Badvertising

If there's any question as to whether or not advertising is a colossal scam, this should settle the score:

A £125,000 campaign to replace Scotland's Best Small Country In The World tag has been unveiled. And the exciting new catchphrase dreamed up by top advertising brains is... "Welcome to Scotland".

Welcome to Scotland? Can you even copyright that? If I was Scotland, I would be livid. Not because the tag is so simple. But because, even if you paid me a quarter million dollars, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a worse tagline. Trust me. I tried. In fact, the only slogan I came up with that even approaches the shittiness of "Welcome to Scotland" is "Scotland: It's a Country". And even that has a nice ring to it.

The point is this. Taglines are supposed to be ambiguous. If a tagline makes sense, it's not effective. Taglines should be the source of endless confusion, and cripple rational thought processes. They should paradoxically make absolutely no sense, and absolute sense, simultaneously.

Take Nike's slogan, "Just do it". It's brilliant. Nobody knows what it means. I don't even think Nike knows what it means. But I'll tell you what, I can definitely get down with doing it. Especially if Michael Jordan tells me to. Or, DeBeers. They say, "A Diamond Is Forever". Even if a diamond is forever (whatever that entails) won't whoever you give it to be dead by the time forever rolls around? Still, it's a tempting prospect... I'll take two. Then there's McDonald's tagline, "I'm lovin' it". I don't know what I'm supposed to be lovin' but I sincerely doubt it's the McChicken sandwiches or the chronic diarrhea.

Here's the kicker. For whatever reason, badvertising works. That's why I've developed the tagline to end all taglines. It works universally, for every product, everywhere. It's simple. It's perfect. It's three letters long.


Yep. It works like a charm.