Fritinancy

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:

Unaccountable

Capital One Bank has taken over the Montgomery St. BART station with its campaign for “new-school” banking, which involves some infinitesimal interest rate paid on savings accounts. I almost missed my train while I pondered a couple of the ads.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember (or imagine) how Babylonians did their banking. Did the Code of Hammurabi cover direct deposits? Did the whole system collapse under the weight of all those gold shekels? And how do Iraqis—modern-day Babylonians, more or less—feel about this slur against their ancient homeland?

(On Twitter, Trochee—linguist Jeremy Kahn—suggested that the ad made sense “because cuneiform banking is so 1500 B.C.” And Chrys—another linguist—wrote, “Maybe they want you to walk like an Egyptian?” Hmm. I’ve always liked that song.)

Then there was this:

Stumped again! Is Capital One dissing the First Thanksgiving Pilgrims, with their white collars and buckled shoes and muskets? Did they even have banks? (Trochee again: “The Pilgrims were notorious for their proscription of usury. No wonder C1 doesn’t like them.”)

But maybe Capital One was thinking of different pilgrims—from the Canterbury Tales, perhaps? The Summoner’s Tale had something to do with charitable gifts, if memory serves. No? Then how about pilgrims to Mecca? Nope: Islam prohibits interest on loans. Well then, do you suppose CapOne is gunning for Pilgrim Bank?

(On Twitter, Hubbit wrote: “Imagine John Wayne pitching that . . . ‘Quit banking like a pilgrim, pilgrim!’”)

In the TV version of the “pilgrim” ad, actor Jerry Stiller (who played George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld) harangues a crowd. I couldn’t find this ad online, but I did find older Capital One TV spots featuring Visigoths and Vikings. What any of these folks have to do with Capital One’s tagline—“What’s in Your Wallet?”—is a mystery to me.

So I’m still clueless. And I have another question: Just how do you write a capital one, anyway?

April Linkfest

I thought I knew a lot about tampon ads, but I'd never considered their similarity to cigarette ads. Allow former "Colbert Report" producer Allison Silverman to enlighten you as well, via this hilarious slide show. (Slate)

A roundup of recent bank and credit-union name changes. Yep, we won't shed many tears over CUMCO. (The Financial Brand)

Who's afraid of the trademark police? Recently, a surprising number of big companies. (CatchThis)

We've had staycations, mancations, and furcations. Now there's nakation (or nacation), the "clothing-optional" getaway. Not to be confused with naycation, the just-say-no variation. (Mr. Verb)

Feel like a schmendrick because you don't know bupkes about the mamaloshen? Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and How to Be a Mentsh and Not a Shmuck, patiently answers readers' questions about Yiddish. (Schott's Vocab, Part 1 and Part 2)

From another corner of the linguasphere, behold the chola makeup tutorial by Baby Smiley, included here because of its repeated use of "eyebrowns" (as in "You gotta make sure that your eyebrowns scream bitch!").* "Eyebrowns" is a well-documented eggcorn with about 43,000 Google hits and an entry in the Eggcorn Forum.

Viewer advisory: Extreme cosmetics, casual profanity, and mock mayhem.

Many thanks to style (and swearing) maven Wendy Brandes, who posted the video on her blog.

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* OK, OK. I included it because it's hilarious.

Think Twice

And then think some more.

A spread from Saks Fifth Avenue's new "Think About It" campaign.

 

 

Bare Escentuals' "Rethink What Matters" campaign (cover of online brochure).

 

Bare Escentuals, Powell Street BART station, San Francisco (station domination). 

 
Think Mutual Bank, Minnesota.

 

 

Classic IBM slogan created by company founder Thomas Watson, rendered in many languages.

 

 

 

                                                     Cover of IBM Think book.

 

Volkswagen "Think Small" ad, 1962, created by DDB.

All together now:

Brands of the Year: Fritinancy Edition

The headlines this year were full of failing or dead brands, from Circuit City and Max Factor to Pontiac and Saturn. (For more about eight major brand failures, see CNN Money's wrap-up.) And let's have several mournful moments of silence for the defunct newspapers and magazines—the Rocky Mountain News, Gourmet, I.D., and many others.

But my own Brands of the Year list isn't a eulogy; it's a salute to brands that survived (sometimes despite serious damage) and made us look, talk, and think.

For a longer view, see my Brands of the Decade: 2000-2009 post.

In alphabetical order: