In my travels, I witness a ton of small business taglines on billboards and other signage, in magazines and newspapers, and even, as in this particular case, on the periphery of a place mat at a diner.

The Sterling Living Center, located I won’t mention where, has a tagline wrapped in quotation marks, a custom as inexplicable to me today as it has been for the decades I’ve been cognizant of this tagline custom. But that isn’t what made me chuckle.

I’d like to think the humor in the tagline will be self-evident, but that assumption has bitten me in the butt more than once.

Ready?

“We focus on people. Our residents. Their lives. Their health. Their families.”

I have to say, I can’t recall ever seeing a five-part tagline before, so I suppose some sort of congratulations is in order for that.

I spent a little while trying to at least turn this into one sentence, to see if it helps. Here’s where I landed:

We focus on the lives and health of our residents and their families.

“people” seemed redundant with “residents and their families”.

“Lives and health”, while not entirely redundant, overlaps a lot. I would have just gone with “health” because “lives” is oh so even more  broad and vague than “health”. Financial lives? Quality of lives? Lifestyles? Spiritual lives? Just what aspect of their lives do they focus on? I’m guessing it’s the health-related aspect.

Given the nature of focusing, I’d argue that you can’t really focus on both the residents and their families. The may take the family into consideration, or attend to their needs as well, but surely they are actually focused on their residents.

So the tagline really could have read:

Focused on our residents’ health.

or, if you wanted to make it sound a little more holistic-ish:

Focused on our residents’ overall health.

So, that’s a much more manageable tagline. But isn’t it kind of stating what should be a given. If a living center didn’t focus on its residents lives/health, what would they focus on?

Anyway, I had a good chuckle.

It is such a sad commentary on advertising that a current Tide commercial has caused a stir because the wife says to the husband, “You suck at folding” at the end of the commercial. The shock isn’t that the word “suck” was used. The shock is that a commercial actually dipped its toe into the waters of real, current, American conversational English. The wife said something that a wife would ACTUALLY SAY in the real world. That never happens, especially not in a commercial for a mundane product like Tide.

Of course, there will be some small sliver of the population who will be offended or put off by the use of the word “suck”, as if it were a naughty word or something. Who cares?

I applaud the Tide people and their ad agency for having the backbone to produce this commercial. I’m sure it was the topic of much discussion and research. But I feel shame for an industry in which it requires backbone to accomplish what should be a given: putting normal, everyday, real world words into the mouths of the people who represent your target audience in your advertising.

I just watched a commercial for the Honda Civic in which the announcer utters the words, “turn sharper”, which should mean you would be in more danger of getting cut by the Civic if it turned sharper. But, in fact, he meant “turn more sharply”. “Sharply” is an adverb. “Sharper” is an adjective.

It wasn’t that long ago that this error would have been caught and fixed by the creative director, or the account guy, or, if everyone else failed, the proofreader. So, is it that Honda’s ad agency doesn’t have a proofreader. These days, that is a very likely possibility. And since, apparently, no one else is familiar with even the most basic basics of grammar, like the difference between an adverb and an adjective, if the proofreader, who no longer works there, doesn’t catch the error, no one else will. Does the client, Honda, have no professional pride? How did they let this one get past them?

I have never considered myself a school marm grammar nazi. I make the purists mad all the time with my liberal point of view about the fluidity and changeability of language.

Granted that some alleged grammarians would allow this use of “sharper” as a comparative adverb in “casual situations”, I’m sorry. Even if the announcer is going for a “casual” or “conversational” tone, in this case, it sounds wrong. Although, obviously, not to the people who produced this commercial.

I’m sorry, call me an old lady, but it’s inexcusable. I am personally embarrassed for every person associated with this commercial.

And that’s saying something. Of course, I’m speaking of the advertising, not the game, which wasn’t too bad, for a change.

I’m going to limit my comments to the commercial’s taglines, as you might expect.

First, I don’t pay attention to ads for movies, TV shows and the NFL since ads for these products are just too easy to create advertising for.

Second, approximately 20% of the commercials during the 2013 Superbowl had no tagline.

Of the commercials that did have taglines, more than half were taglines of three words or less. If I haven’t mentioned it before, and I’m sure I have, really short taglines like these are unlikely to be capable of making an impression, evoking a reaction or communicating a message of any depth.

Just consider the power of the following taglines: Make it great; Smarter. Bolder. Faster; Truth in engineering; Open happiness; Let’s go places; Here we go; Eat fresh; Live Mas; Designed for speed; Handle it. These are what pass for taglines in the modern age. The fact is, large brands, by and large, have abandoned the tagline, as witness these witless excuses for a tagline.

