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  All of these brand names originated around the turn of the 20th century:

Crisco -- Crystallized Cotten Seed Oil
Necco -- New England Candy Company
Noxzema -- "knocks out eczema"

Each of them is based on an encoding of what there was meant to be.

All of these brand names orginated closer to the turn of the 21st century:

Amazon.com -- book retailer
Enron -- power traders
iPod -- computer storage device opitmized for music

Note that the .com actually means something, but besides that there's little about the name that reflects the nature of the product. It might make some sense that Enron is a made up name that doesn't have any apparent connection to what the company did, because there's no apparent explanation for what the company did when it was operating.

This is obviously an unscientific sample of brand names, I'm not sure if any significant comparison can be drawn from these examples. The obvious example might be that late 2oth century companies have less respect for the material objects they make than those in the early 20th century.

A second possibility though, is that our ancestors a century ago may have been more skillful at decoding advertisements, since they had more practice with adds that used literal codes.
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