Five celebrity chefs armed with kitchen knives and the miracle product we named Glad Simply Cooking Microwave Steaming Bags, are battling for the title of "Steamiest Chef. " Just roll over your favorite bobble-headed chef to "learn their steamy secrets, get their steamy recipe, and then vote for your favorite." Right now, Sam Talbot from Top Chef, is leading the pack but someone else could smoke him out. If only all the things that we named were this interactive. What's next, a Spoon Me spooning contest? Actually, it's already in the works!
We have a lot of food on our plates right now including naming healthy snacks for kids and two new Star-kist products which we have to keep under wraps for now. Sorry, Charlie. About 60% of our current naming gigs are for products that don't make you fat or drunk - like software, schools, and sportswear. We're doing name explorations for sound pioneer THX, Knowledge Learning Corporation, a luxury goods retailer, and lots of Web 2.0 start-ups. We'll let you know when we can let the monkey out of the bag.
Our Spoon Me frozen yogurt client, has opened its doors in Salt Lake City, replacing the cheeky "Spooning Soon" sign out front with hysterical signs on the front door declaring "No Shirt. No Shoes. No Spoon" and "No Spooning on Sundays." The Spoon Me t-shirts are flying off the shelves and owner Ryan Combe is mobbed by teenage girls whenever he wears one in public. (He says he'll retire in 2 years from the merchandise profits alone.) As the first "green store" in Utah (!!!!), they are ultra eco-friendly. Other smart ideas: replacing the tip jar in favor of a donation jar for local charities, discounts to customers who ride public transportation to the store, and a 20-dollar bonus each month to any employee who reads a book. (But not The Book of Mormon.) Spoon Me is already a media darling - here's a video clip from ABC news:
While we are usually annoyed by the obnoxious product placement on our favorite TV show, Top Chef, we freaked out (in a good way) when our new Glad Simply Cooking Microwave Steaming Bags took center stage. These super space age bags are perfect for steaming veggies -- just fill, zap and serve. No waiting for water to boil, no messy pots and pans to clean. And according to the Man from Glad in this painfully cheesy video demo, you can even use them make "tasty omelets and fluffy desserts."
We're continually amazed that people trademark names that are spelled differently than they sound. In today's word-of-mouth world, what you hear is what you type in your browser, so it's imperative that your name is easy and intuitive to spell. Case in point: Takkle.com, a high school sports website. When Jeff says, "Yo Steve, check out Takkle.com," Steve hears "tackle" and when he types it in his browser, he lands at Bass Pro, a fishing tackle website. So Takkle loses a customer and Steve thinks Jeff is a dork. During a panel discussion at the recent MashUp teen marketing conference, Alexandra asked Takkle CEO David Birnbaum if, in hindsight, he would have chosen a name that was easier to spell. He said he would stick with Takkle. Proving Alexandra's point, RockYou.com founder Lance Tokuda jumped in and said that RockYou loses thousands of customers a day who type in "rocku." We wonder how often the Takkle guy has to say "that's Takkle with two K's," when he isn't sporting a Takkle baseball cap that he can point to.
We were asked to create a tagline for a new investing service called Portfolia, which doesn't exactly stand out in a sea of Wall Street websites. So we convinced them to let us rename the company. This easy-to-use site lets you check out the actual portfolios, watchlists and real-time trades of top investors and your family and friends. Plus you can see how you stack up against others, which is fun unless you suck in the market. And you can do it all safely, securely and anonymously. For free. It's cake. And that's what we named it - Cake. If you're an investor, check out the alpha version of this "social investing revolution."
