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Tails between their legs, agencies drop those silly names

Back in March 2000, I was privy to a pre-bubble-burst cab-ride conversation between a pair of Internet entrepreneurs. The topic at hand: a name change for their company. Their reason? Pure boredom.

That kind of whimsy, along with a desire to be in vogue, was all the rage at ad agencies, too— particularly those involved with Web advertising. Their names were suddenly swimming in a sea of symbols, numbers and nonsensical words with arbitrary capitalizations.



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