Best ever ad taglines?
Stuff like this is gold dust on marketing, advertising and PR blogs because it's good link-bait-y copy. Top tens always go down well, but if you can match something that tugs at the nostalgia strings of readers, string it out over 20-odd pages and churn out some generic keyword-heavy intros and you're away.
It's ironic that this one is about advertising taglines, as the title 'best every ad taglines?' - or words to that effect - is almost an advertising tagline in itself.
Anyway, the slogans on this article by Forbes - coincidentally one of the least user-friendly sites in existence - are inevitably US-based, but enough of them should have leaked through to our combined UK and European consciousnesses for them to make sense.
Some are universal. BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine is timeless. Or so you would have thought, as BMW recently ditched it for the appalling Joy.
Just Do It - also a good one, and a slogan coincidentally used by my Dad, in his general attitude to life. Not because of a freaky baseball-cap-wearing US geriatric, but because it worked for him.
Got milk? has alway baffled me. Surely the answer is either 'yes I have go milk' or 'no I haven't got milk'?
Mastercard's There Are Some Things Money Can't Buy tagline is supposedly well-loved. And while it's spawned a thousand spoofs, it doesn't exactly stand out. Does it do anything that other cards don't do? No, it doesn't. So who exactly 'loves' it?
Verizon's Can You Hear Me Now? suggests to me that the line is bad, forcing a redial. It also sounds like something a Tarantino protagonist would shout while pumping someone's head full of bullets.
McDonalds' You Deserve a Break Today has an old-world charm, certainly more than I'm Lovin' It. And We Bring Good Things to Life for GE is quaintly pleasing, far more so than the meaningless, aspirational Imagaination At Work. Then again, these were the days before carbon emissions.
Forbes tells us that the simplicity of The Milk Chocolate Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand is what makes it so good. But if describing what a product does makes a tagline clever, why isn't the Pampers slogan Keeps Baby Shit From Falling Out All Over The Place?
And Time to Make the Donuts? Surely the donuts have been made already? What?
You've Come a Long Way, Baby - Virginia Slims' tagline for marketing fags at women - is well-loved, Forbes tells us. Is it? Is it really? Who loves it exactly? The best I can say about something that plays on womens' fears of their own body image is that it smacks of a low animal cunning.
Reach Out and Touch Someone from AT&T is obviously problematic, while Be All You Can Be - for the US army - has a lot of obvious unfortunate rejoinders: 'working-class cannon fodder', perhaps?
Anyway, what I think stuff like this says about advertising is that it's indelibly linked with a hazy nostalgia for time's gone by. No-one's immune to it. It's the reason why old ads get a run out from time-to-time; the reason we form affinities with brands; the reason why articles like this exist.
Because we don't love the taglines. We love the bittwerweet melancholy of remembering.
• What are the 'best-loved' UK advertising slogans? Some that seem typically British include Ah, Bisto!; Go To Work On An Egg; Beanz Meanz Heinz; Have A Break. Have A Kit-Kat; For Mash Get Smash; Hello Tosh, Gotta Toshiba...
Ladbrokes doubles up on twattery in World Cup advert
What the fuck is this shit all about?
The ubiquitous and uniformly-awful Wright and the absurd Kamara, known to football fans everywhere as an idiot pundit, are dressed up as traditional English gentlemen and caked in mascara. Why? Here's what Ladbrokes says of the M&C Saatchi ad:
The creative features a series of entertaining vignettes, some of which are 1960s themed, set to the tune of ‘Self Preservation Society’ from the film The Italian Job. Chris Kamara and Ian Wright give cameo performances extolling England’s chances at the World Cup. As the action comes to a conclusion, it becomes clear that we have been inside the mind of a football fan, watching his decision making process taking place. As we come out of his head we see him blurt out loudly that England are going to win the World Cup, however he has forgotten that he is at dinner with his girlfriend who looks very unimpressed with his inappropriate behaviour.
