Fritinancy

May linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.

It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner. 

September linkfest

“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)

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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)

Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).

December linkfest

It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel linky.

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New York-based creative director Lukas Weber turned some familiar online abbreviations – LOL, ROFL, BTW, and more – into familiar-looking logos. (Via Brand New blog)

 

 

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“An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography.” (Emblemetric)

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Stan Freberg, 1926-2015

Stan Freberg, a man of myriad talents who was often called “the father of funny advertising,” died Tuesday in Santa Monica. He was 88.

Freberg was born in Pasadena and grew up in Los Angeles; he turned down scholarships to Stanford University and the University of Redlands in order to pursue a career in radio. He became a successful comedian and a voice actor in cartoons—his was the voice of the beaver in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp—but it’s as rule-breaking advertising copywriter that I choose to remember him.

According to the New York Times obituary, Freberg went into advertising “because he considered most commercials moronic.” In 1957, after the CBS Radio Network canceled “The Stan Freberg Show” after just 15 weeks, Freberg formed his own ad-production company, which he called Freberg Ltd. (but not very). His motto, according to the Los Angeles Times obituary, was Ars gratia pecuniae: “Art for money’s sake.” He “set the standard for humor in advertising,” according to a tribute in Advertising Age: his work included campaigns for Chun King, Jeno’s Pizza, Sunsweet prunes (one of his prune ads starred Ray Bradbury, the science-fiction writer), Contadina tomato paste (“Who puts eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can? You know who. You know who. You know who”), and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Freberg’s copy wasn’t just funny; it was subversive. He “used humor to declare war on postwar advertising,” writes the New York Times’s Douglas Martin: “Mr. Freberg even committed, eagerly, the ad industry’s greatest heresy: lampooning the deficiencies of a paying client’s own products.”

When he couldn’t get a paying client to underwrite his heresies, he went indie. His 1958 comedy single, “Green Chri$tma$” hardly seems dated today, nearly half a century later:

Deck the halls with advertising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
’Tis the time for merchandising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
Profit never needs a reason!
Fa-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la!
Get the money, it’s the season!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!

Listen to the whole “Green Chri$tma$” recording. 

A few more Freberg links:

“Who Listens to Radio?” (1965)

“Elderly Man River” (1957)

“Take an Indian to Lunch” (1961)

“St. George and the Dragonet” (1953 parody of “Dragnet”)

A tribute from NPR that includes a sketch Freberg did with Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, “Le Show”).

 

Judy Protas, 1922-2014

Judy Protas may have been famous only within the insular world of New York advertising. But some of the ads she wrote, including the 20th-century classic “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” have been been famous across the country for more than half a century.

Ms. Protas, a retired executive at New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, died January 7 at 91. Margalit Fox wrote the obituary for the New York Times, which I commend to you.

Here’s Fox on the Levy’s campaign:

Though its evocative tagline is often credited to William Bernbach, a founder of DDB, or to Phyllis Robinson, the agency’s chief copywriter, period newspaper accounts and contemporary archival sources make clear that the actual writing fell to Ms. Protas, who, working quietly and out of the limelight, set down those dozen durable words.

We didn’t have Levy’s in California, so this may have been the first Judy Protas ad I ever saw:

The walls of the mezzanine of the Ohrbach’s store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles were decorated with ads like this one, which was far from current by the time I laid eyes on it. (The store, part of a New York-based chain, closed in 1987.) I remember my bemusement—a talking cat? in a fancy hat? with a cigarette holder?—and my delightthat this discount retailer valued advertisements highly enough to treat them as art. (Yes, I was an ad nerd even as a child.)

“Ohrbach’s … wanted to disabuse consumers of the notion that discount equaled déclassé,” writes Fox:

Beneath the headline — “I Found Out About Joan” — Ms. Protas’s copy went on, cattily, to describe the impecunious Joan’s pretensions to wealth before conceding, “She does dress divinely,” and concluding, “I just happened to be going her way and I saw Joan come out of Ohrbach’s!”

