t been aware of it, so all those -ify names—Rockify, Subsify, Wingify, et al.—don’t get proper representation.

But those quibbles aside, it’s a brilliant infographic. I’m deeply flattered.

Thanks to Karen for the tweet that sent me there.

How Beamly Got Its Name

A name change begins with questions—what do we need to communicate? how do we want to express it?–and it ends not merely with the new name but with the story that accompanies it. In the best of outcomes—if the renaming process was guided by a clear and comprehensive naming brief—company executives can tell a cogent story about how the new name came to be. Other times, perhaps because they are a little muddled about what just happened and why, they spin their wheels and generate a not-very-convincing or useful word cloud.

This post is about one of those other times. 

Zeebox, a London-based “social networking and social TV platform,” was founded in early 2011. In April of this year, the company announced it was changing its name to Beamly.

That’s right: another Name That Ends in -ly.

Pinkish wordmark + heart-ish logo = girl appeal?

 

The name change, according to an April report in Digital TV Europe, represents the company’s “bid to ‘capture the zeitgeist’ of its core target audience of 16 to 24 year-old millennials and to break away from its ‘geeky male audience’.”

What made Zeebox geeky? What makes Beamly zeitgeist-y? I certainly wanted to know. Instead, here’s how Simon Miller, the company’s chief of product and content development, attempted to explain the name change:

Naming an app is tough. You’re looking for a memorable, distinctive name with an available an [sic] web URL and preferably with a connection with the purpose of your app. zeebox was by no means perfect, but it worked for our original focus. However, as our users asked us for more than just second screen features, we began to evolve beyond second screen experiences into what you might call a social network for TV, and our original name just didn’t match that evolution. We needed a new brand.

The explanation, such as it is, left me wanting more: Why was Zeebox “by no means perfect”? What about this imperfect name made it nevertheless a good fit for the “original focus”? Why was it a poor fit for the new, social-network focus? Why is it only “preferable” that the new name have “a connection with the purpose of your app”?

(And by the way: Don’t tell me that naming is “tough.” Cry me a river.)

Hypothetically, and especially since renaming is so “tough,” one might argue in favor of keeping the Zeebox name (“Zee is for zeitgeist!”) and instead just changing the tagline, the color palette, the font, or large chunks of your content to suggest a more “social” mission. Remember, you don’t have to change your name just because you’ve shifted your business strategy.

Miller continued:

As a social network for TV, we wanted a friendly, all-inclusive name to brand a community of TV lovers whilst retaining our second screen beginnings plus, of course, it needed to be memorable, distinctive and available. We considered hundreds of names, hunted high and low and eventually the name that put a smile on our faces (and everyone’s when you say it) was “Beamly”.

Oh, really? Why does Beamly make you happy? Because “beam” is a synonym for “smile”? Because television “beams” images? Or because “everyone” smirked smiled while recalling that there are more than 200 other company names that end in -ly? 

Of course, there are also quite a few company names that incorporate “box.”

(Wondering about that “whilst” in Miller’s copy? Beamly is still a UK company, and “whilst” is a marker of British English. In American English, “while” is preferred unless the writer is aiming for an antiquated or humorous tone. However, Ben Yagoda observes in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog that “whilst” has been on the rise in the U.S. since about 2008. But I digress.)

Beamly’s corporate communication machine runs a little more smoothly when the controls are turned over to the art director and the creative director, who talk about Pantone colors, fonts, and navigation. Still, I’d rather not hear that “designing a logo is never a short process”—as with the “tough” naming job, who cares? And while (or whilst) there’s some lip service given to form, function, and simplicity, there’s also too much of this sort of thing:

In the end we opted to use Beamly Coral at the top level of the app (My TV, Discover, Guide, Notifications, Me), but when navigating to a TV Room or TV show the colour of those pages would be calculated by analysing the colours within the image representing the show.

Hmm? Oh, sorry—I just switched channels.

As for the Beamly name—well, you already know what I think about -ly names. Still, “beam” is a valid starting point, and even a mediocre name can be strengthened by clear and effective storytelling. It’s disappointing to see this company miss the opportunity to tell a meaningful name story in language its customers can understand and value.

