Sharp Quattron TVs have a kind of fun ad campaign going on, the tagline of which is You Have To See It To See It. The line serves their overall message perfectly, and has just enough of a twist to bring attention to the benefit being touted. Blindingly brilliant? No. But a good, useful line.

Meanwhile, Marshall’s new tagline is Never Pay Full Price For Fabulous. Again, not brilliant, but what I like about the line is that it’s emotional emphasis (and the fact that it even has an emotional emphasis is an accomplishment) is on the merchandise they sell, rather than on the money you save. The line succeeds in reminding us of the money half of the Marshall’s equation, “Never Pay Full Price”, but the value part of their value proposition lies in the “Fabulous”. It is undefensive, unapologetic and spoken in the language of its customers. “Fabulous” reflects the joy and passion of shopping for clothes and accessories , which is a lot better that telling people that they’ll “Get The Max For The Minimum”, as their prime competitor used to say. Now they’re carrying the tagline, Where Fashionistas Become Maxxinistas. This line feels so strained and contrived and unresonant, compared to the Marshall’s line. Do their customers really think of themselves as fashionistas? Or aspire to be fashionistas? Or do they just want to look good? And will they adopt the label “Maxxinista”? I suppose it’s possible, but I try not to hold their customers in such low regard.

Great idea, if you do it well, ESPECIALLY if you are boring enough to have a name that is made up of letters, rather than a word/words or a name/names.

LG’s tagline is Life’s Good. Clever way to give the name’s two random letters such a positive meaning. Especially considering that, if I understand correctly, LG originally stood for Lucky Goldstar, which was the name of their brand back when it was the off brand/house brand cheapo brand you’d find at discount electronics places and department stores. You remember that time, when Japanese brands had stopped being cheap imitations, but Korean brands still were.

You and Us. UBS. UBS, in case you didn’t know (and I didn’t until I looked into it) stands for Union Bank of Switzerland. But the brand has been simply UBS for a long time. I considered You and Us to be a timeless line that could serve them forever. But now they seem to have dumped it in favor of one of the new, trendy FLEXIBLE taglines, that can be modified infinitely to accommodate many specific messages. In their case, the formula is

Until you [blah blah blah] we will not rest. for example

Until you look to the future with quiet confidence . . . we will not rest.

This kind of tagline, from which you can generate a million headlines, is very efficient, spares the copywriter all the time and trouble of thinking of interesting headlines. The problem with the tagline is that, unless you can say something really compelling in the “Until you” part of the line, the “we will not rest” part falls a little flat.

Still, at least they stand for something, like, I guess, tenacity or perseverance on your behalf. Apparently they’ve lost interest in the partnership/collaborative/relationship with customers. Now they’re going to work obsessively and be workaholics instead. I recall, a couple decades ago, what was then Continental Bank had a campaign about their bankers being workaholics. It was done with humor. Even so, they were skewered for sanctioning the idea of workaholics. I don’t see how the UBS campaign and tagline is any different, other than the disingenuous halo of nobility and altruism that it’s wrapped in.

Now some company called CA technologies has adopted the tagline, you can.   Again, this tagline is the answer to an infinite number of possible question/headlines, i.e., Can you change the game? you can.

Looking at this campaign, I’ve decided it’s just lazy. While incorporating the name into the tagline is good, neither the tagline nore the headline/questions it spawns are even slightly interesting, so what’s the point. At least the UBS campaign allows for the potential of interesting headlines setting up their tagline. Not to say they will realize that potential. But, if “Can you change the game?” is any indication, CA probably won’t be breaking a sweat coming up with truly provocative or intriguing questions.

So, what’s my point? If you can incorporate the name into the tagline, by all means, do it, BUT ONLY if you can do it in an interesting, fruitful way, NOT if leads to lazy advertising.

The answer to the first question can be found on my guest blog on TheMarketingSpot.com, Jay Ehret’s erudite small business site. The site in general, and my fresh-off-the-virtual-presses blog in particular, are definitely worth a look.

