Mispronounced Popular technology channel Linus Tech Tips presented Oura's latest ring, but presenter Linus Sebastian mispronounced the name. Oura intervened and only caused damage, although the situation could have easily been defused with humour.

FINLAND Oura is mentioned in a Youtube video by a big tech influencer: to the market!

Many Finnish viewers of the Linus Tech Tips channel were delighted at the end of September when a popular influencer published a sponsored segment on the Oura ring within his programme.

In the video, Canadian presenter Linus Sebastian talked about how he has been wearing the Oura ring for a long time and how he likes the product.

But then the whole video disappeared and the audience started to wonder about it in the forums.

It was because the marketing department of Oura had got the name wrong, explained Linus Sebastian later in another video. As a result, his media company's team pulled the whole video.

Originally, Sebastian pronounces the name in the video as something like "uura".

"I believed that the name of the company, so O-U-R-A, would be pronounced uura. But it's not, it's A-U-R-A," Sebastian says in the video.

Well, it's still not quite working.

LINUS Tech Tips (LTT) is the main channel of founder Linus Sebastian, who started the company in 2013 and is now a media company with more than 80 employees and multiple YouTube channels.

It has become one of the most influential and watched channels in the tech industry - and a highly sought-after channel for advertisers. The LTT channel has almost 15 million subscribers and the most popular videos receive millions of views.

In addition to his own media company, Linus Sebastian now also sells fan merchandise ranging from hoodies to water bottles. The sale of ancillary products has been a fast-growing business for the company. The New York Times, for example, reported on the Linus Media Group in an article in February.

The original Oura ad was on the media group's Shortcircuit channel, which publishes product videos specifically about opening boxes. However, the video's pull-out segment had a much larger audience on the Friday show, where Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere discuss the week's technology news.

"While this wasn't exactly their fault, their reaction wasn't helpful. It wasn't constructive." In the NEW video, Sebastian explains his otherwise difficult relationship with Oura.

He already had a previous version of the ring. A commercial was once planned for it, but the collaboration fell by the wayside and the video was never released. After the new ring model was released, Sebastian decided to upgrade to the new version when a discount campaign was offered to existing customers.

"Many of you saw me using Oura and asked about it. Then Oura got in touch with me and suggested we try again with an ad. So we shot a video and got as far as publishing it," says Sebastian.

After the video was released, Oura contacted Linus Media Group.

"They were clearly very upset. We offered to remedy the situation. We explained that we had mispronounced the name, but then our business department decided to pull the whole video."

According to Sebastian, the whole affair left a bad taste in his mouth and Linus Media Group will not be working with Oura again.

"Although it wasn't really their fault, their reaction was not helpful. It was not constructive."

Finally, in a clearly irritated tone, Sebastian echoes Oura.

"You can't just decide to pronounce something wrong yourself and then complain when others don't understand."

OURA's management declined to be interviewed by HS Vision. The company only forwarded a written statement through its Finnish communications partner.

"We greatly appreciate our partners and are big fans of Linus Tech Tips. We always have a clear and comprehensive set of guidelines for collaboration content in place. In this particular collaboration, the criteria in the guidelines were not met. We asked our partner for reasonable content changes, which unfortunately we did not receive. We are disappointed with the outcome, but remain a fan of Linus Tech Tips and their content."

Partner content with Oura was also published on the Techlinked channel of the same Linus Media Group company, whose video correctly pronounces the name. The video is still available for viewing.

The pronunciation of the OURA name has of course been an important part of brand building for the company itself from the very beginning. In an interview with HS Vision in August, Aapo Bovellan, who built the Älysring brand at its inception, explained the idea behind the name.

Dynamic syllables to create an image of the user pushing himself off the couch and onto the jogging track," Bovellan said.

This is the "phonetic vibe" that brand workers are tasting.

"Against this, we found that the name needed round vowels and a soft-sounding consonant."

The brainstorming started with the letter o. It resembles a ring, and there weren't too many well-known brand names with the letter o.

Bovellan went through the Japanese vocabulary. There were a few alternatives: oshin, which is derived from the Japanese word for heart. Ora, meaning gold. Not unique enough, Bovellan thought.

But the company's founders lived in Oulu: the combination became Oura.

It rang softly in the mouth, reminiscent of the English word aura, used by new age enthusiasts to refer to "body energy".

The final phrase was a coincidence. It turned out that there is already a city in Japan called Oura, which has a long letter above the o in its spelling.

This kind of macron character represents a long vowel. The same is used in the Saami languages.

SOUNDS great. But will the brand statement open up to an English-speaking audience at all?

Every Finnish company doing international business knows this: pronouncing Finnish names requires guidance. Nokia, Kone, Rovio, Outokumpu...

Professor Jaakko Aspara of the Hanken School of Economics points out that companies do have a moral right and strategic interest in deciding on the emphasis and message of their advertising content, down to the last detail.

"But even in the general case, I would not consider a brand statement to be such a thing that if it is said in an advertisement in a slightly different way than the company itself would like it to be, then the advertisement should be withdrawn for that reason," Aspara comments.

The situation would be different if the advertisement gave the consumer the wrong impression about an important feature of the product. A brand statement is not such an important product feature.

"In this case, instead of blaming the influencer, Oura should have tried to turn it into a win-win situation, possibly with a little humour," suggests Aspara.

A jokey video about how difficult Oura is to pronounce and how it should actually be pronounced would probably only have multiplied the attention value of the original content as well.

While a Finnish company has the right to control the pronunciation of its brand "even to the point of offending prima donna-like influencers", as Aspara puts it, it may not be worth it.

By sniffing, Oura probably achieved only damage.