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Previously in How They Got That Name:  Ski-Doo, ASOS, Pitango.

The -ly Name Trend: Not Just for Tech Startups

My guest post for Duets Blog yesterday (helpfully tagged “mixed bag of nuts”) looked at the epidemic of copycat names—in particular, the 193 names ending in -ly that I’d documented on Pinterest.

One day later, there are 196 -ly names on the board. I spotted two of them not in TechCrunch, my near-bottomless resource, but on the shelves of my neighborhood Safeway.

Brightly paper towels promise “virtually lint-free shine.”

 

Softly toilet paper.

 

The Guys and Dolls fan in me hoped Safeway also carried Nicely-Nicely paper cups. No dice.

The character was called Nicely-Nicely Jones in the original Damon Runyon stories. For more on Runyon and his creations, here’s a wonderful appreciation by Adam Gopnik, published in the March 2, 2009, issue of the New Yorker.

Guest Post for Duets Blog: Trendifying Adverbially

My new guest post at Duets Blog, “Trendifying Adverbially: When Naming Fads Become Epidemics,” takes a serious look at copycat naming. Why are there at least 193 195 companies or products whose names end in -ly? What explains the surge in names that end in -ify? Is lack of awareness to blame, or the opposite—an eagerness to hitch one’s star to a branding bandwagon?

Read the post—and leave a comment with your own observations, if you like.

Brand Like a Pirate

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day (the 13th annual, by my reckoning), and to mark the occasion I’ve gone on a treasure hunt for pirate-type brands. I’m not dropping a dime on actual piratical deeds, you understand: this is just good clean yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum fun.

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Yarrly has pirate-talk in its very name. Let TechCrunch explain:

[W]hat the world really needs, of course, is an anonymous meme generator with a chain letter-styled remixable twist. Meet Yarrly (to be said with your best pirate voice). Created by London-based Dave Ganly and Holly Clarke outside of their tech day jobs, the Android app lets anyone create two panel images and add text in the style of a meme maker.

Yarrly has some fun with the piracy theme.

Aye, matey—it’s another Name That Ends in -Ly!

But here’s the part the makes branding consultants and trademark lawyers want to walk the plank: each Yarrly remix is called a “yarrly” – lower case. Bad, bad branding!

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Yarr, Pirate Maps is “just like usin’ real google maps, but better – ’cos everythin’ is all piratey and mappy.” Example: when you mouse over a map, the manicule is a skeleton hand. Yarr, Pirate Maps, is not related to Yarrly, as far as I can tell.

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Scurvy was the scourge of real pirates—the bleeding gums, the jaundice, the suppurating wounds—but apparently Sanuk, a Southern California footwear company, likes the sound of “Scurvy” for a men’s casual shoe.*

 

Sanuk Scurvy in “brindle” color, on sale at REI. 

 

* They look like shoes to me, but Sanuk says otherwise:

The company name comes from the Thai word for “happiness.”

I learned of the Scurvy from Jan Freeman, who queried me in an email: “Do you suppose they think ‘scurvy’ is just a pirate word (‘ye scurvy dog’) and have no idea it's a disease?” Actually, Sanuk seems to know exactly what it’s doing. Here’s the product copy on Amazon (probably supplied by the manufacturer):

With a name like Scurvy, it’s got to be good!** In fact, this sidewalk surfer from Sanuk is the epitome of wholesomeness, crafted with vegan sensibilities. With a hand-crafted canvas upper and a “laces or no laces” option it’s like two shoes in one. Inside, a soft canvas liner a contoured footbed makes this shoe a nice place for your foot to be. And down below matey? A herringbone rubber outsole ensures you won't slip while walking the plank.

Still, severe vitamin C deficiency is no joke. I picture the Scurvy being worn by Bleeding Gums Murphy, R.I.P.

 

** A scurvy act of piracy! That “With a name like__” slogan was originally coined by Smucker’s and, of course, parodied by Saturday Night Live in the famous “Jam Hawkers” skit.