No Absoluts?

You think this is a pile-on post but you are mistaken – maybe.

In fact, it’s relatively rare for just one ad to raise such a ruckus. But that is what the Mexico City agency Teran/TWBA has accomplished with this particular execution of the year-old IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD advertising campaign. Unless you live in a hole in the ground or work on Wall Street, you have to be aware of the hell that’s been raised over this ad.

The best tracker of the story – and chief hell-raiser – is Michelle Malkin. Head for her michellemalkin.com website to review the whole tale…the good, the bad and the ugly.

What’s odd is that the goofy (and rather jejune) campaign premiered a year ago, its various executions got a lot of praise – the US TV and print executions came out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York City…and you can review various examples on Duncan’s Print. TBWA Creative Director Rob Smiley said at the time, “As the story unfolds you can expect commentary on topics and ideas big and small, serious and humorous, timeless and of the moment.”

Depending on your POV then, Absolut creative is either cutting edge or overly obvious. I put the “Pregnant Guy” into the latter category but quite a few people loved it, apparently believing that this was a fresh idea.

Yet in a semantic sense, IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD represents a contradiction in terms. Either you drink enough the trademarked vodka to enable yourself to view men as capable of becoming pregnant – or you deny the “absolute” that only females of mammalian species can bear young. That’s not commentary, that’s contradiction.

Interpreting the Mexican Absolut ad offers choices. One, it is about contradiction –Mexico might be better off if its ruler of the moment hadn’t sold a huge portion of the country to the US some 150 years ago.

Two, it’s about guzzling too much vodka – envisioning the country as it used to be takes a bottle or two.

Or three, this is a very funny ad (which it actually is) because Absolut’s world is NEVER about the real world.

Over-reaction to a single ad in a single campaign about a single product may be a fact, but it’s hardly crucial in the life of the world. It’s not as though, as one commentator suggested, Absolut’s agencies created an ad showing a map of “Greater Germany” circa 1942, covering France and Poland. Is it?

PS: I’m sending a note to my Dialogue International contacts in Europe to see if they have any opinions about this nationalistic shouting match. I’ll be interested in their comments, if they choose to share ‘em.

Razoo Up

Razoo is in beta.

I only found out about this from a copyrighted article by Brad Hem in the Houston Chronicle. The company’s called iRazoo.com and “Four Houston entrepreneurs” are credited with launching the search engine they expect to challenge Google and Yahoo.

Click on the site and you’ll get a coming-soon sort of intro, but a nice story with beat-driven Indian music…clapping hands rhythm out the words: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive.”

Like the article says, there are hundreds of smaller search engines in operation beside the Big Guys. What’s special about Razoo? It requires users to log in, which may slow it down. It is points-driven: I have never tried that. Trust in a new search engine is another big factor. Nevertheless, I always enjoy seeing hometown boys make good, even if they aren’t originally from around here.

Such an odd word, razoo; potentially, a great brand name. So I Googled it (well, why not? Razoo.com isn’t working yet). Turns out razoo is Down-Under slang for an imaginary coin of trivial value, the Oz version of a farthing; according to some definers, it’s used only in negative contexts: “Not worth a brass razoo” – though Encarta identifies it as Aussie for a gambling chip.

The latter definition fits this case pretty well. iRazoo is a gamble. Best of luck to ‘em, though.

If it works, you heard it here second.

Old Forester

Is this brand story true? Brown-Forman Distillers Company of Louisville, KY, has been running an advertising campaign for Old Forester, which the company says is “America’s First Bottled Bourbon,” complete with a trademark.

The company has got this story behind the campaign: In 1870, George Garvin Brown, a young pharmaceuticals salesman in Louisville, Kentucky, saw the need for a consistently high-quality whisky that met medicinal standards. With $5,500 in saved and borrowed money, Brown and his half brother started J.T.S. Brown and Bro. They sold Old Forester Bourbon Whisky exclusively in sealed glass bottles to assure its quality.

It’s the kind of classically designed campaign that has come to characterize the upscale liquor market – lots of emphasis on heritage and purity and very nice looking with it. Brown-Forman is working on the brand. But…is the claim factual? I seemed to recall seeing Civil War-era engravings with bottles of bourbon (so labeled) on shelves – that would pre-date the foundation of the Old Forester brand story.

I tried contacting Brown-Forman…got nothing.

Fortunately, the people at my own favorite bourbon company, Jim Beam, were much more attentive. They asked their PR agency to work the problem and I got an outstanding call from Layton Meng, one of the Directors at Qorvis working on the Jim Beam account. (She left a message that I didn’t get immediately, driving through the middle of southern Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp at the time as I was.)

Meng had spoken with Jerry Dalton, Jim Beam’s Master Distiller. His research says that Abram M Bininger & Co. was actually the oldest known source of bottled bourbon: he started doing it in 1848. Nevertheless, it is Brown that’s recognized in the industry for being the first distiller to mass-produce and sell branded bourbon in bottles.

