Branding Strategy Insider

Great Moments in Naming: Academy Awards 'Oscar'

Where Did “Oscar” Get its Name? We don’t mean Oscar Wilde or Oscar Hammerstein. We mean that 8-pound gold statuette so beloved in Hollywood.

Most nicknames have obvious sources, but not Oscar, as the awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are commonly known.

For instance, the Tony Awards on Broadway are nicknamed in honor of actress/director Antoinette Perry, who died in 1946. The Tony Awards began the next year. Television’s Emmy awards get their moniker from a pioneer TV engineer and the third president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He suggested “Immy,” a term commonly used around 1950 for the early image orthicon camera. The name stuck and was later modified to Emmy, which was considered more appropriate for a female symbol.

But Oscar’s origin is shrouded in showbiz lore.

Great Moments in Branding: Neil McElroy Memo

After its successes with Ivory and Crisco, P&G developed a new business technique called "brand management." Because it focused attention on a product rather than a business function, brand management turned out to be similar in its effects to the multi-divisional structure introduced by Alfred Sloan at General Motors. And it had the same powerful tendency to decentralize decision making.

The shift to brand management began on May 13, 1931, with an internal memorandum from Neil McElroy (1904-1972), an athletic young man who had come to P&G in 1925 right after his graduation from Harvard College. While working on the advertising campaign for Camay soap, McElroy became frustrated with having to compete not only with soaps from Lever and Palmolive, but also with Ivory, P&G's own flagship product. In a now-famous memo, he argued that more concentrated attention should be paid to Camay, and by extension to other P&G brands as well. In addition to having a person in charge of each brand, there should be a substantial team of people devoted to thinking about every aspect of marketing it. This dedicated group should attend to one brand and it alone. The new unit should include a brand assistant, several "check-up people," and others with very specific tasks.

The concern of these managers would be the brand, which would be marketed as if it were a separate business. In this way the qualities of every brand would be distinguished from those of every other. In ad campaigns, Camay and Ivory would be targeted to different consumer markets, and therefore would become less competitive with each other. Over the years, "product differentiation," as businesspeople came to call it, would develop into a key element of marketing.

Great Moments in Naming: Twitter

Interviewed by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, Isaac (“Biz”) Stone, the co-inventor of Twitter, explained the name this way:

 "We had a lot of words like “Jitter” and things that reflected a hyper-nervousness. Somebody threw “Twitter” in the hat. I thought, “Oh, that’s the short trivial bursts of information that birds do.”

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Great Moments in Copywriting: Rubicam & Squibb

In 1921, Squibb had never advertised to the public, but wanted to advertise certain "household" drug products which are on most bathroom shelves. Squibb did a large business with the medical profession and felt that the profession would scrutinize very critically any advertising to the public that it might do. So the problem given to Raymond Rubicam, then a writer at N. W. Ayer & Son, was to produce a series of advertisements which would sell Squibb to the public and not offend the publicity sensitive medical profession. He wrote this of the assignment:

"My efforts to produce something effective are still painful in my mind. I became obsessed with the problem day and night and covered dozens of yellow sheets with headlines, both in the office and at home. One night at two in the morning I seemed as far away from a solution as ever and I started for bed. As I gathered up my yellow sheets I took one more look through the mass of headline I had written. Suddenly two separate word combinations popped out at me from two different headlines. One was The Priceless Ingredient and the other Honor and Integrity. Instantly, the two came together in my mind and I knew I had the headline and the slant that solved the problem: The Priceless Ingredient of Every Product is the Honor and Integrity of its Maker".

- Raymond Rubicam, Advertising Pioneer, 1959

The phrase, The Priceless Ingredient of Every Product is the Honor and Integrity of its Maker, became a permanent part of Squibb advertising and appears on everything bearing the Squibb name.

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Great Moments in Advertising: Morton Salt

The Morton Umbrella Girl has been an enduring icon since she first appeared on our table salt packaging in 1914.

