Fritinancy

Double Take

Ads for doubleTwist, a developer of software that allows synchronizing of media content across multiple platforms, began appearing this week in New York and San Francisco:

 
A BART car? Photo via doubleTwist co-founder Jon Lech Johansen.

This campaign probably won't create the stir that another doubleTwist ad did. In early June, the San Francisco-based company managed to place a banner reading "The Cure for iPhone Envy" on a window next to the entrance to Apple's flagship San Francisco store. (The window belongs to transit agency BART.)

My own double take when I read the June headlines had less to do with Apple getting "pwned" (as TechCrunch put it) and more to do with the doubleTwist name. Back in the First Internet Era, nearly a decade ago, DoubleTwist—with a capital D—was the name of a bioinformatics company that seemed poised to decipher the code of "junk DNA." Like the current doubleTwist, the earlier company was based in the Bay Area— in fact, a flag bearing its double-helix logo fluttered for a while on the serpentine-stone façade of an Art Deco landmark in downtown Oakland, the I. Magnin building.*

What happened? DoubleTwist, which had started its corporate existence as Pangea, filed for an IPO in September 2000 and for trademark protection for the DoubleTwist name in January 2001. Things quickly unraveled. According to Digital Code of Life, a 2004 book about bioinformatics by Glyn Moody, the company's "plans to 'dot-com' itself and to create a Web 'portal' ... were clear warning signals that the company did not have an alternative business plan other than hoping that Net mania would somehow carry it along." In March 2002, the journal Nature reported DoubleTwist's demise.

The media company doubleTwist bought www.doubletwist.com in September 2004, perhaps for a premium price from the previous owners. (Someone owns doubletwist.net, too, but I couldn't track that record in Whois.) The new doubleTwist filed for trademark protection of its name in September 2007.

DoubleTwist was an excellent name for a genomics company; it conjured the double helix and its mysteries without sounding arcane. (In fact, I used to use it as an example of a suggestive—in other words, not undesirably descriptive—name in presentations to naming clients, who invariably loved it.) As the name of a company that allows you to "sync, play, and send" to various media devices, it's acceptable but not a perfect 10: I can't see how "double" or "twist" are operative here.** My guess: the domain was available, it sounded cool, and the company founders jumped on it.

Whatever the story, I have to concede that this is one of the cleverer recent examples of name recycling.
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* Founded in 1876, I. Magnin was once one of the glories of California retail; I still mourn its untimely 1994 death. But that's another story.

** On reflection, maybe "double" could have something to do with "sync" or "back up." But that interpretation requires a bit of, um, twisting.

Guess Who?

Every month brings a new station-domination campaign (yes, that's the official marketing-ese) to San Francisco's underground BART stations. Here's what the Powell Street station looks like right now:

 

Don't bother looking for a brand name; there's none to be seen. So—who's the advertiser?

Revelations and more photos after the jump.

Refreshing

It's called "station domination"--the practice of renting every available surface in one of downtown San Francisco's underground BART stations to a single advertiser. Results have been mixed; I remember entering one station a couple of years ago during the famous Dove Intensive Firming Cream campaign and being surrounded by images of beaming, near-naked, cellulite-free giantesses. Unsettling, it was.

This week, though, the Montgomery Street BART station is dominated by Perrier, the century-old mineral water company that last made significant waves here in the 1980s. Last October the company launched a fizzy new ad campaign that has finally gone subterranean. The copy tweaks the famous Perrier logo and name by substituting English-language adjectives: crazier, flirtier, sassier. It's clever enough on paper, but look at how effective it is on these signs:

That's "Easier" over the escalator, "Speedier" over the stairs.

While you're waiting for your train, you can enjoy the childlike line drawings and verbal humor of the wall posters:

 

Update via MJF: With BART trains in parlous condition, maybe Perrier should add a sign that reads "Filthier."

For those of you of a certain age, the Perrier ads may recall a long-running print ad campaign for Napier costume jewelry. That campaign also played bilingual games with the -ier suffix, as in a 1974 ad currently for sale on eBay:

  Other headlines read "Napier Is Sexier," "Napier Is Earthier," and so on. In this case, the word play was a pronunciation guide, telling us to say NAY-pee-ur. I'm not certain Perrier actually wants us to say man-lee-AY, but maybe we can start something.