I’ve made a special effort this year to sit back, relax and watch the winter olympics in Torino. It’s not often that you get to see people screaming down a track of ice on a small sled at 80 miles per hour. I have to admit that I even found myself watching a curling “match” (if that’s what you call it) the other day and I was unable to peel myself from the television to make dinner.

In the midst of these exciting competitive events have been a lot of olympic related ads. It seems that advertisers have gone out of their way to make olympic inspired ads, presumably under the assumption that those ads would appeal to people watching the olympics. My overall perception of a lot of these ads, however, is that they are ads for the olympics themselves. There are several ads for which I really, really have to think back to what the ad was for.

One example is the one where a husband and wife are watching an ice dancing competition on TV, and decide they’re going to go out to the old pond and give it a try themselves. They dance on the ice to “The Hustle”, and the clumsy husband slides into the flimsy skate rental shack, causing a large sheet of ice to “total” the family car. The first time, I saw the ad, I thought it was going to be for Viagra or some other ED medication. Then, I thought maybe it was an ad for a new NBC show - something along the lines of “The Wonder Years” or “Freaks and Geeks”. In actuality, the ad is for AllState insurance. You see, next time you bump into the old skate shack, it’s no problem because you’re in good hands. That was surprising to me, but not surprising enough to make me remember it was an AllState ad the next time I saw it.

Another example are the multitude of Visa commercials. Visa used to be “Everywhere you want to be”. Now, “Life takes Visa”. These ads are all about all the things that life takes. Life takes determination (for when you’re eating a Galapagos turtle sized hamburger), life takes risk (for using expired milk), life takes luck (while you’re bowling), life takes exploration (in the library), etc. The first time I saw this one, I wasn’t really sure what it was about. I thought it was going to be some motivational thing that ended in “life takes Jesus”. Jesus, however, does not give you the “freedom to live life the way you want”. Visa apparently does.

Although I was a bit confused by the Visa ads at first, I have to admit that like any good tagline, “Life takes Visa” has really grown on me. Although the start has been disappointing, I think it’s a solid campaign and I’m excited to see where they’ll take it next. It’s such a good play on the word “take”. After all, you might ask the clerk at the corner store whether they take Visa. Now, life takes Visa. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Lately, I’ve heard less about people getting online to do a web search for something and more about people “googling” for things. For instance, I might be sitting in my living room with my wife when we decide a rum cake sounds delicious. I might say “Honey, can you go google ‘rum cake recipe’ for me?” If my wife uses Yahoo! for the web search, is she still googling? Apparently.

The concept of a brand name becoming the term that is used to refer to a product or service in general is not a new one. I clearly remember growing up in St. Louis, and always referring to facial tissues as “kleenex”. Now, it’s a well known fact that my family almost exclusively uses Puffs. Still if I were at the grocery store with my mom, she would tell me to run down aisle 13 and pick up a box of kleenex. I knew that the type of kleenex we used was Puffs. I was 10 years old before I realized that Kleenex and Puffs were actually two distinct brands of facial tissue.

There are many other examples too. Almost any fruity frozen novelty on a stick is referred to as a Popsicle. When you put your Levi’s on in the morning, you may actually be wearing jeans made by the Arizona Jean Company. Is that really a Band-Aid on your knee, or some other type of bandage. Would you correct a mistake with Wite Out, or the generic store brand of correction fluid. Perhaps you’ve even Xeroxed something on a Canon color copier.

The real question is how does one achieve this status for their company? In some cases, the product or service was the first of its kind and there really was nothing else to call it until copies of the original product were developed by other companies. By then, the brand name term had already penetrated too far into the consciousness of the general public for other companies’ names to make a big difference. In other case, the product or service so outperformed its competition, that its name became synonymous with the product or service itself.

Assuming you aren’t in the process of mass marketing your new invention, the best you can do right now is just continue being the best at whatever it is you do. You never know, maybe your company will be the next “Super Glue“.