Fritinancy

New writing

If you’ve landed here via search engine, welcome! For the last six months most of my writing has been published on Substack. That’s where you’ll find:

All about Veblen goods (and Thorstein Veblen, for whom they’re named)

Discovering Asian brands at San Francisco’s liveliest shopping center

Critiques of three brand names: Nuvet, TRYP, and Navier

And lots more! Subscribe—it’s free!

I also continue to publish on Medium. Recent stories include:

The triumph of the swears: Why naughty words dominated the Word of the Year vote

It’s been 40 years since Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” ad, and I still haven’t bought a single Apple product

And because squaw is back in the news because Fresno County (California) leaders are refusing to remove the word from a local place name, here’s a gift link to my 2021 story about the valley of the S-word.

You can read all of my Medium stories with an annual membership—just $50—that also gives you access to everything else published on Medium.

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

*

 

New writing on Medium: How Johnnie Walker kept walking

An obituary for Ivan Menezes, CEO of global spirits corporation Diageo, jogged my memory about something I’d written many years ago about Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky brand that Menezes helped revive with the enduring effective “Keep Walking” campaign.

I revisited that campaign—still going strong 24 years after its launch—in my latest story for Medium, “The Man Who Kept Johnnie Walker Walking.” That’s a friend link, so you’ll bypass the paywall; if you’d like to read everything I’ve published on Medium—70 stories so far—as well as all the other Medium stories, here’s a referral link. (I’ll get a percentage of your membership fee—thanks!)

Blog bonus: Here’s a bit of Johnnie Walker history that didn’t make it into my story.

Grimace

I have a confession: I have never eaten at a McDonald’s. Once, many years ago, I ducked into a Mickey D’s in Berkeley to use the restroom, and then ducked right out again. And once when I was babysitting a cranky child I briefly pacified him with a Happy Meal. But I myself have never eaten a Big Mac or a McRib or an Egg McMuffin or even the McDonald’s “salad.” I am, obviously, a Bad American.

I’m not totally ignorant. I’ve watched The Founder, the demi-factual 2016 film about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers, so I’m familiar with the origin story. And I’ve written about “You Deserve a Break Today,” the hugely influential McDonald’s ad campaign that ran from 1971 to 1990.

Like just about everyone, I knew about Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot who first appeared in Washington, DC, in 1963. (He was originally portrayed by Willard Scott, former Bozo the Clown, future Today Show weatherman.) But somehow I’d never, even once, heard of the big purple blob called Grimace, a denizen of McDonaldland who’s celebrating his 52nd birthday this month.

Grimace evolution via McDonald’s Wiki

 

And I might have remained blissfully unaware of Grimace were it not for a June 12 post about Grimace’s birthday on The Impulsive Buy, a blog about fast food and supermarket snacks. To celebrate the occasion, McDonald’s is offering a combo meal consisting of a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a Grimace’s Birthday Shake. The shake, writes TIB correspondent Marvo, “has a delightful blueberry flavor that reminds me of the fruit at the bottom of a blueberry yogurt but a little more intense.”

But enough about food. What’s the Grimace story, and why the name?

New writing on Medium: Is it curtains for the Wienermobile?

Processed-meat maker Oscar Mayer announced last week that its “iconic” Wienermobile—the adjective is apparently compulsory—which has tootled along American streets since 1936, would now be called the Frankmobile, a tribute to the company’s 100% Beef Franks. Say it ain’t so! said a bunch of branding folks of my acquaintance.

But hang on: Is this really a rebrand, or is it just a seasonal stunt? In my latest story for Medium I look at how the (branding) sausage is made. Enjoy, and don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!).

Read You Say Wienermobile, They Say Frankmobile. Let’s Call the Whole Thing ... Publicity?

Blog bonus #1: Wiener literally means “of/from Vienna” (Wien in German), just as frankfurter means “of/from Frankfurt.” If you’re interested in why we call a wiener a hot dog, Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog is the place to go. 

Blog bonus #2: The Oscar Mayer wiener song, accompanied by the Wiener Whistle (now called the Frank Whistle ... at least for a while). The jingle was retired in 2016.

Blog bonus #3: The story behind that other Oscar Mayer jingle, “My Bologna Has a First Name,” as told by former Oscar Mayer marketing VP Jerry Ringlien. Watch all the way to the end to see the original ad.

