When is a billboard not a billboard? When it’s a freakin’ 227-word manifesto – 239 if you include the headline.
“This is our only billboard. We need it to say a lot.” No you don’t.
Yes, I counted the words in this screwy outdoor ad from Public Mobile, a Canadian wireless-telecom company. (I lifted the photo from Tim Nudd’s post on Adweek, which called the ad “clever.” I disagree.)
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“Broadly speaking,” Winston Churchill may or may not have said*, “short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.” With Oath, the name of the new division that will house AOL and Yahoo’s media and business-to-business properties after those two companies merge, parent company Verizon gets a twofer: short and old.
The name was revealed in a cryptic tweet from AOL CEO Time Armstrong on Tuesday afternoon: “Billion+ Customers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” Twitter predictably piled on, not without justification. But I solemnly pledge to give the new name a fair hearing.
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Two huge companies on opposite sides of the globe. Two ad campaigns with ginormous budgets. Two teams of copywriters burning the midnight oil, pushing themselves to be original and authentic and cutting edge.
And powerful, too. Let’s not forget powerful.
Let’s see what they came up with.
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Here’s one of the Verizon “Better Matters” ads currently papering the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco:
“A better network is better.”
“Well, of course better is better,” you may be thinking with a twinge of annoyance. (“Some copywriter got overpaid for that?”) Ah, but there’s more to the slogan than meets the eye.
Continue reading "In the Wild: Adjective Noun Is Adjective" »
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I’m pleased to introduce Mast Mobile, which was named by my company, Wordworking.
Mast is a new kind of mobile-telecommunications platform for businesses and their employees: a carrier, software platform, and device manager all in one. It gives business owners the power to manage productivity, costs, and security, and it allows employees to carry a single device with two numbers, one for personal use and one for business use.
When the co-founders of Mast Mobile—all of whom had extensive experience at large multinational companies—contacted me in January, their company was less than 18 months old and was operating in private beta under the name Grid Mobile. That name had evolved from an early plan to provide mesh networks as overlay on existing mobile networks. Now that the original strategy was no longer central, the founders wanted to replace a name they correctly perceived as having unwelcome connotations of infrastructure and “electrical grid,” and a static rather than dynamic and innovative sound.
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If you needed proof that “ass” and its variants (kick-ass, bad-ass, Big Ass) have become unexceptional in mainstream US advertising, here’s a new Verizon ad that tells customers they can “stop living with half-fast Internet.”
Geddit? “Half-assed,” haha.
Update, December 2014: the video I originally embedded is no longer available, but the campaign continues.
“Don't have a half-fast holiday.”
Via Language Log.The comments are worth reading.
For additional examples of commercial near-profanity, see Booking.com’s “Abso-Booking-Lutely,” Sheets Energy Strips “I Take a Sheet in the Pool,” Peet’s Coffee and Tea’s “Do You Give a Cup?” and Kmart’s “Ship My Pants.”
*
Meanwhile, a new cookbook from Rodale—yes, that Rodale, 84 years old and famous for healthy-living publications like Women’s Health and Prevention—says F-U to innuendo and drives straight into foul territory.
Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook. Tagline: “Eat like you give a fuck.” Via AdFreak.
It’s a real cookbook, and there’s a real trailer for it. As the header warns, the language is “explicit”—and also very funny. The ad team has clearly paid attention to pharmaceutical advertising.
“Consult your doctor or use common fucking sense.”
The Thug Kitchen website minces nectarines but not words.
Hey, you missed a fucking apostrophe there!
I can’t wait to read the review by Cursing Mommy.
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For the record, I am not categorically anti-portmanteau. I think affluenza and gundamentalist are inspired. I admire the speedy, seamless blend of Travelocity. I appreciate Lewis Carroll’s contributions to the genre.
But few commercial portmanteaus rise to those heights. Instead, what we see is a lot of chop-and-jam (or perhaps choja, as the blend trend would have it).
Last year, for example, saw the debut of Burger King’s Satisfries, a combo of “satisfy” and “fries” that satisfied no one. (It doesn’t help that the word sounds almost exactly like “saddest fries.”) Sonic Drive-In tortured phonetics with Spicedictive, a distinctly nonaddictive word. The New York Times devoted many column inches to a bourbon-rye blend called Bourye, which I see as Bour Ye and want to pronounce like “Hear ye, hear ye!”
Also in 2013, Subway introduced the Flatizza (flatbread/pizza), which invites adolescent chortling* about flat tits.
Image via A Walk in the Words, who called Flatizza “a phonetically problematic portmanteau.” Indeed.
And I’m sorry to say that we are far from finished with this tired trend. Today marks the rollout of Framily, from Sprint.
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Two moments of silence, if you please.
Obit #1: FierceCable, July 23, 2013.
Cablevision Shutting Down OMGFAST Wireless Broadband Service
Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) said Tuesday that it is shutting down its OMGFAST wireless broadband service in Florida next month. …
“OMGFAST will be discontinuing its voice and broadband services. We are in the process of notifying existing customers so they can identify alternative services,” Cablevision told FierceCable in a statement late Tuesday. While Cablevision didn't announce a specific shutdown date for OMGFAST, a recorded message on its customer service line Tuesday said that service in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and 10 other cities would be discontinued on Aug. 19.
(Via my brother Michael the cable maven.)
Obit #2: TechCrunch, August 5, 2013.
OMGPOP Team Tried to Buy Back Its Site, but Zynga Killed It Instead
OMGPOP almost got an extra life, but Zynga said ‘game over’. Zynga just finalized plans to shut down OMGPOP, the game developer of Draw My Thing it acquired for $200 million in March 2012. But multiple sources familiar with Zynga tell TechCrunch the OMGPOP team was in direct contact with Zynga leadership in an attempt to buy back the site or continue operating it, yet Zynga refused.
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Earlier this year I wrote about two new and unrelated brands that share a name: Nokia HERE (yes, all shouty like that) and PayPal Here. Now comes word, via Coin Branding of Toronto, that Radio-Canada, the government-owned, Francophone counterpart of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is jumping on the brandwagon with ICI, French for “here.”
“Ici, tout est possible.” Image via Coin blog.
The new name comes from the network’s longtime on-air identification: “Ici, Radio-Canada.” The network’s domain name, currently radio-canada.ca, will change in October to ici.ca.
The announcement “swiftly met widespread condemnation and mockery, especially from those angered over dropping the word Canada,” writes Ian Austen in the New York Times. He adds: “Some online critics, particularly on English-language Web sites, suggested that Quebec separatism was a factor in the new name.”
Coin Branding’s Andris Pone points out that ICI “cannot possibly be a good choice” because the network’s government funding stipulates that programming be “predominantly and distinctively Canadian” and that it be “in English and in French, reflecting the different needs and circumstances of each official language community.” Not only does ICI flout these requirements, the name is also “totally unrelated to the abiding message of the network,” Pone writes.
William Chambers, Radio-Canada’s vice president of brand, communications, and corporate affairs, “said it was all a misunderstanding induced by the network’s ‘enthusiasm’ for its new identity,” according to the Times story. He said the network’s abstract logo – Chambers called it “the gem,” but most people, says the Times, call it “the pizza” – will not change.
Read the French-language press release about the name change.
In other directional naming news, I’m pleased to tell you that, contra Gertrude Stein, there is a ThereThere in Oakland.
In fact, you can buy a poster-size print of that nifty ThereThere ambigram at the Oaklandish retail store.
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