So the answer is, yes…Old Forester is the first bottled bourbon brand. Brown-Forman is correct and the story on the Old Forester website is a good one. (Always tell good stories about your brand.)

For me, though, the stars of this one are Jim Beam and Qorvis – so my special appreciation to Dalton and Meng: more responsive to customers, thank you very much. It’s way early for a drink, but mine will be Jim Beam when the time comes, not Old Forester. Maybe I should have used a photograph of a Beam bourbon bottle instead.

American Chocolate

“Say, do you have a Chocolate cell phone?” You bet, buddy. Just click here and Creative Chocolates of Vermont will have one delivered – no contract, no hype:

This cellular phone is solid milk chocolate with white chocolate buttons (with all your basic keys). Designed to look just like a real cell phone, this delicious electrical wonder is the same size as a normal cell phone (5 inches x 2 inches x 1/2 inch; with an additional 1 inch antenna).

Please note that it was originally designed to compliment the company’s Roadside Construction Cone Basket – I gotta get me one of those. The company was created in 1982…so it’s safe to say it’s found a sweet spot in the choco-biz.

Still have a yen for a chocolate phone (aside from LG’s fancy model)? Just click here (see No. 17) or here. Personally, I think the Vermont company has the tastiest-looking technological treat. Personally, I think the Vermont company has the tastiest-looking technological treat.

Think of this post as an expansion on the recently expressed idea that someone may look at your cell phone and say, “Wow! That’s chocolate!” LG isn’t the only chocolate phone provider in the market. Think American: there’s a whole…candy store…out there for you to explore.

Coming soon: chocolate skulls! Ooooh!

Photo courtesy of Creative Chocolates of Vermont, with thanks.

Free Chocolate

I suppose it’s inevitable that Barbara and I would be exposed as the older-than-Pizza-Hut’s-Market people that we are. We both misunderstood the flyer that came attached to the pizza delivered to our door last night. A bright green oblong was titled thusly in great big red letters: TURN THIS CERTIFICATE INTO A FREE* CHOCOLATETM by LG.

A great big Pizza Hut logo was right underneath, followed by tiny little type with double asterisks that said, “See back for details and restrictions.”

Both of us thought there was some sort of chocolate candy on offer. Being fond of it, I read a bit further and discovered that Pizza Hut was promoting the new cellphone by LG, in conjunction with Verizon Wireless. If you buy a “Cheesy Bites” or any large pizza, and if you activate a two-year customer agreement with the aforesaid wireless service provider, you can get this neat new gizmo.

Two challenges confront me about this. First, I was hoping for chocolate, the real stuff, sweet and likely not good for me. I’m not the only one who misunderstood this offer right off the top of the box:

“I didn't see the Verizon part of the title at first which led me to believe that Pizza Hut was unveiling a new telephone-shaped dessert,” posted by mst3kzz on Fat Wallet.com; and “I thought at first I was getting a chocolate phone I could eat,” posted by BoNg420, same place.

Okay – I’m out of the swim when it comes to new technologies and forgot that “Chocolate” is one of the new, cute brand names that are floating around in the marketplace. (One look at the people pictured on the Pizza Hut website assures me that I am at least 30 years outside Pizza Hut’s demographic.)

Second, though, I wonder about trademark issues. I have always been taught (and have therefore generally practiced) that a trademark is an adjective, to be used when defining a noun. Here, “Chocolate” – even when followed by a TM – is used as a noun. A careful reader would discover the adjectival usage only in the fifth line of extraordinarily tiny type on the back of the flyer: “Get a free LG Chocolate phone…”

“Escalator” and “Cellophane” lost their trademark status because these words became so well known that they were universally used as nouns. Johnson & Johnson almost lost “Band-Aid” the same way, and went to extraordinary lengths to begin protecting the trademark, even changing its wonderful jingle at the time.

Today, J&J carefully refers to its product as BAND-AID® BRAND ADHESIVE BANDAGES.

J&J does it; Coca-Cola doesn’t. Neither does LG or even Pizza Hut, itself a registered trademark. Who’s right? Well – of course it’s the lawyers…whom in 30+ years of advertising experience I’ve never known to be consistent.

The Federal government, which grants trademarks, doesn’t appear to issue a standard in this regard. But the HTML Writers Guild does state, “A trademark or service mark is always an adjective – never a noun or a verb – and always begins with a capital letter.” And the danger of misuse is worth quoting from this website:

While these distinctions may sound like insignificant details, consider the plight of Otis Elevator Company. Years ago, that company produced an advertisement with a similar error in the copy, certainly a detail nobody deemed momentous at the time. However, that one sentence in that one ad helped Otis lose its trademark: Escalator. (See my mention above.) So now any manufacturer of moving staircases can call their products escalators. You’ll want to avoid making this costly mistake with your trademarks, so if in doubt, err on the side of over-protection.

So I ask LG, Pizza Hut and Verizon Wireless: What’s your thinking here? Any answers? I’d appreciate hearing the rationale for presuming that “Chocolate” is anything other than a sweet.