The answer to the second question is addressed in Ad Age, w/0 Sept. 6.

As I immodestly point out in a comment on the article in Ad Age, little ole’ prescient me predicted back in the 90’s, when jingles were not just passe´, but reviled, and seemingly extinct, that jingles would rise again someday, because they are just too useful, effective, evocative, and imprintable on the brain, to be dismissed. So nah nah to all you naysayers who mocked me back then.

By the way, taglines share many—in fact, all— of these same characteristics, which is why, ultimately, they ain’t goin’ nowhere. It’s no coincidence that many of the greatest taglines occur in a musical context, or to look at it conversely, it’s no coincidence that many of the greatest jingles feature an irresistible lyrical hook that happens to be . . . a tagline.

By the way, my contention way back when was that one necessary condition for the return of jingles was a new term to replace the dated “jingle” term. Back then, when TV spots were still the center of the advertising universe, my suggestion was “spottunes.” Now that there really is no center to this universe, I don’t have a good suggestion for what the new term should be, but I expect that one will emerge as the popularity of jingles increases.

I consider “slogan” to be a term as tired and dated as “jingle” and am thus relieved that we already have “tagline”, a more current, or at least less ancient, term.

By the way, by the way, I notice that Al Ries has an article in Ad Age as well, on how long taglines are more effective than short ones. I haven’t read the article yet, but you can be sure I’ll have something contrary to say about it when I do. In the meanwhile, I’m glad that someone has finally affirmed a contention I’ve held forever, that long taglines can work well. Whether one can make the generalization that long ones work better than short ones, I doubt. The key variable is evocativeness, not length.

Healthcare taglines are particularly interesting to me because the vocabulary available to draw from tends to be very limited. That’s why so many hospital taglines sound like every other hospital’s tagline. It’s all variations on “care” or “caring”, “medicine”, “technology” or “innovation”, “Live” or “life”, “health”, “state of the art” or “advanced” or “world class”, and, no doubt, a half dozen other words. Having written at least a score of hospital taglines myself, I know I’ve often found myself boxed in by these words. The challenge is to somehow find a twist or turn that freshens the thought. For example, St. Luke’s line, mentioned in a previous post, is State of The Art Humanity.That surprising juxtaposition does a great job of communicating the two pronged “high tech/high touch” benefit that most hospitals try to convey. The tagline I wrote for Rush Health System here in Chicago contained the terms “medicine”, “you” and “world class”, making it potentially horrible. But my job was to convey one of those two pronged benefits. In Rush’s case, they truly do have “world class” medicine going on there. And they’re model is, at least theoretically, “patient-centered”. So I was able to convey both of those benefits while employing a subtle play on “world” and “revolve.” The line was “Where World Class Medicine Revolves Around You.” So I was able to overcome, to some extent anyway, the limitations of the tiny  hospital tagline vocabulary.

Advocate, A local health system, has a new tagline, Inspiring Medicine. Changing Lives. It’s an unremarkable line, but worthy of comment anyway, for this reason. This two part formula is common, especially with hospitals. The problem is that there needs to be a parallelness to the two parts. In this case, it’s missing. The first word of each half of this tagline needs to be the same kind of word. If one is an adjective, the other needs to be an adjective as well. That’s what makes it parallel. Unfortunately, Advocate apparently didn’t get the word. Of course, you could read “Inspiring” as a verb, so that it would be parallel to “Changing”, but read that way, the line doesn’t make sense. Who’s inspiring whom, or what? It seems clear that “Inspiring” is intended as an adjective. Okay, but what if “Changing” is read as an adjective, which is theoretically possible. Again, it doesn’t make sense. In order to read the line in a way that actually communicates, the parallelism collapses.

Some of the best two-part, parallel taglines intentionally employ at least one word that can be read two ways, (verb/adjective, verb/noun or whatever) and both senses make sense in the context of the line, and, indeed, enrich the meaning of the line considerably.

The Advocate line doesn’t do this, and doesn’t even succeed in its attempted parallelism.

Too bad they didn’t call me to help with that line.