To the extent that anyone is still making an attempt to use taglines effectively, it is small and medium-sized companies that are doing this. Even the Superbowl advertising demonstrates this reality. There were two taglines that made some attempt to be interesting, noticeable or even slightly memorable.

The Gildan shirt company’s tagline is Every Thread Counts. And Redd’s Apple Ale features the tagline Branch Out. At least we haven’t heard this language a zillion times in taglines. At least the tagline has something to do with their products.

I (begrudgingly) acknowledge that Jimmy John’s Freaky Fast Delivery isn’t a bad tagline. It’s clear, it’s about the benefit they’re trying to focus on, and it’s kind of fun.

But that’s about it. There’s just nothing much else to say about the taglines that we saw during this year’s Superbowl.

Perhaps the pendulum will swing back some day. But for the forseeable future, for those of us who still value the contribution that taglines make, it will be small businesses and some medium-sized businesses that we will be looking to.

There’s no inherent limitation in large businesses that prevents them from coming up with good taglines. In fact, there are hundreds of examples of wonderful taglines for many large businesses. It’s just that almost all of them are examples drawn from the archives of advertising during the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, (and maybe the 50’s and 90’s) when taglines were appropriately valued.

Welcome to the Dark Age of taglines.

Rethink Possible is an appropriately grand thought for a company as large as AT&T. I hadn’t given that tagline much thought since it debuted years ago.

Recently, however, I was in Denver for a few days and noticed a commercial for a healthcare-related company that used the same Rethink Possible tagline. A quick search revealed several other smaller companies, most healthcare or education-related, using precisely that tagline or else taglines expressing the same thought, only more grammatically, i.e. Rethink What’s Possible or Rethink The Possibilities. Finding all these iterations of the AT&T tagline got me thinking. Who knows who got there first? It may not have been AT&T.

Often, this mimicking or cloning isn’t intentional.Anyone who has worked in advertising for a many years has experienced parallel thinking, where you come across the idea or the tagline or image  you came up with, in another ad that you had nothing to do with. It probably wasn’t ripped off. It’s just that someone else also came up with it too.

Of course, in the case of taglines, the lexicon from which small business people and hack copywriters draw from consists of a couple hundred words. And, for these people, cliches draw them like magnets. So the chances of a tagline being repeated is quite high.

I probably have pointed out before that, according to the database created by adslogans.com, a British tagline website, Simply The Best is the most frequently used slogan, with more than 100 examples in their database.

As I reflected on AT&T’s tagline, it didn’t take long to stumble onto the irony in that line. AT&T may rethink possible in many ways and many contexts, but they haven’t really rethought possible regarding their own tagline. Rethinking your tagline isn’t the same as rethinking what’s possible regarding a tagline. To me, the latter is a far more interesting, and far more difficult, exercise. I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked to dig that deep, to question that fundamentally, in creating a tagline. I’ve given the nature, function and value of taglines a ton of thought, but I’ve never framed the problem in terms of rethinking what’s possible with, from, or in a tagline. Upon reflection, I’ve always assumed that I had a pretty good idea what it was possible to do or say with a tagline. But now, I guess I’m going to have to do a little uncomfortable straining, trying get my head around this daunting question of what’s even possible with a tagline. Can a tagline fix a supply chain or polish up a P&L statement or come up with product innovations?

Thanks a lot, AT&T.

TBS. Very Funny.

This is the best they could do for a tagline? And the commercials punctuated with this tagline are no better, consisting largely of members of the casts of various TBS sitcoms telling us, without irony, how funny they are.

The campaign strikes me as sad and desperate. The cast members are just short of pleading with us to please agree with them that the shows are funny. Since when does a network focused on funny shows have to resort to explaining to us that the shows are funny.

Shouldn’t a funny network have a funny advertising campaign and a funny tagline? Have they not heard me say a million times, “Don’t say it, convey it.”

Demonstrate your funniness. No one is going to take your word for it. Generally people will let their laughter or lack of laughter be the judge of whether something is funny. My guess is that whichever writer[s] they assigned the task came up with lots of very funny taglines, all of which got a laugh from the decision makers, who then rejected them out of hand out of fear or some distorted notion of what would constitute an “appropriate” tagline.

It’s a shame that a network  smart enough to carve out a specific niche for itself isn’t smart enough to tout its niche in a manner consistent with that niche.

