FBI MEMOS
Memos from the ad agency

There is an excellent article about new business by Noelle Weaver in Advertising Age magazine called “Agency Reviews During a Recession.” She talks about how tough it can be to find new business during difficult economic times. That’s a no brainer. But then she goes on to the unsettling changes that are happenning in the review process, specifically with RFPs.

As a new-business director, I’m not hearing crickets quite yet, but I have noticed that many of the RFPs we have received are either project-based and/or aren’t quite as solid of an opportunity that we’d like to think it is.

Consider two increasingly common questions found on RFPs:

Question #12: Tell us what a creative program/campaign might look like.
Question #13: Please tell us what a program such as the one you outlined above might cost.

It’s becoming a trend.

At that point, I thought Noelle must have our offices bugged. Or if she was reading my mind. We have had some interesting RFPs come our way lately. Some of them were so “interesting” that we had to pass on participating. There was a review for a new product launch a month or so ago that our agency was uniquely qualified to handle. We would have gone into it feeling like we were the front-runner for winning the account. The account was large enough to get us all excited. Then we read the RFP. They wanted a full spec creative campaign presented in their headquarters, 1000 miles away. And they wanted it in a week. We’re a small shop. We couldn’t possibly get that done. So we had to pass.

In a perfect world, all new business would grow organically out of relationships made through networking. A new client would go through our capabilities and get to know us and then decide to engage our services. Also, in a perfect world we would all ride on unicorns and it would rain candy. So, we have to deal with the RFP process. It is a process that is inherently flawed. And we learn more and more questions to ask up front every time we go through one. For instance, we put a whole lot of time into a response, only to not make the first cut. We found out later that there were 26 agencies invited to respond. Now, we ask how many are involved up front.

I could go on and on about the RFP process. But I won’t. I will say this, if you are looking to hire an agency and you are going with the RFP route, there is some responsibility on your end. You need to do some due diligence up front. Investigate potential agencies and narrow down your choices. Don’t ask for spec creative to be conjured up in an information vacuum. Don’t ask for responses from agencies you have little interest in working with as “a favor.” Remember, it’s a Request for Proposal. Make your requests reasonable.

Or, better yet, just hire us.

I love providing tech support for Jim’s lovely blog. hopefully I’m done for a while

A couple of weeks ago, we started getting search results in Google that looked like this:

Notice on the second listing, the warning to stay away from our website because we may harm your computer. Stunned we were, indeed. So I started poking around and noticed we had been hacked. And I noticed that all of the warnings were coming on the agency blog, not on the main site. So I went and looked and found that someone had gotten in and inserted some Spam text into several posts. So Chris, who sits in the big corner office and whistles all day, had to go in and de-hackify it and install the newest version of Wordpress. The only negative result was that we lost the tags on all our posts.

Finally, yesterday, the warning disappeared from Google. So we’re back in the blog business. I know how excited you must be for us.

I grew up in the telephone generation. Written communication was limited to two occasions a year - after Christmas and my birthday when my mother insisted that I sit down and write thank-you notes. If I wanted to communicate with someone, I went to the phone in the kitchen and dialed, or, more likely, waited until I saw them again.

If you define a friend as someone you have frequent communication with, I would say people I knew growing up had four or five real “friends.” And I think the reason for this is the inherent shyness and social awkwardness that is present in everybody. I might have sat next to Bob everyday in math class for a year, but if I had never called him before, to do so would be taking a huge risk of possible awkwardness. The thought of having to explain who you are on the phone to someone can be quite daunting. “Hi, Bob, this is Jim. From math class? I sit next to you? Remember, the skinny guy with the bad complexion?”

Email changed all that. It is much easier to explain who you are in writing, because you don’t fear the awkward silence from the other end if the person doesn’t recognize you, no matter how unlikely that might be. Suddenly, people were comfortable striking up communications with folks they hadn’t talked to in years, or only met briefly, because it was from the comfort of a keyboard. Suddenly, the number of “friends” people could claim skyrocketed. Adding someone I just met to my address book and forwarding jokes was a great way to begin lasting friendships. Even if I never found myself in the same room with that person again.

Now, email is old school. Adults send three emails for every text. With teens, it is the other way around. Young consumers play by their own set of multi-tasking, micro-messaging rules. And most marketers are failing at getting any message through to them. In a world they completely don’t understand, marketers just assume more is better, and they increase the frequency of their old school messages. This is a generation that can do homework, chat on Facebook, keep up with Twitter and text messaging, all at the same time. According to a 2007 study by MTV and Microsoft, 14-24 year olds have an average of 53 people they consider friends. Multi-tasking is all they’ve ever known. They can filter the noise out.
”
The smart marketers are getting involved, and they’re getting noticed for it. Every company should have a blog. Every company should be on MySpace. Every company should be on Facebook. And guess what? If you do all that, you’re already behind the curve.

I’ve mentioned my current obsession, Twitter, here before. Some people I follow were having a debate over which theme park within driving distance from Nashville provided the best bang for the buck. I had something to add a few days later, but couldn’t remember who was talking about it. One of the parks was Holiday World, so I did a tweetscan search. Lo and behold, Holiday World had just started using Twitter. I went to their Website. They have a blog. Because this communication is all personal and engaging, I now follow them and added them to my RSS reader. Come summertime, when I need a quick getaway with my kid, you’d better believe Holiday World is going to be top of mind when considering destinations.

