Fritinancy

Blemished

From "Beauty Blogs Come of Age: Swag, Please!" by Kayleen Schaefer, in Thursday's New York Times:

Before choosing which blogs to target, companies consider whether a Web site has a fresh look and frequent postings as well as comments from engaged readers. Misspellings are considered a blemish.

I guess that means Schaefer will be paying for her own cosmetics. Two paragraphs down we have this:

The bloggers may sound as if they're staging sit-ins at Sephora while waiting for the next eye shadow palate from NARS, but they are likely to be at home anticipating the latest U.P.S. delivery from a MAC publicist.

It's palette, not palate.

Good for What Ales You

I did a double-take when I saw this vehicle directly ahead of me, somewhere in Berkeley:

An ambulance? A beer-delivery van? Both, it turns out: it's the "am-brew-lance" operated by Iron Springs Pub & Brewery in Fairfax (West Marin County). Slogan: "Saving Lives, One Beer at a Time" (yes, another variation of the "Saving X, One Y at a Time" snowclone last noted in the 360 Vodka ad campaign).

I'm skeptical about the wisdom of connecting beer-drinking with life-saving, but I admit the concept made me laugh. I admire the cheeky "am-brew-lance" coinage and the way Iron Springs tells its story:

Since Iron Springs opened in 2004, we have always had our sights set on a beer delivery vehicle powered by our own waste vegetable oil. ... We kept our eyes peeled for the right van and, as more venues wanted our brew for their taps, the need for a devoted vehicle became stronger and then, as the sun broke through the fluffy clouds of another stellar fairfax day, we had our epiphany. While searching on craigslist for a diesel van, we discovered one that was also a retired ambulance. Sonoma county first purchased it in 1988, and recently auctioned it to an individual who then posted it on craigslist. We drove a couple of hours and spent the day testing the mechanics and electrical components, plenty of fun with all of the bells and whistles still in working order. Everything checked out and soon the deal was signed, and we began our own conversion process.

First stop: Diego Bros. Truck Repair in Larkspur. They performed a complete diagnostic test from bumper to bumper, tuned it up, changed the fluids and gave it their seal of approval. Next, we put on four new tires, gave it a paint job, and began the creative process of decal and design. It didn’t take long to come up with the name “Am-brew-lance” and next we altered the 'star of life' (found on all emergency vehicles, equivalent to the caduceus of medical personel [sic]) to include a tall pilsner glass full of beer. Slogans were flowing from us like the bubbly exlixir [sic] does from our taps...we narrowed it down to a few winners, and after West Coast Sign Works completed the project, the boys at Raw Energy were ready to install the vegetable oil system. This includes several fuel-heaters, filters, a state of the art fuel pump designed specifically for veggie oil fuel and custom regulated to fit our particular engine, plus some pressure and temperature gauges to monitor the veggie conversion components. Meanwhile, we devoted a closet inside the brewpub to storing and filtering our new fuel, which would be dispensed from the same reinforced containers that the virgin vegetable oil was first purchased in for cooking purposes. After the final adjustments and modifications (we had to change out the red emergency lenses to comply with state law) we had finally made this beautiful work of engineering and design into our maiden ship.

Overall, a nice blend of sincerity and whimsy, although "maiden ship" sounds odd to me: we speak of a "maiden voyage" and (rarely) a "maiden speech," but other maiden- forms seem strained.

By the way, while researching this post I came across another medico-alcoholic brand name: Caduceus Cellars, a winery in Cornville, Arizona (?!) owned by former rock singer/songwriter/producer Maynard James Keenan. I was amused as well by the name of Keenan's vineyard: Merkin. Keenan is either a closet Chaucerian or a fan of this best-forgotten film. Or maybe that's just the way he pronounces "American."

How Carbon/Silicon Got Its Name

From Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with Carbon/Silicon founders Mick Jones (formerly of The Clash) and Tony James (formerly of Generation X):

Terry Gross: What does "Carbon/Silicon" mean to you?

Tony James: Well, it's two things--we both had different views of it. I like the idea that it was the combination of carbon, meaning soul, and silicon, meaning computers. And it was like, old and modern together, you know. In a way it represented our two different personalities. You know, Mick comes from a sort of organic, regular life type stuff, and I like computers and the technology stuff. So it was a combination of those two things, I thought suited what we were about.

Mick Jones: For me it's like a carbon ashtray, like a charcoal ashtray with a diamond in the middle of it.