While so many giant global companies continue to produce blah, predictable, flaccid and impotent taglines, paying ad agencies many thousands (tens of thousands?) of dollars to create these lines, there are thousands of small businesses who can’t afford to do the same. They either come up with their taglines themselves, or they hire a tagline writer like me, who, while not cheap, is more affordable than an ad agency.

Sadly, most of these businesses (or the writers they hire) aren’t up to the task. The best they can do is a tagline like Doing such and such since 1968, We Put You First, or something similar. They draw from the short list of the most vacuous lines possible, i.e. Simply The Best (a tagline that a British website that keeps a tagline database reports more than 150 brands using), or some line featuring words like experience, committed, excellence, quality and similarly empty words.

However, there are those businesses out their who make the extra effort, or spend a little more for a better writer. These businesses think harder about what they want their tagline to convey, and, as a result, while the taglines these brands choose may not be brilliant, they stand out, they work a little harder.

When I see taglines like these, I like these companies a little better.

Here are three examples:

Sligo Plastering. We Go To The Wall For You. This is not just a silly pun. They’ve found a way to say “committed” without invoking that wornout word.

Zel Nor Auto Body Shop. We Meet By Accident. (My apology if I don’t have this brand name quite right, it was on a truck I glimpsed briefly.)

Marble Life. We Work Stone Miracles. I may be giving these guys more credit than they deserve. The way I read this line, it works the double meaning of “stone”, one being the literal noun, “stone”, as in granite, marble, etc.; the other being the slang adjective circa the 60’s that means, roughly, very, totally, extremely, as in Hendrix’s song, “Stone Free”. I have no way to know if they intended this word play, but I’d like to think so. And I didn’t even mention my favorite part of this tagline, which adds a cheesy charm that is endearing. At the end of their tagline, they have, as if it was a hand written, last minute addition to the tagline, “and grout!”

Like I say, none of these taglines is brilliant. But each of them at least tries to express something beyond merely a flat articulation of what business they’re in, and each does this with a little humanity and humor. Taglines like these at least have a chance of making a little difference, giving the brand a slight edge, a smidgeon more likability.

So, hurray for you, small businesses that at least make an effort, tagline wise.

With a brand name like Tagline Jim, you might expect me to appoint myself an expert on all things tagline. But, given my long standing contention that those of us in advertising really have very little knowledge about how the advertising we create really works, it would be disingenuous and hypocritical for me to claim any degree of expertise in what I do.

On the other hand, I do regard myself as a specialist. This more modest claim seem far more justifiable. While I’ve been a copywriter for more than 30 years, and “copywriter” usually means being a generalist, throughout my career I’ve focused on taglines whenever the opportunity has arisen. More than any other copywriting challenge, I love the intellectual exercise of trying to boil a brand, or an ad campaign’s central idea,down to a small set of evocative, interruptive or memorable words. And I think I’m very good at doing this.

I continue to write ads, brochures, website content, radio and TV spots, direct mail and other kinds of advertising, but a few years ago I decided that it was time to make my long-unofficial specialty official. Tagline Jim was born. Every year a larger percentage of the work I do involves the creation of taglines and all the deep-dive positioning and branding thinking that precedes the task of writing the tagline itself. As this percentage rises, so does my job satisfaction.

“We’re happy for you, but what, if anything, is the point of all this self-indulgent blathering?”, you may be wondering.

All of the above blathering is prelude to the insight I’m now hoping to articulate. Within this blog, and in many other contexts, I speak “authoritatively” about taglines in general, and particular taglines that I find noteworthy. I analyze, pontificate and judge taglines, as if I actually “knew” something about them. It is interesting to me that no one has ever really challenged this “authority”. The fact is, there is less accountability attached to taglines and judgements about them than any other forms of persuasive communication out there. The effectiveness of a tagline can seldom be measured. Only is extreme cases do we see a dramatic effect that seems to be largely caused by a tagline. ( I cite foundation repair company The Crack Team’s A Dry Crack is  a Happy Crack! as an example of a tagline that almost immediately drove their business dramatically upward.) So, arguing that such and such a tagline is great, or sucks, is easy to do. Anyone can do it. Because there’s no objective, measurable basis for refuting such judgements.

This being the case, one might argue that what I’ve done in specializing in taglines is to cower in a safe little corner of advertising, where I’m impervious to attack.

There may be some truth to that. I certainly do enjoy being in a position where I needn’t fear being attacked by anyone armed with studies and stats. It’s undeniably emboldening.

