Fritinancy

New work: CIMA

The beauty-education industry serves a diverse, mostly female population of instructors, students, and beauty-school owners. Many students come to beauty-school programs with only a high school degree; instructors may have community-college backgrounds or four-year degrees; owners usually have a bachelor’s degree.

That educational diversity was one of my challenges when I was asked by Milady, a leader in beauty education and certification, to name the company’s new digital learning system. A second challenge: communicating “innovation.” Milady is well established and respected—it’s an industry pioneer—but not as closely associated with technological advances as some of its younger competitors.

Meet CIMA, a name to position Milady for a dynamic future while honoring the company’s heritage.

 

 

Stop naming buildings after people

The San Francisco Board of Education wants to dename schools named for Abraham Lincoln, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Washington, and other people. I think they should go even further. Read my latest post for Medium.

P.S. If you like the story, please “clap” for it. You can clap up to 50 times per Medium story. Claps translate into modest payouts for authors.

July linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous. Duchess Goldblatt—Her Grace or DG to her thousands of Twitter followers, myself included—has been an indelible, wholly invented presence on Twitter for some eight years. Her avatar is a 1633 portrait by Frans Hals, and her distinctive voice—firm yet loving, barmy yet authoritative, warm yet tinged with acid—has inspired endless speculation about her “real” identity. You won’t learn that secret from this memoir, but you will learn how the anonymous author (now a woman of perhaps middle age) came to create her, during a terrible period in her life during which she lost her marriage, her house, her job, and most of her friends. The Duchess became her 81-year-old alter ego: an escape from loneliness and an outlet for her considerable writing talent. The book combines memoir with selected DG tweets, and if you choose the audiobook—try your local library system—you’ll enjoy not just the primary narration by Gabra Zackman but also the wonderful actress J. Smith Cameron reading the tweets and singer/songwriter/actor Lyle Lovett reading the Lyle Lovett parts. (Lovett and Her Grace have a mutual admiration society, and if only DG would deign to follow me back on Twitter we could make it a threesome.)

 

Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.

— Duchess Goldblatt (@duchessgoldblat) December 5, 2017

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Remember when the owner of that professional football team in Washington, DC, said he would NEVER change the team’s name? “Daniel Snyder surely meant NEVER to mean forever,” writes trademark lawyer Steven Baird in Duets Blog, “but in 2013, he could not have foreseen how quickly the world has changed over the last six weeks.” A thorough review of what led up to Snyder’s promised “thorough review of the offending team name.

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Word of the week: No-platform

 

If you’ve followed college controversies over the last couple of years, you’ve heard about microagressions and safe spaces, both of which were on my 2015 Words of the Year list (and the lists of many other people). Both of those terms arose out of 1970s New Left movements in the U.S. Now comes no-platform, a British import that’s the latest vogue word among politically aware college students.

The verb no-platform, according to the Oxford Dictionaries entry, means to prevent someone whose views are regarded as unacceptable or offensive “from contributing to a public debate or meeting, especially one at which they had originally been invited to speak.” The entry’s example sentences: “Dozens of other speakers have been no-platformed because they hold non-leftist opinions”; “If we want to debate the limits of free speech within the law we can't really do that consistently by no-platforming extremists.”

 

Via The Rebel (Canada), February 21, 2016: “‘No-platforming’ is the new college campus craze!”

Back to (brand) school

Welcome, students! Here’s your curriculum for the semester:

 

Anthropologie

Course description: “Founded in Wayne, Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1992, Anthropologie remains a destination for women wanting a curated mix of clothing, accessories, gifts and home décor that reflects their personal style and fuels their lives' passions, from fashion to art to entertaining.”

Extra credit: Anthropologie has a charitable division called Philanthropie.

 

Checknology

Course description: “Get connected today and take control of your money like never before.”

Instructor: Central Bank, Edmond, Oklahoma.

New work: “Make It Meaningful”

The Athenian School, a small, private, progressive institution for grades 6 through 12 in Danville, California, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015. Simultaneously, it launched a $12 million capital campaign comprising three major facility improvements. I was brought in to develop a themeline for the campaign, which will span the 2016-2017 academic year and will be aimed at the school’s internal community, chiefly parents, grandparents, and alumni. The themeline needed to be appropriate for web, print, and video; and it needed to be flexible, even modular.

May linkfest

The official Trump typeface – as seen on hotels, airplanes, and campaign logo (but not on the failed steaks, wine, or university) – is Akzidenz Grotesk.

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Budweiser has announced that it’s rebranding its beer “America” for the duration of the U.S. election season. It’s not the first America-first stunt the brewery has pulled, notes Mark Wilson in Fast Co Design: previous summer-only editions have featured the Statue of Liberty and the American flag. But this bit of revisionism is especially thorough: “Almost every bit of type on the Budweiser label has been scrubbed away by Easter Egg patriotism, with new text citing the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star Spangled Banner, and America the Beautiful—all rendered in newly developed hand lettering, inspired by Budweiser’s archives.” For what it’s worth, Budweiser’s parent company, InBev, is headquartered in Belgium and Brazil.

 

Like Minded

I was surprised to see “Great minds like a think” headlining One Day University’s full-page ad in the New York Times Sunday Review of June 22:

 

 

A clever play on “great minds think alike,” right? Too bad that particular witticism has been associated with The Economist for more than a quarter-century.

 

20" x 14" poster, $224 framed, at the Economist store.