 

Word of the week: Retrofuturism

Bruce McCall, the Canadian-born author and illustrator whose work adorned 83 New Yorker covers and who was, according to Car and Driver, “one of the funniest men ever to write about cars,” died on May 6, four days shy of his 88th birthday. He had recently completed “Safe Travels,” the gouache illustration that appears on the cover of the New Yorker’s May 15 issue.

McCall’s specialty was “retrofuturism,” a word he claimed to have coined. (The OED awards that honor to a 1988 issue of Inland Architect magazine. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael used “retro-futurist” in a 1986 review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.) As McCall defined it, retrofuturism entails “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow”—in McCall’s case, with sly faux-nostalgia and a keen eye for hucksterism and hyperbole. His first job after dropping out of high school was at a Toronto ad agency, and he later wrote copy for a Detroit agency that represented Chevrolet; he drew on those experiences to concoct automotive inventions with fanciful names like Bulgemobile and Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti Turbo-Hipster. Many of McCall’s delicious, fictitious car promotions originally appeared in the National Lampoon and were later included in The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build. McCall also wrote about his automotive career in a memoir, How Did I Get Here?, which was excerpted—with wonderful illustrations—in the New Yorker.

 

In McCall’s imagining, Bulgemobile models included the Fireblast, the Blastfire, and the Firewood (“For the man who has everything and just needs something to carry it in!”).

New writing on Medium: An F for "effortless"

Effortless style, effortless meditation, effortless cash flow, effortless HR, effortless entertaining, effortless change: If it’s worth doing, we’re being told, it’s worth doing with as little effort as possible.

A small sampling of the dozens of “effortless” brands and book titles that have multiplied over the last 20 or so years

In my latest story for Medium, “Against Effortlessness,” I investigate the buzzword and compare it with “We Try Harder,” Avis’s long-running slogan that made a virtue of effort. And I find evidence that the effortless tide may be turning. Read the story, clap (up to 50 times!) if you like it, and sign up for Medium to read more from me and other writers. It’s worth the effort!

 

New from me on Medium: From Burma-Shave to Burma-Gram

It’s been 60 years since Burma-Shave rhyming ads last entertained and instructed drivers on U.S. highways, but their spirit lives on in a quirky Instagram account I discovered a couple of years ago. In my latest story for Medium, I write about Burma-Gram, which updates the “verse by the side of the road” concept with clever online messages for 21st-century readers.

A famous Burma-Shave rhyming ad: “Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin/ Burma-Shave.” (Via Legends of America)

 

A recent Burma-Gram:

 

Read “Burma-Shave Is Dead. Long Live Burma-Shave,” and be sure to scroll down to the end, where I attempt my own Burma-style rhyme. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!), and if you feel moved to join Medium, here’s my referral link.

*

Blog bonus #1: A 2012 article in Print magazine, “The motion-graphic ads of Burma-Shave, 1927-1963” (the URL calls it “morbid roadside ad poetry”).

Blog bonus #2: Post–Burma-Shave, but long before Burma-Gram, U.S. political campaigns borrowed the roadside-verse format for their own ends. In 2008, Poetry & Popular Culture blogger Mike Chasar wrote about some of those efforts in “Burma-Shave Politics.” 

New from me on Medium: Do we [heart] New York?

Yes, I’ve been MIA this week, but I have an excuse, or at least a story: I’ve been working on a piece for Medium about the new “We ❤️ NYC” campaign, unveiled on March 20.

Read it here: The [Heart] of the Matter.

That’s a friend link that will bypass the paywall; if you’d like to join Medium (so many benefits!), please use this referral link.

And here’s a blog bonus: I spotted this variation on “We ❤️ X” in a San Francisco Muni bus earlier this week.

We ❤️ Muni Operators, with a QR code inside the ❤️

 

Could this be the most productive snowclone in history?

__

Thanks to T. Kent Jones, James I. Bowie, and Erin O’Connor for inspiration and data.

 

Going negative

Is it ever smart to choose a negative tagline? Some brands say “Positively yes!” Discover which ones, and how they went negative, in my latest story for Medium: “The Sneaky Power of a Negative Tagline.” Don’t forget to clap!