Fritinancy

Corona reads

Like the rest of the Bay Area, I’m sheltering in place, waiting out the coronavirus crisis. But I’m still open for business: in fact, I’ve had a couple of small naming jobs this week. Under SIP, we’re still allowed to go outside for essential errands and exercise, and I’ve been taking full advantage (and taking photos). I intend to continue publishing here once or twice a week, and would be interested to know what you’d like to read about.

In the meantime, here are some things I found interesting.

Name in the wild: Blunts+Moore

Now that the sale, possession, and use of recreational cannabis have been legal in California for a full year, what’s happening with weed branding? Well, cannabis ads are still outlawed on San Francisco’s Muni buses, streetcars, and cable cars. On the other hand, I’ve been noticing a lot of outdoor advertising in strategic locations around the Bay Area: big, bold billboards near freeway on-ramps and bridges. Some are for companies that were founded before full legalization took effect on January 1, 2018, like Eaze (a delivery service) and Weedmaps (“a community where businesses and consumers can search and discover cannabis products, become educated on all things cannabis, review cannabis businesses and connect with other like-minded users”).

But one new brand caught my attention when I saw it on a billboard on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge: Blunts+Moore. Merely descriptive was my first thought. After all, blunt has been a slang term for “marijuana cigarette” for at least 30 years; the Random House Dictionary of Historical Slang connects it to Phillies Blunt*, a trademark in use since 1958 for a brand of inexpensive cigars.

But wait: there’s more. And also Moore.

Word of the week: White-caller crime

The first incident that made national headlines occurred right here in Oakland, directly across Lake Merritt from where I live. On April 29, a white woman later identified as Jennifer Schulte made a 911 call to report that two African American men were barbecuing in an area not designated for charcoal grills. A woman named Michelle Snider filmed the call on her own phone; the video, posted to YouTube, has attracted more than three million views. Also viral: the “BBQ Becky” meme.*

“BBQ Becky” on her phone, via BBC.

 

Acronyms on the menu

Two signs in two restaurants, both in my general neighborhood in Oakland.

1. Choriz-O-M-G at Chipotle on Lakeshore Avenue.

 

Chipotle is also running a “BOGO” promotion – Buy One, Get One –for active, reserve, and retired members of the armed services.

For other commercial uses of OMG, see my 2012 post.

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

Word of the week: Motto

Motto: A brief statement that expresses a goal, ideal, or principle. From the Italian motto, “a saying or legend attached to a heraldic design,” and ultimately from Latin muttum (“grunt” or “word”). Related to French mot (“word”) and English mutter (“to mumble”).

I’ve written so much and for so long about slogans and taglines that I was surprised to find that I’d never written about the meaning and uses of motto. I’ll get to the distinctions between those words – motto, slogan, and tagline – in a bit. First, though, the reason to talk about motto this week.

This was never supposed to happen

And yet, somehow, it did.

Outdoor ad for Lyft. Harrison between 8th and 9th streets, San Francisco, January 30, 2016.

Hella to Pay

In the Bay Area—and maybe where you live, too—“hella” is hella ubiquitous. I’ve spotted it three times recently in some unexpected contexts.

Signs of Concern

I enjoy a little word puzzle as much as, or maybe more than, the next public-transit user. But two Bay Area bus-shelter signs, both for worthy nonprofit organizations, go beyond puzzling to confounding.

Here’s the first one:

 

SF Environment, Fillmore Avenue, San Francisco, April 26, 2015.

 

 

“Do You Really Want the City 7 x 7 x 7?” asks this poster. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, trying to stitch together “Do you really want the city” and “7 x 7 x 7.”  What could it possibly mean?

Mull it over while I show you the other ad.

Siri, Tell Me the Name of the Advertiser

You’re cruising along at 25 mph in Oakland when you glimpse a billboard across the street. You see it for about two seconds, across three lanes of traffic, before you drive by. What registers? What’s being advertised?

 

“Siri, find me a place above 50°.” Broadway near 51st Street.

 

I’ll tell you what I saw: an ad for Siri, the iPhone voice app. Or maybe, on second thought, an ad for kayaks. In, I dunno, Alaska.

It wasn’t until a third and slower drive-by that I caught the much smaller type in the lower right-hand corner: “Real summer. Real close.” And beneath that line, in even smaller type—at last—the name of the advertiser: GoTahoeNorth.com.

In other words, this is the 2014 edition of the you-poor-suffering-San-Franciscans campaign that GoTahoeNorth introduced last year. The first time around, I said I liked the catchy slogan (“Winter, Spring, Winter, Fall”). What went wrong this year? Simple: the agency led us astray by name-checking an unrelated brand. After we see the “Siri” billboard we aren’t thinking about Lake Tahoe, we’re thinking about iPhones.

Moral: It’s not enough to come up with what you think is a clever line. You have to remember the context as well. What works in a static medium like print may not work in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t environment of outdoor advertising. When you’re pitching to a moving target, you need to make sure they see your name, not some other brand’s, writ large.

Tangent: The Tahoe North folks have a harder sell this year, because here in the San Francisco Bay Area we’re enjoying an exceptionally warm summer. Last week daytime temperatures climbed into the 80s in San Francisco, and one overnight low in the middle of the week was the warmest on record for that date—a near-tropical 63°. (It’s more July-typical for San Francisco’s daytime high temperatures to be in the low 60s.)

Here’s an even weirder tidbit. Where I swim in San Francisco Bay, we’ve been recording water temperatures of 66° and 67°, about four degrees above normal. Some veteran bay swimmers have been overheard grumbling that the water’s too damn warm. Not I: after two weeks of 49° water in January, I’m happy to revel in this quasi-Hawaiian treat.

So, Siri, I’m happily staying put. See you next year, when I hope you’ve counseled GoTahoeNorth on a better way to sell its summer weather to us flatlanders.