 

The line was created by the UK’s biggest ad agency, Abbott Mead Vickers (now part of BBDO), for a much-lauded campaign that began in the mid-1980s and ran for at least 20 years. (It may still be running somewhere.) Other word-playful lines in the campaign included “Trump Donald,” “Pressure peers,” and “Think someone under the table.” (See Jarrett Lambert’s Pinterest board of Economist ads.)

In appropriating the “great minds” line, One Day University may have violated copyright law, but not trademark. As far as I can tell, The Economist doesn’t have trademark protection for the tagline. [UPDATE: But see comment below from Jessica, a trademark lawyer.]

Nevertheless, when a line is that distinctive, and that closely associated with a single globally recognized company (founded 1843), it seems shabby, derivative, and even larcenous when another advertiser “borrows” it.

This isn’t the first time The Economist’s famous ads have been plagiarized. Back in 2003, the British budget airline easyJet ran ads with a quote from “George Smith, management trainee, aged 47”:

Blurry image via The Guardian, April 14, 2003.

 

The Economist was not amused.

 

 

From the Guardian article:

The Economist has complained to the advertising watchdog about Easyjet, accusing the budget airline of copying its hugely successful black-on-red advertising campaign. …

The Economist is claiming the advert breaches the copyright on its famous “management trainee” poster campaign, which ran in the mind-1980s [sic] and was voted among the top 10 posters of the century by Campaign magazine.

EasyJet may have assumed it was in the clear because it changed the verb tense and “trainee” age in the copy. One Day University, in contrast, didn’t make even the feeblest attempt at originality. It may have another think coming.

More Heroics

I’ve been tracking the (over)use of “hero” in branding for about a year. I rounded up my findings for a Visual Thesaurus column last September on “‘Hero’ Worship,” but the “hero” pileup continues, as these recent sightings indicate:

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Discovery Communications’ Military Channel rebranded last week as the American Heroes Channel. (Whoops—“not a rebrand but a broadening,” said group president Henry Schleiff.) “American Heroes Channel expands on the American Heroes Channel’s [sic] promise to honor the great defenders of our freedom, while providing a rare glimpse into major events that shaped our world and the trailblazers and unexpected advocates who made a difference,” according to a press release.

All that, plus a “What Gun Are You?” quiz.

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Draper University of Heroes is an unaccredited institution whose curriculum does not, you may surprised to hear, include CPR, firefighting, or hostage negotiations. Rather, students learn “media training,” “branding,” “fundraising,” and “innovation.”

From the home page:

Located in Silicon Valley, Draper University of Heroes is the brainchild of free-spirited venture capitalist Tim Draper, aka “The Riskmaster”. We are an unconventional world-class residential and online school for the brightest young entrepreneurs from around the world. We built this school because the world needs more heroes.

Tim Draper, a founder of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is on the record as saying he modeled Draper U after Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series. He even borrowed the lightning-bolt motif for his logo.

No Quidditch amid the course offerings, although one enterprising student boasted to TechCrunch that he was selling sex toys as part of a class assignment.

Meanwhile, Tim Draper was lately in the news because of his ballot initiative to split California into six states.

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Finally, if you watched last Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast you were assailed with the show’s theme, “A Celebration of Movie Heroes.” The definition of “hero” was a little elastic, encompassing Superman, Tom Joad, Karen Silkwood, and—that pint-size wizard again!—Harry Potter. After the ritual In Memoriam montage Bette Midler sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings”; “Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” never sounded more sycophantic than when accompanied by a portrait of “Julian Meyers, publicist.” And best-actor winner Matthew McConaughey told the audience that his hero is “myself, ten years from now.”

Discover Your X

Henry Alpert of Action Copy emailed to alert me about a mini-trend in commercial calls to action: Discover your X, in which X is some non-noun pressed into nounish service.

Henry’s first example:

“Discover your Interesting.”

Zite is an app that “delivers your personal slice of the Zeitgeist.” (Yes, Zite comes from Zeitgeist.) It’s hard to tell whether interesting is capitalized because it’s meant to be a proper noun or because the proofreading was haphazard.

Henry’s second example:

“Discover your Why.”

 

 

The slogan appears on an online-education site whose name may be Start with Why (the URL), Inspire Action (the home-page headline), Why University (one of the things being sold) or Simon Sinek (the name of the developer). Honestly, the site makes it really challenging to find your What.

Elsewhere on the site we see “Learn your Why.”

And also “Share the Why,” “Clarify your Why,” and “Articulate your Hows.”

Unlike interesting, why is legitimately a noun from time to time (“the hows and whys of logo design”), as well as an adverb, a conjunction, and an interjection.

A third example of the trend appeared in my in-box earlier this week: “Find your inner fabulous!”

 

HerRoom turns underwear into a verb (I think) and fabulous into a noun.

Besides the discover/find trope and the anthimeria—the use of a word outside its customary part of speech—the theme here is personalization: it’s your why, your interesting, your inner fabulous. This is a trend of its own, one I first wrote about in 2009 (“But Enough About Me”). In 2010 I devoted a Visual Thesaurus column to the subject (“The You Decade”). Back in 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote much more elegantly about it for Slate; his essay is also titled “The You Decade.” Hitchens wrote:

Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your  side. The ways in which the corporation has your  needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your  views.

Almost six years later, the political is, if anything, even more personal. You may not have much influence on climate change or gun violence, but hey—you can own “interesting.” If you can find it, that is.