Tony James: See, that totally illustrates what I'm talking about.

The "Dude" Lexicon

John Swansberg writes in Slate about the Bud Light TV commercials that depict "a day in the life of an unnamed man who communicates using the word dude and dude alone." Swansberg identifies "at least six distinct usages" of dude in the ads:

The admonitory dude: the dude deployed when your buddy won't stop humming "Umbrella" on a long car ride. As in, "Dude, enough."

The interrogative dude: useful for ascertaining whether you've dropped a call. "Dude? Are you still there?"

The deflated dude: the dude of bad news. "Dude. Tom Brady's wearing a boot."

The exclamatory dude: the dude of good news. "Dude! Tom Brady is no longer wearing a boot!"

The sotto voce dude: for classified briefings. "Dude: Here comes that tall drink of water from accounting."

The blissed-out dude: more accurately rendered as duhuhude. The dude issued upon rediscovering a long-lost Dead tape.

I counted a few additional variations in the "Dude Football" spot: the dude of disgust (in the restroom), the dude of distress (hitting crotch on turnstile), and the you-disappoint-me dude (at the very end).

Pictured: Jeff Bridges as Jeff (The Dude) Lebowski, in The Big Lebowski (1998). Image source.

Looking Presidential

A couple of type designers analyze the logos of the presidential candidates for readers of the Boston Globe. Some excerpts:

• "The Hillary logo has the look of an '80s newspaper layout or an investment company."
• "The Edwards type is very Wal-Mart, tabloid, middle class. Not a whiff of high-powered lawyer."
• "Obama's ... serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit."
• "Huckabee has the most inexplicable selection of typography and graphics, from the six floating stars to the white stripe seemingly stolen from the Coca-Cola logo."
• "[Romney's] graphics are puzzling. The eagle logo has the head of the US Postal Service logo and body of the Norwegian flag flowing behind it."
• "[Giuliani's] message is all about Rudy, name recognition. The enlarged R introduces the other letters like a big, protective parent."
• "From the perfectly centered star to the perfectly spaced type, [McCain's] entire design looks like a high-end real estate company."

In conclusion: "If we were to predict the results based on typography and design, we would pick McCain and Obama."

Via The Ridger, who's peeved--as am I--by the misplaced apostrophe in the Globe's sidebar heading, "All the Candidate's Logos." (Just one candidate with many logos?) Not only that, but on the "all logos" page there's an extraneous comma: "type designers, Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith..." Does anyone work on the copy desk anymore?

Bonus link: Obama has the hardest-working logo of any presidential candidate.

Read my earlier post on candidates' logos.

Don't Know Much About History

This billboard really irks my inner peevologist:

For those of you who need a refresher course, that's George Washington directly below the space between "Behind" and "Every." The painting is Emanuel Leutze's 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, as every schoolchild used to know, commemorates the beginning of a surprise attack on Hessian forces in the Revolutionary War, Dec. 25, 1776. 

George Washington may have been first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen--and indeed a land surveyor in civilian life--but one thing he was not was an "explorer."

The advertiser is Mio Digiwalker. If I can't trust their research, how can they expect me to trust their technology?

(And yes, the painting itself is full of inaccuracies, too. For one thing, the actual crossing took place at night.)

Photo taken at 8th and Mission streets, San Francisco.

Word of the Week: Big-Up

Big-Up: To praise or promote; to raise the profile of. Urban Dictionary gives eight citations going back as far as 2003. Usage example: "I want to big-up everyone who has supported me over the years."

Lexicographer Ben Zimmer, writing last week in From A to Zimmer, an Oxford University Press blog, notes that the term comes from Caribbean English and is gaining popularity in North America:

Three recent quotes from American media sources give you a sense of how it’s being used these days. Here’s the actress Jaime Pressly critiquing the show “Ugly Betty”: “They’re purposefully big-upping the ugly fat girl to make everybody feel great, but it also glamorizes the fact that people are getting plastic surgery because they can.” The music blog Idolator had this to say about an “American Idol” contestant: “This is actually the second time that Hennessy has been big-upped by the Idol powers that be,” adding, “is big-upping this girl really the best strategy to boost ratings?” And finally a profile of Staten Island’s Budos Band notes: “Legit blogs like Brooklyn Vegan and online publications like Pitchfork and RollingStone.com have also big-upped the band.” ...