In 1911, Morton’s first advertising campaign for a series of ads in Good Housekeeping created the idea for the girl and her slogan, "When it Rains it Pours."

One of the concepts presented to Morton was an image of a little girl holding an umbrella in one hand to ward off falling rain and a package of salt in the other hand that was tilted back with the spout open and salt running out.

Morton loved the picture that expressed the Morton message — that salt would run even in damp weather. But the copy that went with it, "Even in rainy weather, it flows freely," was too long. Morton felt it needed to be shorter and snappier.

So the advertising agency came up with: "Flows Freely," "Runs Freely," "Pours" and finally, an old proverb, "It never rains, but it pours." The adage was rejected for being too negative. A more positive spin on it resulted in the now famous slogan, "When it Rains it Pours."

The Umbrella Girl remains ageless, but she has continued to changed with the times. Makeovers to modernize her looks began in 1921 and continued in 1933, 1941, 1956 and 1968.

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Great Moments in Advertising: First Newspaper Ad

"At Oyster-bay on Long-Island in the Province of N.York, There is a very good Fulling-Mill, to be Let or Sold, as also a Plantation, having on it a large new Brick house, and another good house by it for a Kitchin & work house, with a Barn, Stable, etc. a young Orchard, and 20 Acres clear Land. The Mill is to be Let with or without the Plantation: Enquire of Mr. William Bradford Printer in N.York, and know further."

The advertisement above appeared in the Boston News-Letter of May 8, 1704. Twenty-five years later Benjamin Franklin would begin publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette which included pages of ‘New Advertisements’. 

And the beat goes on…

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Great Moments in Advertising: The First Agency

N.W. Ayer & Son was the first advertising agency in the United States, founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1869. N.W. Ayer was responsible for some of the most enduring slogans in advertising history, including:

"When it rains it pours", advertising salt for Morton Salt, coined in 1912 "I'd walk a mile for a Camel", advertising Camel cigarettes for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, coined in 1921. Sometimes this slogan was formed into a jingle,"I'd walk a mile for a mild, mild Camel." "A diamond is forever", advertising diamonds for De Beers, coined in 1948 "Reach out and touch someone", advertising long-distance telephone service for AT&T, coined in 1979 "Be all you can be", advertising military service for the United States Army, coined in 1981.

In 1973, the company relocated to New York, New York. Following a general trend in the advertising industry, N.W. Ayer was subject to a number of mergers and acquisitions and was eventually acquired by the Publicis Groupe (based in Paris, France), which closed down the N.W. Ayer offices in 2002.

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Great Moments in Naming: Apple

"Steve (Jobs) came up with the name. He sometimes worked on orchards up in Oregon. I don't know what kind of orchards they were, but I assume there were apple trees there. I don't ask people where they get their ideas, and Steve doesn't tell. My first comment was, 'What about Apple records?' He said, 'Oh, that's a record company. This is computers.' "

                                         - Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder

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Great Moments in Advertising: The Commercial Break

In the 1950's, unhappy with the ethical compromise of the single-sponsor show, NBC executive Sylvester Weaver came up with the idea of selling not whole shows to advertisers, but separate, small blocks of broadcast time. Several different advertisers could buy time within one show, and therefore the content of the show would move out of the control of a single advertiser - rather like a print magazine. This became known as the magazine concept, or participation advertising, as it allowed a whole variety of advertisers to access the audience of a single TV show. Thus the 'commercial break' as we know it was born.

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Great Moments in Leadership: Ogilvy on Staffing

Every so often, David Ogilvy would send each of his directors a set of Russian nesting dolls, where inside the largest doll would be a small one, and then a smaller one, and so on. In the smallest doll, he would place a piece of paper that read: “If we hire people who are smaller than we are, we will become a company of dwarfs. If we hire people who are larger than we are, we’ll become a company of giants.”

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