Protas also wrote the lyrics to the Cracker Jack jingle, “which in full (‘lip-smackin’, whip-crackin’, paddy-whackin’, knickin’-knackin’, silver-rackin’, scoundrel-whackin’, cracker-jackin’ Cracker Jack’) has the trochaic rush of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song,” writes the inimitable Fox.

The career of Judy Protas serves as a reminder that not all Mad Men from advertising’s golden age were men. For further proof, see my post about Lois Wyse, who coined the Smucker’s slogan; and my Visual Thesaurus column about “you deserve it” slogans, which includes the story of how Ilon Specht came up with the long-lasting L’Oreal slogan “Because I’m Worth It.”

Read more about the Levy’s Rye Bread ad campaign at Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog.

Cal Worthington, 1920-2013

If you lived in California between the 1950s and the 1980s, there was no escaping the TV commercials of Cal Worthington, the Oklahoma-born grade-school dropout who turned a single Hudson dealership in Huntington Park (Los Angeles County) into an automotive empire. At one point, in the 1960s, Worthington was the top-selling Dodge dealer in the United States. But it was those TV ads—90 seconds long, cheesy even for their era, but impossible to forget—that made Cal Worthington a household name. Each ad featured a jingle set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”; the verse varied, but the relentless refrain never changed:

If you need a better car, go see Cal
For the best deal by far, go see Cal
If you want your payments low
If you want to save some dough
Go see Cal
Go see Cal
Go see Cal

 

 

 

“It ain’t Shakespeare,” the Los Angeles Times’s David Lazarus wrote yesterday in an appreciation. “But then again, Shakespeare wasn't hell-bent on moving inventory off the lot.”

Worthington died Sunday at his ranch in Orland (Glenn County), California. He was 92.

Cal Worthington “deserves to be included among the greats of TV pitchmen,” Lazarus wrote:

I’d put him right up there with Ron Popeil of Veg-O-Matic fame (“It slices! It dices!”) and Billy Mays (“That's the power of OxiClean!”).

I’d even put Worthington alongside the great Ed Valenti, the genius behind Ginsu knives and the phrases “But wait! There's more!” and “Now how much would you pay?”

Not only did Cal Worthington have the perfect pitch, he was inadvertently blessed with the perfect pitchman’s name. “Cal” suggested California—although he had dealerships in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Alaska, California was always Worthington’s home base. His surname suggested “get your money’s worth.” And the name of his “dog” Spot—sometimes a hippo, a lion, or gorilla, but never a dog—seems in retrospect to be a meta-reference to TV ad spots. (Worthington eventually created his own ad agency, Spot Advertising.)

Yes, Cal Worthington was his real name, shortened from Calvin Coolidge Worthington. He honored his namesake, that government-hating public servant, by being a model entrepreneur, a poster boy for bootstrapped individualism. But, as William Grimes notes in his New York Times obituary, Worthington in fact got his first real start in the working world through a government program: FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

True, he didn’t have the best relationship with regulators: he was sued twice by the state of California for deceptive advertising. (Both cases were settled without an admission of guilt.) But deception was, after all, his game: he always appeared to love the flim-flammery of advertising more than the actual selling of product. “I never much liked the car business,” he told an interviewer in 2007. In fact, he never owned a car.

TV ads today have shorter spans (15 seconds is the norm) and more sophisticated techniques than they did in Cal Worthington’s heyday. But for sheer memorability, you can’t beat those “Go See Cal” ads. Are they the antecedent of “Better Call Saul” on AMC’s “Breaking Bad”? I wouldn’t bet against it.

RIP OMG

Two moments of silence, if you please.

Obit #1: FierceCable, July 23, 2013.

Cablevision Shutting Down OMGFAST Wireless Broadband Service

Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) said Tuesday that it is shutting down its OMGFAST wireless broadband service in Florida next month. …

“OMGFAST will be discontinuing its voice and broadband services.  We are in the process of notifying existing customers so they can identify alternative services,” Cablevision told FierceCable in a statement late Tuesday. While Cablevision didn't announce a specific shutdown date for OMGFAST, a recorded message on its customer service line Tuesday said that service in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and 10 other cities would be discontinued on Aug. 19.