Note that Jaime Pressly said that “Ugly Betty” was “big-upping the ugly fat girl,” not that the show was “bigging up the ugly fat girl” (or “bigging the ugly fat girl up“). So we find that big-up is being treated as a single entity that can be inflected with verb endings, rather than as the verb big plus the particle up. This also helps explain why the hyphenated form is appearing so commonly in print. It’s a bit unusual to find a so-called “phrasal verb” (also known as a “verb-particle construction”) undergoing this type of reanalysis, but one similar case is voice over meaning ‘to supply unseen narration to a broadcast.’ A film can be voiced over or it can be voice-overed, depending on whether voice over is treated as one entity or two. Of course, the existence of the noun voice-over helps with the single-entity reading, just as the noun big-up encourages inflected forms like big-upping.

Zimmer concludes:

And for anyone who finds the verb big-up to be objectionable, I would simply say, in the spirit of “The Simpsons,” it embiggens our language. In fact, it’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Urban Renewal

City life is tough these days. If it isn't the crime it's the schools. If it isn't a garbage strike it's the chronically late buses.

So, faced with a looming recession and citizen antipathy to ponying up for anything preceded by the word "public," what's a hoping-to-be-reelected mayor to do?

You got it. Time for a new city slogan!

Exhibit A comes from Minnesota, whence Steve Berg of MinnPost.com reports on a local dilemma:

If we're from Hopkins and we're traveling and someone asks where we're from, there's an awkward pause. Do we say Hopkins, Minnesota, and then launch into an explanation? Do we say Minneapolis? The Twin Cities? The Seven-County Mosquito Control District? Or do we get vague and just say Minnesota? Our answers tend to vary. But if we aren't quite sure what to call this place, then how can others be sure? And that raises the ultimate existential marketing question: Are we really here?

Apparently we are. Two mayors and three influential public relations executives held a press conference Tuesday to affirm our existence and to announce that there's "more to life in Minneapolis Saint Paul."

Does that last phrase appear to contain a typo? Are you used to seeing it spelled "Minneapolis-St. Paul," with an abbreviation and a hyphen? Better get with the Brand New Program, my friend. Mr. Berg explains, apparently in earnest:

Removing the hyphen suggests a singular place and a stronger brand. "More to life" is meant to promote our greatest asset: you can do more quality things here with less hassle than anywhere else.

Hear that, Coca-Cola and Rolls-Royce? It's those divisive hyphens that have been keeping you from becoming strong, singular brands.

And spelling out "Saint"? Not the way I'm used to seeing it, but I've never been to Minnesota. Seeing as there's no explanation, feel free to make one up. Perhaps the smaller Twin City wants to promote its godliness.

As for "More to Life," it looks and sounds awkward to me without "There's..." in front. I'm betting it gets mis-heard as "More to Like." Or maybe "to life" is now a verb, and I just haven't gotten the memo.

Speaking of betting, here's Exhibit B, from a Jan. 7 Wall St. Journal article (probably behind a paywall until full Murdoch-ization; send me an e-mail if you'd like a guest login):

By now, most Americans are familiar with the Las Vegas mantra "What Happens Here Stays Here." The marketing campaign, launched in 2003, became something of a cultural phenomenon that helped lift the number of visitors to the city to nearly 39 million people in 2006 from 35 million in 2002.

Now, the gambling mecca's marketers are attempting to mess with their own success. Next week, Las Vegas will unveil a new catch phrase and marketing campaign -- titled "Your Vegas Is Showing" -- that confronts a new reality: Las Vegas needs more tourists.

Raise your hand if the first thing you thought of when you read that slogan was the classic fourth-grade witticism, "Your epidermis is showing!" (In Las Vegas, that slogan would also work.)

The new campaign is meant to complement, not replace, the much-better-known "What Happens Here Stays Here" ads, which launched in 2003. "Your Las Vegas" is aimed at a slightly different audience, according to the WSJ's Tamara Audi:

Research has long shown that people behave differently in Vegas, allowing themselves the money and permission to do things they would never do at home, marketers say.

But "people also consume differently" when they come to Las Vegas, says Billy Vassiliadis, chief executive of R&R Partners, which developed the new campaign as well as the "What Happens Here" ads. "It is the case that a very fixed-budget young couple from Des Moines may buy a Prada scarf in Vegas. They won't do it anywhere else, but they'll do it in Vegas."

One of the spots, "Alibi," has already spawned a parody.