However, one of the main appeals of working with taglines is that, because their effectiveness can seldom be quantified, all the thinking and judgements about taglines must be based on thoughtful reasoning and the gut feelings of smart, talented people. Before the advent of quantitative testing, this is how all of advertising operated, and those who worked in advertising during the pre-quantitative testing era lament the way the whole process changed when testing largely supplanted thoughtful reasoning and gut feelings of smart, talented people. Writing taglines is sort of like the last bastion.

When I hit on really good tagline, there is a palpable, involuntary physiological reaction that I experience. I’m loathe to all it “the aha moment” but that’s probably what it is. Anyone who’s every had a really good idea is familiar with that feeling. But, because it’s an oh so subjective tagline, I’m free to embrace the passion that accompanies that moment, to advocate with conviction, and without fear of being trumped or blunted by someone wielding numbers or other cold, quantified wet blankets.

Since proclaiming myself Tagline Jim, I’ve spent a ton of time thinking hard, really hard, about taglines, re-examining all of my decades of previous thinking, as well as the thinking of many smart advertising minds. I’ve looked long and hard at “great” taglines and bad taglines and tried to figure out what confers that status, as good or bad, on them.

As a result, I’ve developed several points of view regarding taglines, some of which run contrary to the current conventional wisdom on taglines. During this next year, I’m going to devote maybe one post a month to discussing and defending some of these contrarian positions.

I hope that some you out there will take me on if you find flaws in my thinking. Don’t let me get away with any glibness or sophistry. The only way we will all get smarter about the function and value of taglines is through critical dialogue. So, let’s have at it.

The other day my colleague, themarketingspot’s Jay Ehret, called my attention to another website, gettingattention.org, which sponsors an award program to recognize the best taglines from not-for-profit organizations. Nancy E. Schwartz runs this website and the Taggies, and I love that she works so hard to shine a light on the value of a good tagline. Yay Nancy.

Of course, as is my inclination, I was prepared to savage the 18 winning taglines. As it turns out, my critique doesn’t rise to the level (sink to the depths?) of “savaging”.  But I would like to point out some interesting patterns that seems to reveal itself across these winning taglines.

First, let me list the winners. (They are broken out into subcategories, but I’m going to disregard those, as they don’t bear on my comments.)

New Depot Players Community Theatre. Play Your Part. (The tagline for their fundraising campaign.)

Indiana Association for Community Economic Development. You Make A Difference . . . (We Make It Easier)

Wounded Warrior Project. The greatest casualty is being forgotten.

Librarians Without Borders. Putting information in the hands of the world.

Youth Express. Potential Meets Opportunity

Lake Champlain International. Clean Water. Healthy Fish. Happy People.

The Jewish Federations of North America. The Strength of a People. The Power of Community.

University of Hawaii Foundation. For our University, our Hawaii, our Future

Community food & Justice Coalition. Food for People, Not Profit

Elder Services of Worcester, Inc. There’s no place like home

The TARA Project. Empowering Communities. Ending Poverty.

University of West Florida Libraries. The Quickest Way from Q to A!

Maryland SPCA. Feel The Warmth of a Cold Nose.

Enactus. A head for business. A heart for the world.

Vehicles for Change. Help Drive Change.

Funding Exchange. It’s all big when you’re changing the world (fundraising campaign)

Goodwill Industries Serving Eastern Nebraska and Southwest Iowa. Your Future Is Calling (For an employment program involving phone-based customer service jobs.)

Ecological Farming Association. Feed the World You Want to Live In

The good news is that all of these lines are pretty clear about the message. The bad news is that, given the importance of emotion in funding and supporting these organizations, I found only three to be emotionally resonant and/or evocative. That is to say, only these three lines reached deep enough for me to feel.

The Greatest Casualty Is Being Forgotten. This is, at face value, a powerful line. but it has a really nice double meaning that takes awhile to get to, because it’s initial meaning is so powerful. As I read it, it can mean “To be forgotten is, itself, the greatest casualty”, and “We are forgetting the greatest casualty”.

Feel the warmth of a cold nose. This is one of those taglines that digs a little deeper to make its point felt.

It’s all big when you’re changing the world. This tagline states a deeper, borderline profound truth, eloquently.

Notice, please, what all three of these lines have in common. They are all complete, coherent thoughts. Right away, that puts them in a strong position in contrast to the two and three part staccato, proto-thoughts. The latter taglines have rhythm, parallelism and sometimes juxtaposition in their favor. But because they don’t express an actual thought, it is far less likely that they will reach the reader on an emotional level.

