New typefaces, logos, and colors are a common way to refresh a brand’s image. Changing a company’s name, however, is a risky move that can cause confusion in the marketplace with customers, prospects, and cost a lot of money to execute.

The brand marketers over at Bacon’s thought that it was in their best interest to take on that battle. In an e-mail message yesterday from CEO Steve Newman, the announcement came fresh with a new logo atop a glassy bar of blue in the header.

Our new name, Cision, reinforces the distinct but related strength of our worldwide organization. It projects our position as a global leader and our commitment to serving our clients seamlessly.

How does a new logo, name, typeface, and colors do this again? We’re big fans of cool branding over here at the pulp – don’t get us wrong – but that explanation is ripe with empty words that are so non-specific, we don’t even want to read them.

The best brand connection is between you and me, 1:1. Don’t make us feel like we’re minions in a sea of ambiguity.

Bacon’s has (edit: had) so much cool brand equity that it could have played off of really well and communicate its transition to a global leader with innovative products for the PR and greater media markets.

For example, the image that a lot of seasoned PR pros still have of the company is that giant directory of media contacts that you can get for some ridiculous fee. Play off of that – shred that puppy to bits and morph it into a Web-based app. Show how many trees they’re saving now. Send out free bacon-for-a-year gifts to best clients. Have fun. Instead, they were always pumping up the communications cycle and its offerings along the way.

A visit over to the now conglomerate’s Web site is just as stale and depressing as the note from the CEO today. So we stared at the logo a bit more and asked to ourselves: is it pronounced siz-e-on or siz-shun? The best we can figure out it’s like a snipped version of the word decision.

One word: booo.

Right around the same time, Vocus reaffirmed its outlook on the year and is shaking the trees with a follow-on stock offering of up to 60M shares.

It’s getting to be crunch time for taxes.

If you haven’t started yet, you better get crackin’.

We came across this post and thought it might be helpful for navigating through all the online tax prep offerings that are out there.

You could save a few bucks and take a bit of the sting off the pain of realizing how much money you gave to Uncle Sam in ‘06.

This is a little off-topic, but we’ll make it work.

If you have a young one, or otherwise have had to endure the awkward silence of Dora, then you need to check out this spoof that aired recently on SNL.

If nothing else, it’s a Monday reminder that it’s okay to poke fun at yourself – it may even help strengthen your brand image with fringe publics.

We returned from a short sabbatical to hear about Fred Vogelstein’s little moment of awkwardness over at Wired.

The contributing editor got an unexpected e-mail from Microsoft last week while he was buttoning-up an article on the company’s Channel 9/10 developer communities. It contained a 5,500 word “dossier” that revealed the PR strategy behind the Wired story.

Read the full document here.

It’s kind of like the PR equivalent of Microsoft accidentally dropping its pants.

Waggener Edstrom was the agency that created the document and was facilitating the exchanges. Since then, both sides have adjusted the way the story made it to light.

The reporter posted some background on a Wired blog and then the CEO over at Waggener posted his attempt at accelerating the period of disillusionment.

From the Wired blog:

Should I be flattered that they worked so hard, or should I be embarrassed at being co-opted by their spin machine? I’d like to think I would have written the same story no matter what. But now, through the miracle of transparency, you, the reader, get to decide that too.

The question we raise is: how much different is this versus a reporter interviewing multiple sources, observing nuances, and sometimes working with other reporters to feed story information?

The President of Waggener, Frank Shaw, posted (and it should be noted that the post includes the acronym “POV”) to the company’s blog Glass House and contains a nice breakdown of the steps that occur surrounding an interview and the development of a story. The problem is that it reeks of insecurity and forced nonchalance.

Interesting stuff with a lesson to be learned here: be careful with those internal briefing memos – they might just accidentally end up in a reporter’s hands.

Okay, this is about as trashy as we’ll ever get. But when you cover the juicy stuff, well, you gotta cover the juicy stuff:

“Instead of working solely in Wal-Mart’s interest,” the company said, Ms. Roehm “frequently put her own first. She did not merely fail to avoid conflicts of interest, she invited them.”

Wal-Mart backed up its assertions with what it said were e-mail messages sent by Ms. Roehm and Mr. Womack, both married, from their work and private accounts.

“I hate not being able to call you or write you,” Ms. Roehm wrote early last fall, according to an e-mail message Mr. Womack’s wife provided to Wal-Mart. “I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.”

Hey now! Someone didn’t pass the HR exam on the way in.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled postings…

Via NYT.

The Airbus A380 taxis after landing at JFK International Airport in New York March 19, 2007. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

For all of Airbus’ woes, today is the day they seemed to all melt away – if for only that moment when the 550+ passenger plane touched down on U.S. soil for the first time.

The company has been plagued by delays that triggered the cancellation of several orders that add up to more than $3.3 billion in costs to the company according to The New York Times.

Today, however, it doesn’t seem to matter. The media have been abuzz with the plane’s massive body. “Flying on football field-length wings, she’s as tall as a seven-story building, roomy enough to fit 70 vehicles on its wings, as heavy as 500 Volkswagen Golfs and big enough to carry 35 million ping pong balls” they scribed. Enough soundbytes to ground a, well, nevermind…

Aside from the cool pictures, the tale isn’t smooth sailing at all. No American airline has purchased a single $319 million A380 and none has any intent to do so. Thousands have been laid off by the public/private Euro partnership and a CEO has been ousted. Airports have scrambled to make accommodations for the monstrosity with taxiways widened, runways realigned, and doubledecker jetways installed. We’ll sit tight too – waiting to jump to any conclusions on the argument that more passengers on fewer flights is a good thing until we get a sense of how much carbon this puppy spits out per passenger mile versus other aircraft.

In lieu of any hard data at hand right now (and a lack of brain cells to care that much), we’ll play along and let the jet enjoy its media tour on the two coast with a pointless flight around Manhattan ooh and aah onlookers who question physics just one more time.

Meanwhile, if you want to assemble one yourself, here’s how:

Via every media outlet under the sun.

Forget the headlines of lost productivity and conspiracy theories about bandwidth shrinkage as a result of March Madness. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

CBS has stepped up to the foul line just in time with a handy widget that you add to your own blog.

Via Widgify.

We knew it was only a matter of time before the lawyers over at Viacom started to lay out some serious smack:

Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, sued Google and YouTube in federal court today, citing “massive intentional copyright infringement.”
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Viacom, which has feuded publicly with YouTube and its parent Google about the unauthorized posting of its programming online, said it was seeking more than $1 billion in damages. Viacom’s suit is the most aggressive move so far by an old-line media company against the highly popular but legally questionable practice of posting copyrighted media content online.

…

In a statement, Viacom accused the video-sharing Web site of “exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative work in order to enrich itself.” It added: “There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process.”

Via NYT.

We want to know who over at PRWeb thought that it would be a good idea for us to see this innocent girl after completing a short survey.

Need some copy and wonder where you can score some dummy text?

Head on over to www.loremipsum.de and you can get as much as you need.

It’s a free service for copywriters, graphic designers, and more.

Interested in its history? Read on:

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero’s ‘de Finibus’ 1.10.32, which begins ‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…’ [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]