The best city slogan of all belongs not to a city but to the District of Columbia. Hats off to former Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who in 2000 coined "Taxation Without Representation." Unlike the official slogan, "The American Experience" (bo-ring), Williams's justifiable dig actually appears on District license plates.

Read my previous posts about city slogans here and here.

(Hat tip to Our Bold Hero for the Mpls-St. Paul story.)

Crying Time

Anthropologist Grant McCracken writes about brands and business at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, an awkwardly titled but highly readable blog that's the latest addition to my blogroll. (Hat tip: Sara Winge.) The first post I read there, on brand names like Firefox and Fire Eagle, expanded my awareness of mythical archetypes in branding. More recently McCracken wrote an appreciation of the current Kleenex ad campaign--the one that urges you to "let it out" and have a good cry. In the ads, people sit on a blue couch and weep, and not always from joy.

McCracken writes:

Now, this is the last place you would expect a brand to play. Big emotions? In public? People losing control of the feelings? In public?

Something in the culture of marketing balks at this. Emotions in advertising were supposed to be upbeat, cheery, and peppy.  That's why we have been forced suffer all that "fun in the sun" advertising. Addled icons like The Doublemint Twins, the forced good humor of a family drive to Knott's Landing¹, the spectacular gratitude that came from discovering just how much fun to operate a George Foreman grill, these were the emotional orthodoxies of the advertising world.  Negative emotions were forbidden.  The culture created by capitalism was thin and risible. 

Plus, something in the culture of marketing balked at associating the brand with something it couldn't "own." What marketers really wanted was the Unique Selling Proposition, the one functional utility the brand possessed over all others. People crying in public? Who could own this?

Here's his conclusion:

The fact that "let it out" appears in this campaign tells us that marketing is becoming a little more anthropological.  Brands are listening to their publics more closely. They are taking in aspects of the human experience more broadly. They are playing back things that have a little more narrative or at least dramatic oomph. They are now prepared to send their brands up the value hierarchy. They are making themselves partners to larger, worthier undertakings than fun in the sun.

Well, maybe. There's this one little thing, which irks me as much as it does McCracken: Kimberly-Clark, Kleenex's parent company, has applied for a trademark for the phrase "let it out." And they make sure you know about it. That TM symbol is all over the Let It Out website.

It's enough to make you cry. Or, as McCracken puts it:

When you seek to make cultural meanings part of the brand proposition, you are a guest in someone's house.  The moment you start stuffing the silver into your pockets, that's when we're going to ask you to leave.

Here's something interesting, though. There's a Let It Out corporate blog on the Kleenex site; its anonymous author maintains a relentlessly chirpy tone --"I have stopped making resolutions. Instead I choose a theme word for the year"--and the text is littered with TM symbols. Yet something very different is going on in the readers' comments, whose tags include "deppression [sic]," "bewildered," "death," "scary," "bullys [sic]," and "sadness and deciet [sic]." Kleenex encouraged them to Let It Out, and by God, they did. Very moving, even heartbreaking at times.

Kleenex would probably like you to Make It All Go Away by ordering a personalized Kleenex Oval box. $4.99 (each) plus shipping.

Image: 1950s Kleenex ad, via Life Is Marketing.

___

¹ Sic. I'm pretty sure he means Knott's Berry Farm.

Shatner in Esperanto

John McGrath posts at Errata:

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto.

I've been fascinated by Esperanto, the international language that was supposed to bring about world peace and harmony, since I first learned about it as a child. Isn't it lovely that "Esperanto" means "one who hopes"? And isn't it poignant that the language, invented in 1887 by a Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-Jewish opthalmologist named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, still has, according to Wikipedia anyway, "between 100,000 and 2 million speakers," including "approximately a thousand native speakers"? (Forget Shatner: don't you wonder what Esperanto baby talk sounds like?)

I used to have an insurance-company client in Emeryville, a tiny enclave between Oakland and Berkeley, whose offices shared building space with Esperanto-USA (formerly the Esperanto League of North America, which had a ring of quaint subversion that the new name sadly lacks). I kept meaning to drop by and say Salut! but never did. I have, however, slipped Esperanto words into naming lists on more than one occasion. So far, no client has accepted the challenge.

More about Esperanto--"the international language that works!"--here, here, and here. Sonja's English-Esperanto Dictionary--a highly arbitrary compilation that includes translations of "wapiti" and "sainfoin" (what-what?) but not of "sharp," "bright," or "happy"-- has a nifty "ten random words" feature, including--just now--"squint (partly close eyes) duone fermi la okulojn."