(Via my brother Michael the cable maven.)

 

Obit #2: TechCrunch, August 5, 2013.

OMGPOP Team Tried to Buy Back Its Site, but Zynga Killed It Instead

OMGPOP almost got an extra life, but Zynga said ‘game over’. Zynga just finalized plans to shut down OMGPOP, the game developer of Draw My Thing it acquired for $200 million in March 2012.  But multiple sources familiar with Zynga tell TechCrunch the OMGPOP team was in direct contact with Zynga leadership in an attempt to buy back the site or continue operating it, yet Zynga refused.

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Word of the Week: Cucoloris

Cucoloris: A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface. (Source: Idiom Savant: Slang As It Is Slung.) Also spelled cucaloris, kookaloris, kukaloris, cookaloris, cucalorus, etc. Shortened to cookie, kook, or cuke. Alternate names: gobo, ulcer, dapple sheet.

 

Wooden cucoloris, B&H Photo and Video, New York.

 

The film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, included kookalouris in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, published in 1994. From his entry:

Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.

(Read more of Ebert’s movie tropes, including Inevitable Sister, Mid-Wife Crisis, Wunza Movies, and “Fruit Cart!”, in an excerpt published in the Visual Thesaurus. And scroll down for more on Ebert.)

It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.

“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”

Barrett’s etymological note for the cookie entry doesn’t mention Cukor, but it doesn’t reach any other satisfying conclusions, either:

A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.

* The word “cucaloris” comes from the Greek for shadow play.» —by Ivan Curry Directing & Producing for Television Nov. 29, 2001.

Nor is there evidence to support the assertion in TV Tropes:

The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.

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A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.

Michael Cronan, 1951–2013

Many of us who work in branding are mourning the death of Michael Cronan on January 1. Cronan, who lived and worked in Berkeley, was an artist, graphic designer, product developer, brand strategist, and teacher. With his wife and creative partner, Karin Hibma, he also created names for many companies and products, most notably TiVo and Kindle. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years ago.

I met Michael Cronan a couple of times over the years and was impressed by the breadth of his skills – he truly merited that overused term “Renaissance man” – and his generous, thoughtful manner. I wrote in 2008 about how Cronan named Kindle.

In 2009, Steve Rubenstein wrote a more detailed profile of Cronan for the San Francisco Chronicle, which I recommend to you. It opens with Cronan and Hibma noodling around with Scrabble tiles, looking for promising combinations. Dealing with clients, Cronan told Rubenstein, is “at least as tricky” as dealing with Scrabble tiles. “Very few clients have any idea what they’re asking for,” Cronan said. “They need a name and a logo and, to them, it’s like they need a loading dock or an actuarial table.”

But it’s so much more, as this passage from the article reveals:

The creation of TiVo is ancient history in the advertising racket, Cronan said, but the story bears repeating. Cronan and Hibma held a half dozen meetings in Silicon Valley with the manufacturer, hashing out possible names for the device. At the time, a competitor was marketing a similar gizmo, called Replay, and Cronan needed something better.

TiVo, Cronan knew, was the right thing to call the device, even though its manufacturer was more impressed with some other choices that Cronan was kicking around: Lasso and Bongo. Lasso was a contender, Cronan said, because the device lassos TV programs the way a cowboy lassos cattle. And Bongo was a possibility because the gizmo had two round things on top, like bongo drums. But both of those names, Cronan felt, were lousy. In all, Cronan recalled, the designers were considering no fewer than 800 names for the product.

None said television as well as TiVo did, Cronan argued. And with its capitalized V in the middle, it sounded revolutionary as all get-out. After Cronan, also an award-winning graphic designer, came up with the logo for the product - that smiling, walking television with the rabbit ears - Replay never knew what hit it.

For more about Cronan and Hibma’s approach to the naming process, read this Q&A on the Wordnik blog, published just over a month ago.

Michael Cronan’s life and work were an inspiration to all of us who build brands. His death is a huge loss.

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)