On Tight Text and Taglines

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on November 1st, 2010 at 08:47 AM | | Tweet

The campaigns that have held up over decades are ones that used few (not one) words to paint a picture that lingered in a zeitgeist way--necessarily tied to what was happening in the culture.

Less is more.  Kill your darlings.  Show don’t tell.  Thus are the aphorisms of succinct prose.

Arielle Ford’s recent HuffPo post on superfluous verbiage in literature and its effect on readers got me thinking about current and past trends in taglines, which dovetails the necessity for direct messaging in general. 

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the popularity of one word sentences in advertising: copy. print. pack. ship. for example.  A series of single utterances that align with the way the brain has been rewired.  That’s the theory, anyway.  The advertising leader Saatchi, has come up with something it calls “one word equity” which is a distillation strategy they employ to a brand in order boil it down to its most salient common denominator word.  It’s their response to advertising in the digital age—but as far as I could tell from perusing the site, given that the idea was launched four years ago and the concept is still half-baked, I’d say they missed the lovemark on that one.

The campaigns that have held up over decades are ones that used few (not one) words to paint a picture that lingered in a zeitgeist way—necessarily tied to what was happening in the culture.  Here are some examples:

FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES.  That one held up the wings of United Airlines for more than 30 years.  It died in 1997 when it became clear that flight attendants were not universally courteous, and flyers themselves, even less so. 

WHERE’S THE BEEF?  Put Wendy’s in the fast food driver’s seat, as that tag became a slogan for the 80’s generally.  The culture, like that prim old lady, wanted to hold industries and politicians accountable for their claims, and the sentiment behind “Where’s the beef” was echoed throughout the land, from bedrooms to boardrooms.

JUST DO IT.  Minimalism at its best.  Combined with the Nike swoosh, this winner tag boiled success down to its basics.  (C’mon Saatchi, you really think it would have been as successful had the tag been truncated to “do”?  Me thinks not!). This brand seized the cultural paradigm of the burgeoning individualism and DIY (dare I say it) maverickness of a generation of self-loathers who wished to move beyond whining to embrace winning.  And it worked!

Anymore, our best stylists are Tweeters who express volumes in 140 characters or less.  More than a word; less than a diatribe.