Product Names:
Steelhead
Client:
Riverbed
Services Provided:
Brand strategy, product naming, creative direction, graphic design, copywriting, website design, video production
 When we decided on Riverbed for the company name, the natural question was, ‘do we go down this road for the product names?’ Since at this point, we were talking about one product family with numerical suffixes, we decided that made sense and the name that everyone around the table got excited about was Steelhead. The product is a series of appliances that allow companies to transmit vast files over the wide area network in very little time. We did the naming a few years ago when the company was very small. There are now over 2,000 companies using this technology. Riverbed went public on September 21, 2006 and now has a market cap of $2.5 billion. We created an animated film with Laika, Phil Knight’s animation house in Portland, OR, which uses a fictional I.T. manager named Jack, who tells the Steelhead story.
Breadbox
Client:
Odyssey LLP
Services Provided:
Image consulting, brand analysis, brand strategy, product naming, corporate identity, creative direction, advertising, graphic design, copywriting
Odyssey is our oldest client--the relationship dates back over ten years. They
describe themselves as follows: "Odyssey is the nation's only independent
market research firm dedicated exclusively to studying the complex  and
changing relationship between consumers, technology, and at-home entertainment,
information, communication, and commerce." Odyssey set out to do
a twice-yearly national survey on consumer attitudes towards and usage
of electronic commerce. So it was all about the home and stuff that came
into the home. We wanted a name that was like the game that Groucho played
with his contestants on You Bet Your Life. "Guess the magic word--it's
something that's around the house--and win $100." For us, Breadbox
was that word.
Pooch Punch
Client:
Colgate
Services Provided :
Product naming, advertising, copywriting
This
was my first, and last, job at a big agency. It was Ted Bates in New York.
One day Irv Sonn, the cigar-puffing creative director, sent down the word
that we might be losing the Colgate Toothpaste account, and everyone in
the creative department (there were over 50 of us) had to come in with
a new Colgate commercial the next day. That was the kind of place it was.
Anyway, Colgate was testing a drink for dogs (an idea which now seems
completely logical) and they wanted us to name it and create a test campaign.
We named it Pooch Punch, The First Drink for Dogs, decided it had to come
in a six-pack, and were off to a supermarket in Hoboken where we filmed
the test spot at night after the real shoppers went home. We got a dog
to carry a basket down the aisle, stop at the Pooch Punch, knock a six-pack
off the shelf and into the basket (a piece of salami hidden behind the
six-pack was instrumental in making this happen), and carry the basket
up to the checkout, where the guy at the register acts almost like this
happens every day. It was a great product concept, but we used beef broth
at the end where you show the dog licking it up, and Colgate was never
able to formulate it as a shelf-stable product.
Wiggle Wiggle
Client:
Deepa Textiles
Services Provided :
Product naming, copywriting
 Deepa
Textiles makes very-rich looking, well-designed fabrics. We did a
lot of projects for Deepa Thomas, the CEO, including positioning a new
service that created proprietary fabrics that related to a company's
identity and culture. Perhaps the most fun was naming and writing stories
for each new fabric. This one looked like it had lots of squirmy things
all over it, which made us think of a Bob Dylan song on the album called
Under the Red Sky--the song was Wiggle
Wiggle. There's
not much to the lyrics, but it's a very energetic song and the title gave
us what we were after. Just so you know, the titles of books, songs and
movies can't be trademarked, so they are fair game.
Every name tells a story:
See all of our names
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