When my wife and I had our oldest son, we spent a ton of time trying to figure out names, so as not to saddle him with some poorly thought-out albatross for the rest of his life. When it comes to living, breathing carbon-based entities, it’s not fair to try and be creative at all costs. But when it comes to a living, breathing digital entity, I have no such reservations.

Recently, I was tasked with naming our Armstrong|Shank agency blog — a project I was excited to do. The challenge in naming a company blog is finding a name that fits what you do and also creates an expectation for what the reader is about to experience. Now, if you’re a financial business, the direction seems simple: you want the name to say “We know money.” If you’re in the ag business, you want the name to say “We know farming, or ranching, or whatever.”

But what do you say when you’re in advertising, an industry whose split personality straddles the line between art and business? As one who spent a number of hours coming up with various name ideas, I’ve found it can be especially tough. Do you try and push your business expertise? Your creative expertise? Do you get arrogant and try to do both? Good question.

In my search, I was all over the landscape — marketing and advertising-related puns (“Ad Libs”), inspirational messages (“Insight that Incites”), esoteric creative concepts (“Crawlspace”), names related to our agency’s street address (“7450”) or pyramid-shaped logo (“Four-Point Perspective”) and so on. I asked for input from all over the building, which was both helpful … and not. More opinions meant more people to please, which wasn’t easy.

At one point, I took a new philosophy toward it. While this blog is meant to be many things — a gathering place for business professionals looking for insight, a resource for marketing expertise and a forum for creative expression — the one thing it has to be, due to its very nature as a blog, is free-flowing … not boring, stuffy business-speak.

I extended my name search into realm of the absurd. I tried to develop an expectation of creativity in the same way that a hard-rockin’, mind-blowin’ movie trailer psyches you up for the latest action flick. Names like “A Bullet Train from the Wind-swept Plains,” “Flight of the Magic Chicken Man,” and “Intergalactic Ferrari Force 5000” were born. I didn’t expect any of them to realistically make the cut — and boy oh boy, did they not make the cut — but I have to admit they still held a small place in my heart.

While the wacky detour didn’t produce an acceptable idea, it did help with the process of elimination. Regrouping, I went back to my drawing board to see where I’d been before. On second glance, one name stuck out to me. I presented it to Ed, my creative director, on the grounds that it was simple, appropriate to both the creative and business sides of our business, and it had potential for an interesting design. He agreed, it moved on to the big boss Susan, and now it sits at the top of this page.

If you mapped out my naming quest, it’d look like one of those Family Circus cartoons where Jeffy traipses in, over and around every square inch of the neighborhood. But at the end of the day, much like little Jeffy, I feel we ended up safe on the doorstep, with a blog name that fits to boot.

Looks like a Paul Simon song out my window. There’s a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow all over the woods behind our building. The black trees are frozen stiffly in place. The sky is a gray felt hat pulled down tight. Our bird feeders are by reservation only. The squirrels are scrunched up tight against the ground ravenously devouring the black oil sunflower seeds scattered about.

It’s a pretty picture-postcard, but I’m fantasizing about spring. I see goldfinch transformed from drab winter brown to brilliant summer yellow. I long for tender green leaves and deep shade sheltering a newborn fawn. And to feel a gentle breeze through my sliding door as I’m soothed by water splashing from the fountain in our reflecting pool.

Bitter winter temperatures and snow on the ground is a hardscrabble existence for the animals. Our furnace at home went out a few days ago, and even though the new one makes the house all toasty, I’m still not warm. The failed furnace gave me insight into the plight of the homeless and of my woodland friends all puffed up against the cold.

During milder winter days we never see birds in these numbers or variety at our back door: chickadee, titmouse, dark-eyed junco, harris sparrow, white-throated sparrow, goldfinch, house finch, cardinal, downy woodpecker, red-breasted woodpecker, and Carolina wren, to name the most common. Squirrels are daily visitors. But the snow blanketing the ground has driven animals we rarely see out into the open; even a rabbit lumbers awkwardly through the snow to our larder. For the most part, even when the day’s offering begins to run low, all animals share without conflict. The exception is that birds of the same species do have their pecking order.

In unison, the birds explode from the ground and race to cover. Either someone walked by the windows on the back of the building, which happens often, or a hawk is about. A blue jay screams raucously. And there it is: the party pooper – either a cooper’s or sharp-shinned hawk. Perched majestically on a hackberry limb about 15 feet above the forest floor, the predator is immobile except for its head rotating purposefully. Closer examination says the interloper is almost certainly a cooper’s. Standing nearly twenty inches, a large cooper’s is about the size of an average crow. Perfectly adapted for flying aggressively through trees, with short, powerful wings and a long tail for balance, they make their living feasting on smaller birds and animals. When they’re about, feeding birds at a feeder is like setting the table. Even the squirrels take cover.

It’s a deep and dark December.

Ford has some problems right now.  The economy has Ford asking tough questions about the future of their organization.  One of their dilemmas is whether or not to suspend new product development projects in order to stockpile cash.  They certainly need the cash, but as Ford’s global product development chief Derrick Kuzak points out in this report from the Detroit News, “Outstanding products are the heart of any turnaround of our business and its future success.”  If Ford stops investing in new product development, what future are they saving by stockpiling cash now?

