Scaredy (under)pants

Fruit of the Loom can come up with cool names, they’re just afraid to use them.

There’s a Fruit of the Loom ad that’s showing up on ESPN in which they’re promoting their new breathable underwear. Since these new underwear are “perfect,” they “need a name just as perfect.”

Then, the witty and creative Fruit of the Loom office throws out a bunch of potential names for their new briefs:

Cool’s Gold
The Pants Snorkel
Brrriefs
House of Meshresentatives
Shiver me Trousers
Pantarctica
Fruit of the Luge
Mr. Meshy Goes to Windington
Breezy fo Sheezy

Followed by “Uhh, no. We’re going to call it New Breathable Underwear, by Fruit of the Loom.”

Good work guys and gals. This is a first for me: A company telling the world that they have the creativity to come up with a cool name for their cool new product and then chickening out all within a 30 second commercial. That’s impressive.

The irony here is worth pointing out. If they actually used one of the names their ad writers developed, say Brrriefs, their customers would have done the advertising for them… for free. Brrriefs would so easily stand out next to the other underwear on the rack at Target or Walmart that people would take pictures and plaster them all over Instagram and Facebook. Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if people took pictures of themselves in Brrriefs. But instead, they decided to shy away from doing something compelling and just call their “perfect” new underwear Breathable Underwear, by Fruit of the Loom. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. No one’s taking a picture of that. No one’s even recognizing it. But hey, at least it’s good to know they own a boxer-brief sized wind tunnel named Windy Cindy.