The Haystack.

Steve Rubel contemplates Dot-Com-Bubble 2.0 in a recent post, which contains an image of lots of logos. Logos of so-called Web 2.0 companies. Go ahead and check out the image, and see if you don’t notice something weird. Not the logos themselves, which (thankfully) are mostly swoosh-less, in contrast to their 1.0 counterparts. But look at the names. The names, for goodness’ sake. Someone tell me, what the hell is going on here? Yedda? Renkoo? Noodly? Jambo? Zimbra? Is this Very Smart Marketing, or have we left branding creativity in the hands of our linguistically experimental one-year-olds?

Well, I can do it, too. I’m going to go ahead and think up a name for this type of name… let’s see… Smoogly. Cute and fuzzy names which (often) don’t mean a thing, doing their best to create a Google-ish marketing tidal wave. But, as I’m sure people will point out to me, even Google means something. Actually, it makes complete sense.

Therefore, I shouldn’t complain (I’m not really complaining, just overreacting). These names are so very Web 2.0. They are so smoogly. Smoogly goo ga ga. Come on, brainstorm with me! Got a new AJAX e-mail-tagging-list-social-bookmark-photo-sharing-blog-pod-vid-narrow-casting-wiki company and don’t have a name for it? Help is on the way! How about the name Smogul? Take it, it’s yours! Peeza (AJAX Italian hotel-booking application)? Keepo (free 27Gb web storage?), Wanno (wish-list management application)? Bapplr? Pazaaaaka? Woozoo, Zipza, Yazdee? These names are all…well… smoogly, don’t you agree?

Joe Jaffe shakes his finger at BMW in a great response to certain points in its request for proposal to ad agencies last week.

Having worked in creative services for the past 13 years, I’ve seen plenty of RFPs. I’ve never found them fair. Basically, a company can spend a relatively small amount of time putting together a document which asks for the impossible, send that out to several agencies who are thereby granted the opportunity(!) to respond with a relatively large amount of time and effort to come up with a campaign and pitch it. And we all do it. We want the business. That’s just the way it goes.

I would love it if everyone just refused to do it. There are plenty of agencies refusing these blatant attempts at getting free or low-cost creative work. Let’s face it: if 20% of creative work yields 80% of the results, then all the agencies responding to RFPs are doing this most important, most creative 20% before they even get the job, and only one of them gets the job.We’ve done it plenty of times, but I’m starting to do the math. Often, we’re not even informed about how many shops are competing, so we’re not even in a position to calculate chances vs. time and resources.

Jeffrey Zeldman points out a few problems with many RFPs, especially those asking for preliminary work.

It’s hard to do, but we ought to just say no.