Good post bad post
Friday, July 20, 2007

Good post on Culture Making about the shift in corporate discourse from the stuffy and jargon-filled to the happy, smiley Innocent (tm) tone of voice. Namely: it's starting to get a bit annoying. My take is that Innocent is a bit like one of those genuinely great people you meet and want to be a bit more like. But they aren't cool because of what they do or what they wear or the jokes they crack* - they're cool because they're sincerely themselves. The real lesson is that if you're a good company doing good work, relax, and speak from the heart. If you've got something to hide, feel free to try and hide behind meaningless biz-speak, or as seems to be more and more the case, a lovely but equally meaningless cute sweet pile of sugar and daisies and flowers and stuff.

Bad post on the usually great Penguin Blog in reaction to the guy who sent out thinly-disguised versions of Jane Austen's work to publishers, most of whom (including Penguin) just sent him form rejection letters. (Article.) Massive sense of humour failure in this point-by-point dissection - the response Colin was looking for was "Haha, blimey, sort of embarassing from one angle, but on the other hand, it's pretty much the industry standard to send out form letters to any and all rejected manuscripts, so I wouldn't read too much into it if I were you." Instead it comes off as a bit of a curmudgeonly response to a kooky And Finally... news item. Hilarious response in the comments, though:

Jokes. Does Lassman really think publishing companies can take a joke at their own expense? Well, maybe he does. But he's wrong. We can't.
WE CAN'T!

Labels: branding, culture making, innocent, penguin, publishing

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Eww, Mimzy.
Sunday, May 27, 2007

So, there's a film called The Last Mimzy. And it's advertised on posters, the side of buses, that sort of thing. Here's the poster:



And the thing is, almost without fail, when I'm with someone and they see this poster, they burst out laughing. Or cringe. Or just mutter with bewilderment: "The Last Mimzy?" It's as if there's something deeply and instinctively wrong with the name. When pushed, people tend to say:

• It sounds like a sequel to a film that doesn't exist
  
• Mimzy sounds like an annoying word your gran would use, like "whatsit"
  
• Mimzy sounds like a horrible euphenism for vagina
• Mimzy sounds like an annoying, horrible euphenism for vagina your gran would use

It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."

Labels: branding, jamcracker, mimzy

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