Oh-oh, I can feel it welling up inside me, one of my favorite old saws: Don’t say it, convey it.

I was tempted to include The quickest way from Q to A! but it contains a couple of flaws that I couldn’t get past. First, it’s that dang exclamation point. Granted this was written by a student, so maybe I should forgive the overpunctuation . . . nah, it’s unacceptable, I don’t care how young or old you are. The other problem is that I’m not sure it’s credible. If I understand the message that this tagline is supposed to be conveying, it’s about the value of a librarian, versus the internet. It is at least debatable that getting help from a librarian is faster than researching on the internet. It might be a superior choice for other reasons, but if you’re adept at internet searching, it’s pretty dang fast. Maybe I’m being too harsh here. Thoughts?

Fully one third of these taglines resort to the well worn two-part or three-part tagline template. Some are better than others, but I generally regard this approach as the lazy or easy way out.

Some of the other taglines, for me, laid a little flat. they are what I would consider serviceable but unremarkable:

Potential Meets Opportunity, Help Drive Change, There’s no place like home, Putting Information in The Hands of The World. None of these is a bad tagline, it’s just that they don’t get to me. I recognize that much of what I’m saying here is pretty subjective, but, hey, welcome to my world.

Interesting to me is that Putting Information in The Hands of The World didn’t evoke much for me, but Feeding the world you want to live in did, a little bit. One difference is that the former simply states what they do, whereas the latter line injects some aspirational emotion into its characterization of what they do. It’s not just about feeding the world, but about transforming it in the process. Whereas the former line doesn’t take the thought that extra step. Some allusion to what effect putting information into the hands of the world might have, might have helped.

What I’m really pleased about is that a competition like this even exists. Anything out there that will shine a light on the function and value of good taglines is oh so welcome. So, kudos to Ms. Schwartz, and to all those who cared enough to submit their taglines for consideration. I only wish there were a comparable competition in the for-profit world.

For another take on the Taggies, check out Jay Ehret’s TheMarketingSpot blog, where he tells me he will be posting his thoughts this week.

Remember, back in the 80’s, when the National Pork Board and its ad agency, Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt, began a campaign touting pork as The Other White Meat? At the time, this tagline got a lot of attention, and was credited with having a huge impact on pork perception and consumption—a 20% increase in sales over three years. And this, despite the fact that the Department of Agriculture does not deem pork to be a white meat.

The National Pork Board and Bozell were all happy as pigs in poop. And this campaign became a text book case of effective repositioning, spearheaded by that tagline.

Fast forward to 2011, when they changed to a new campaign with a new tagline—Pork. Be Inspired. My immediate reaction was, “What?! Are they nuts? How could they walk away from their iconic tagline? And was Be Inspired really the best they could do?”

Since then, I’ve learned at least part of the reason for this seemingly foolish shift. As usual, the outsider’s snap judgment about such a turn of events merely reflects the outsider’s ignorance of the inside story. This realization would be humbling if I were capable of that.

So, one realization that The Board and its current agency, Schafer Carter Condon, came to, was that defining your brand’s positioning in terms of the competition can be a weak, defensive approach. Of course, back when they initiated this campaign, no one saw it that way. Clearly, this is one of those depends-on-the-circumstances-and-at-what-point-in-the-brand’s-history-the-positioning-happens kind of things. But I can certainly see that, after a certain point, for pork to define itself purely in terms of its similarity to chicken and turkey and in contrast to beef in might not be ideal.

The more interesting and more compelling reason that their old tagline was working against them was this: Pork, when it’s cooked properly, isn’t literally white the way chicken and turkey white meat is. It’s more like red or brown, I’m told. (I don’t eat pork, so what do I know?) The Department of Agriculture, it turns out, has a point.

Only when pork is overcooked does it turn kind of white, with an accompanying dryness that isn’t yummy. So the nation has essentially been trained to overcook pork until it’s nice and white and dry, thus diminishing its appeal—and, presumably, its sales—over the past decade or two. Isn’t that funny? Maybe not to the pork folks.

So they had sound reasons to abandon The Other White Meat. But, in the shadow of such an iconic tagline, Be Inspired is pretty dang lame. I mean, c’mon. If pork, in any form, can truly be a source of inspiration, then it’s time to pack up that word and ship it off to meaninglessland. Surely pork merits a more interesting—and credible—tagline. I would love to have had a shot at that one.