A Gobbledy Classic about Bad Names
AYDS? ISIS? Big Bird? And others...
Hello Gobbledeers,
(I’ve been swamped doing, y’know, actual work and wasn’t able to get the newsletter done this week. If you want to pay me to do actual work, please let me know - I’ve been working with companies on these 2-day messaging workshops, and it’s amazing to see homepages transform into a story that actually (crazy enough) makes sense. I’m at jared@sagelett.com if you want to hear how your company’s messaging can also be transformed). If you DO hire me, I promise it won’t interfere with writing the newsletter. Unless you want it do.
In the meantime, enjoy this Classic Gobbledy from 2 years ago (still fresh!)
A Short Story about Product Names
My father spent a significant chunk of his career as a television cameraman. He had an illustrious career - he won an Emmy award, worked Super Bowls and Olympics and Presidential Inaugurations and Presidential Funerals and Presidential Debates and The Masters and Wrestlemania and Sesame Street and countless other stuff.
(Editor’s Note: I am realizing as I’m writing this that perhaps you are thinking this column is a eulogy of my father. It is not - he’s very, very much alive and well and active in the Coast Guard Auxilliary so don’t try any funny stuff out in the waters off the coast of New Jersey. I apologize for perhaps giving the wrong impression.)
Besides those historical events mentioned above, my father spent a bunch of his time shooting commercials. One of the commercials for which he was best known (to my brother and I) was this absolutely incredible piece of internet ephemera:
There are many unreal things about that ad (starting, obviously, with the very idea that that product, named as such, in 1983, actually existed). To my family, though, the incredible part of it was that the 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser station wagon pictured at the 2 second mark of that ad was our family’s car.
The commercial for that unfortunately named product ran roughly every 11 seconds during daytime TV, and my brother and I would be home after school and see it and be absolutely giddy every single time we watched our car on television.
We would tell people how our car was on TV, and obviously they wouldn’t believe us because it sounds like the kind of stupid nonsense that 10 year olds are always spewing. And there was no Internet and no way to prove it, and I’m sure we suffered many punches-in-the-arm and nooggies and arm burns as a result. But as pre-teens we had no greater accomplishment than our family car being in an ad for an appetite suppressant.
Then later - we were teenagers but the internet did not yet exist (because we are old) - we would tell the story about how our car was in this commercial for some sort of hunk of chocolate that made you lose weight and that hunk of chocolate was called AYDS.
And nobody believed us (obviously), because that sounds - even for a 15 year old who loved Howard Stern - like an unspeakably tasteless joke.
Perhaps more incredible: that product had been around for decades, and that ad was from 1983, and yet the company did not change its name for years after. In 1988 it - truly, incredibly - changed its name to Diet AYDS, a move they thought would stop the 50% drop in sales they’d seen over the prior few years.*
(*Thanks to this article for some of the back story.)
In case you missed that - they thought they would stop the sales slide by changing its name to Diet AYDS.
I appreciate that the company believed that its brand was so strong that it could overcome any similarities to a deadly disease. (I know that it seems like Corona Beer was in a similar situation, but the differences between public perception of AIDS in the early 1980s and the coronavirus in 2020 are deep and significant and someday I’ll be happy to chat about that, but not now). In any case, the company deeply believed in that brand, which is admirable. But had their head up their asses about the reality of the situation.
One of my themes for marketers in 2022 is “let’s be honest with ourselves.” There’s a place for belief in your brand. And there’s a place for re-assessing the strength of your brand right now. It’s a good idea once a year to ask yourself if you’ve become Diet AYDS, a brand tied to the past that’s afraid to change.
The product was discontinued shortly thereafter. My father’s career continued a-pace.
In the early 2010s AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile somehow agreed to work together to build a mobile wallet that would work across the various carriers. That mobile wallet, which was shuttered in 2015, was called Softcard.
Thought before it was called Softcard, it was called something else, which led to one of my favorite headlines ever:
There’s a lot to love right there.
That they wanted to “distance” themselves from the terrorists by rebranding. That “distance” is used as a verb, suggesting that they were originally in some way tied to that organization, but after considerable thought (and a lot of tears), they’re going to not-quite make a clean break, but they’ll start with creating some distance.
And that they’re not just a “terror group” but a “militant terror group” - that if they were just a bunch of non-militant terrorists, the folks at ISIS Wallet could’ve lived with the association. But militant? No thank you.
A publication called Paymentsource reported that the ISIS Wallet team sent a survey to customers asking, “You have undoubtedly noticed that your Isis Wallet shares a common name with the acronym of the ISIS group in Iraq/Syria, does this change your likelihood to use your Isis Wallet?"
Undoubtedly.
A Corner for Readers
And now, as we say on LinkedIn, “I’m SO honored to announce!” for the first time in the newsletter: Readers’ Corner, where readers can share their favorite bits of gobbledy they’ve come across.
A Gobbledy reader passed along this snippet from a job description he received for a CMO at a tech company:
This is an exciting new chapter for the company as they look to reinvigorate their senior leadership and enter into their next phase of growth…
“Reinvigorate their senior leadership” is the best euphemism I’ve seen for “fire everyone and replace them.” Solid work.
And Gobbledy charter subscriber (master of the golf links, and sports marketer extraordinaire) Nick G. shares this bit from Google:
Speaking of helping, if you see any gobbledy out in the wild, please share! I’d love to include it in the next Readers’ Corner. Reach out at jared@sagelett.com
Are you enjoying Gobbledy? That was a rhetorical question. Of course you are. I mean, if you weren’t reading this, what would you be doing? Something else? Gobbledy is definitely better than something else. So given that, I’d love if you’d share this newsletter with your team. You can put a link to it in the “#random” channel in Slack. Or the “#general” channel in Slack. Or the “#dads-who-read-substacks” channel in Slack. Or email it. Or post it. I’m sorry, you know how to share. I won’t micromanage this. I’ve made it easy by putting the share button just below this. As always, thank you for reading.
Oh, and please feel free to set up half an hour with me if you want to chat. Everyone I’ve talked to has enjoyed it (I assume!).
AYDS: Taste, Chew, Enjoy.
I'll stop now.
You've hit New Yorker status! Which is to say, as much as I look forward to reading Gobbledy, I look even more forward to not reading Gobbledy.