Not an easy decision.  This is similar to the branding decisions that all businesses face when economic times are tough.  Companies worried about troubled economic times will often decrease spending on advertising.  Short term, they “save” money.  But long term, they risk losing traction in the marketplace.

So, what is the answer? In “How to Market in a Recession” John Quelch of the Harvard Business School weighs in by saying, “This is not the time to cut advertising.”  Brands that increase advertising during recessions improve market share and see a higher return on their advertising dollar.  While actually raising ad budgets may seem impossible for some, Quelch recommends at least maintaining current spending levels.

At Armstrong|Shank, we advise our clients to look at their marketing mix and see how it might be restructured to include more direct marketing tactics.  For example, the Web offers many scalable, measurable tactics that can be tied to performance measures.  Maybe some dollars can be moved over to a targeted pay-per-click campaign or to an online lead generating campaign.

However, you don’t want to totally abandon your brand advertising.  Often branding tactics are the foundation for other direct efforts.  Specifically in the business-to-business sector, branding activities are critical.  Marketer Galen De Young has a nice discussion on this topic in his article “B2B Search Marketing: Branding’s Best Friend” on SearchEngineLand. He notes that, “…in the B2B world, customer acquisition is directly related to branding, a longer-term initiative.”

Economic turmoil can be a scary time for businesses.  It is sometimes tough to see how we might make it through the storm to sunnier days.  While trying to figure that out, it is imperative to think ahead to when things turn around and ask where your organization should be positioned at that time.  Smart marketing decisions now will make all the difference then.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user yourpaldave.

My father used to keep a sign on his desk at work that said, “Brevity is a virtue.” He was a busy man — always more of a doer than a talker, and was constantly annoyed by people who liked to spend hours talking about a problem rather than doing something about it. At age 70, he still has more energy and initiative than any three other people I know, combined.

If I didn’t look so much like him, I would swear we weren’t related. As a writer, I am prone to the obligatory pitfalls of excessive daydreaming, procrastinating and general goofing around that seem to plague the profession. But, as fathers usually are, he is right. And if you are trying to attract new customers, you should listen to him.

People are busy. They may not be getting anything done, but they are busy nonetheless. And if you want to interrupt their lives and expect them to listen to what you have to say, you had better get their attention…and you’d better be brief.

People make split-second decisions about businesses in the same way that they do with people — through first impressions. In advertising, these first impressions are the print ads, the radio and television spots, the outdoor boards, the Web banners.

When meeting someone at a party who won’t shut up about themselves, most will label them a bore and tune out. It’s the same with advertising. You want to leave them intrigued, inspired, and maybe even enthused about wanting to get to know you better. But you want customers to come to you for that information. You want them to initiate the contact.

Which leads us to the places where it is actually good form to prattle on exhaustively about the benefits of your product or service. The Web sites, the 800 numbers and the brochures work great for answering all the questions (though even these need to be well-organized and to the point.) The trick is to get people asking YOU for the answers. To do that you need to be brief, among other things.

A few weeks ago, pain reliever Motrin was targeted by outraged, baby-toting mothers of the blogosphere in a backlash against the brand’s latest television spot. The spot in question featured a young woman talking about those baby-sling things (I can’t be bothered to find out the actual name of the device), lamenting good-naturedly about the woes of motherhood and the need for the pharmacological phenomenon known as Motrin.

Well, apparently, wearing your baby in a bag is now a movement, a lifestyle choice, complete with books and blogs and outspoken activists. And here I thought it was a Native American invention used to free up your hands so you could get things done, like skinning a buffalo or microwaving a Hot Pocket. Anyway, more than a few of these mothers felt that the Motrin commercial was demeaning to their chosen way of child rearing…or something, I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth. Twitter was immediately abuzz with whispers of boycott. If you are not familiar with Twitter, or tweets, just pretend like you are and move on with life. Nobody needs to be that connected.

I saw the spot and was less than offended, but I’m a middle-aged white man with no kids and even less class. So maybe I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the papoose, but what I do understand is that Motrin’s message missed the mark with a very vocal portion of its intended audience. Motrin has pulled the campaign.

Fast forward a bit to the next ad that has the bloggers raging: Burger King’s Whopper Virgins.

In an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the Whopper over rival burger Big Mac, Burger King has scoured the farthest reaches of the planet to find people unsullied by mass marketing, predisposition, or even a word in their language for a hamburger to solicit a completely unbiased taste test.

A few have been offended by the name alone. Most, however, seem to be concerned with unleashing the preservative-laden, high-calorie, low-nutrition American fast-food diet on an unsuspecting populace — for our amusement, no less. Well, I can’t say I disagree with that notion, but on the scale of injustices perpetrated by our decadent nation, I’m not sure this rates very high. I mean, they didn’t waterboard anyone until they submitted to this taste test. And I’m pretty sure eating a couple of hamburgers isn’t going to destroy anyone’s native culture. It’s just not very politically correct.

And that’s the thing. Burger King’s intended audience isn’t very politically correct. I would imagine that, for the most part, the people who are offended by this ad probably don’t eat a lot of Burger King to begin with.

The commercials are irreverent, a little crass, even a little offensive. And for my money, I think they have their target audience dialed in just fine.