What a load of utter fucking bollocks. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: it's incoherent; it fails as an attempt to raise Ladbrokes' profile; it fails to communicate a message, and it's not just surreal, it's actually vaguely disturbing.
The crushingly banal observation of Ladbrokes is that the ad communicates the idea that 'having a bet is a fun, contemporary thing to do'. My thoughts on Wright are well-detailed. As for Kamara, he is to change his name to Chris Cabanga by deed poll in an effort to aid England in their World Cup campaign. The fucking tit.
Ladbrokes describes the World Cup as 'the biggest customer recruitment opportunity across a four year cycle', which is probably the most honest assessment of every business's attitude towards South Africa 2010 as you're ever likely to find.
Adidas Cantina advert tells us to celebrate originality – the fucking cheek
People or organisations banging on about how much they love Star Wars is about as boring as it's possible to be.
Referencing Star Wars is anything these days is basically short-hand for 'we know we've got nothing interesting to say, but our demographics love this sort of shit'. It's so tired it's frankly inexcusable.
This effort by Adidas, who can boast some good ads over the years, mixes Star Wars with its various brand ambassadors, including David Beckham, Daft Punk, Snoop, Ian Brown and Noel Gallagher. I don't know who any of the others are.
It's an extremely lazy pastiche of the Cantina scene, and it doesn't really hang together at all when you look at it. Some stuff happens; it may or may not be related; the end.
The climax to all of this is a single line uttered by Beckham so devoid of timing, rhythm or cadence you suspect he's ben anesthetized by his agent as a desperate attempt to get him to co-operate.
Elsewhere, Brown and Gallagher start fights; some witless clown gurns for a bit; and Snoop calls someone a foo'. The amount of cash spunked all over this unfunny pointless ad could probably feed a third world country for a week.
The devastating pay-off to all of this? 'Celebrate originality'. The sheer fucking brass cojones of that slogan.
Noel Gallagher's back catalogue has more originality and less contempt for its audience than this sorry affair.
The worst thing is, I love Adidas. Though, to be fair, I hate Star Wars.
Sky humiliates Nick Knight
Sky has spent the last few years busily redefining what people understand by the phrase 'abject cricket commentary'.
It's a peculiar mix of vulgar, boring, sycophantic, miserable and deeply stupid - seemingly devised by an ad executive via late-80s Radio 1 controller with little understanding of, or fondness for, cricket.
Sky has led the way in gaudifying cricket, which is something I don't have a problem with in the right context and if it's done well. WWE American wrestling, for example, is brilliant at this sort of pageantry. Cricket, especially UK cricket, isn't.
Take a look, for example, at this spot from a recent 20/20 game at a wet Hove, astonishingly described by David Lloyd using the word 'razzamatazz'.
This looks a bit like something you might expect to see in the Carribean, only it doesn't really work in this context. It's a fine example of cricket people just misjudging what works in different situations in cricket.
A bronzed booty jiggling around in front of a load of bare-chested supporters in a pool in Barbados is a tad different from a wet Bank Holiday weekend on the south coast with an ass somewhere between pornographic and Carry On film being gyrated in front of three middle-class kids and their Mum, all wearing cagoules.
Here's another example of cricket people getting it wrong. It features the hapless Nick Knight - really, what did do to deserve this? - doing some sort of cricket dance based on umpiring signals to a remix of Dreadlock Holiday.
To suggest that this doesn't work is to radically overestimate the magnitude of how much the phrase 'this doesn't work' can accurately convey how much something doesn't work. It's pitiful, and it beggars belief that whoever is in charge of of cricket at Sky didn't immediately fire everyone within a ten-mile radius the first time he watched this. It's like seeing Gordon Brown trying to convince people to vote for Labour by dancing to House of Pain.
Just how appalling it is was helpfully pointed out by the Sky commentary team yesterday, when they spent the whole day taking the piss out of it. And if the Sky cricket commentary team - the most miserable, humourless, back-stabbing, fogeyish bunch on the box - are taking the piss out of you, you really are in trouble.