There’s always new stuff coming down the pike. The next application I need to explore is something called BrightKite. All the cool kids are doing it. I’ll let you know what I find out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go Twitter a bunch of friends, many of whom I’ve never actually met, a recommendation of my new friend, Holiday World, a place I’ve never actually been, as a great family vacation destination.

We won some more Tellys. The press release follows. If you are from Adweek or the New York Times, I officially give you permission to reprint this anywhere you want.

May 4, 2008, Nashville, TN - “Frank/Best International, a full-service advertising agency located at 705 2nd Avenue in Nashville, was the recent recipient of four Telly Award Finalist trophies at the 29th Annual Telly Awards based out of Ashland, KY. The Telly Awards are a national and international advertising competition honoring videos and television commercials produced at the local, regional and spot market level. FBI won for television commercials produced for Honda Lawnmowers, the Nashville Zoo, Columbia State Community College, and Honda Generators. (See commercials below.)

This year, the Telly Awards had over 14,000 entries from film & video production firms and advertising companies representing all 50 states and several countries. Over the years, Tellys have been featured as coveted marketing accolades in movies and TV shows alike. They’ve appeared on shows like the Bob Newhart Show, Thirtysomething and The Closer, as well as in films such as Nothing In Common and What Women Want.

“We’ve been very fortunate over the years regarding Tellys,” said Tim Best, FBI creative director and founding partner. “We’ve won a bunch but it’s always nice to be recognized by one’s peers and, of course, clients don’t mind having a cool trophy on their shelf, either.”

Telly Awards are the same height and weight as an Academy Award and are manufactured by the same company. In its 11 years of business, FBI has won nearly 30 Tellys.

Besides Honda Lawnmowers, the Nashville Zoo, Columbia State Community College and Honda Generators, Frank/Best International works with clients like Sprintz Furniture, RODE Microphones, Honda Marine, SmartSpace, Honda Engines, New Fossil and, just this week, was awarded television production assignments from Austin Peay State University.

For more information, contact Jim Reams, VP Public Relations at 615-255-6234 Ext. 103

Honda Lawnmowers:

Nashville Zoo:

Columbia State:

Honda Generators:

Last Friday, we had a cookout at the office, followed by a journey to Third and Lindsley, which is a legendary live music club a block from our office, to see FBI President, Bobby Frank, play drums with his classic rock band, Zig Zag.

We had burgers and brats and cole slaw and potato salad and beer and Cokes. (If you aren’t from the South, “Cokes” is the term we use for all soft drinks. It is equivalent to “pop” or “sodas.”) I put my camera in the hands of Greg, who was obviously more interested in the beer than the picture taking. We did get a couple of shots.

If you were our client, you would have been invited. Don’t you think that’s enough to hire us as your advertising agency?

The office hasn’t been abuzz like this since we won the Honda account. It finally arrived in the mail, and was installed within minutes. Yes, we are in Music City and to prove it, we now have this:

Hopefully, this addition to the Frank/Best International Galactic Headquarters will inspire some great creative thinking.

We use the term Web 2.0 around here with a bit of a chuckle, because it doesn’t actually mean anything specific. It is a constantly changing and evolving buzzword for way to interact with others online.

Which, for businesses, means interactive marketing and public relations. And because of it, branding has never been more vital than it is right now.

Search Engines, bloggers and chat rooms have made brand reputation one of the most important aspects in success or failure in this Web 2.0 world. A brand’s reputation used to be defined solely by product quality and the message a company pushed out from its headquarters. There were very few avenues for consumers to find out about product quality, good or bad, without shelling out the money to buy it. Clever 30-second TV spots, slick magazine advertising and a good training program for the staff could cover a multitude of sins. Today, pissing off the wrong person, such as a blogger, can cause irreparable harm to a brand’s reputation.

Restaurants and moviemakers have known this for a long time. A bad review in the Sunday paper could always do far more harm to a film or eatery than a good review could help.

If your company doesn’t have a two-way interaction going on with your customers and potential customers, you are way behind the curve. And the companies who are setting the curve are finding more and faster ways to respond to their customer’s needs. Case in point: Twitter.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks the question, “What are you doing?” And the posts, or “tweets,” are limited to no more than 140 characters. You decide whose updates to follow, and it becomes sort of an ongoing, online chat fest.

Many companies, LinkedIn, H. R. Block and Southwest among the most notable, have Community Managers who follow what people are saying about them on Twitter. This allows them to contact, (instantly in some cases) folks who are having problems. For instance, Helen Mosher, who blogs at The Mosher Pit, had trouble with a company called Mixx, and wrote a short tweet about it to vent her frustration. What happened next surprised her.

“Next thing I knew, Mixx had added me on Twitter. The good folks at Mixx asked what hiccup I had run across. I was very impressed: within a few minutes of making a complaint about a technology, the technology folks approached me with “Hey, I see you had trouble with our platform. What can we do to make it better?”

OMG if VW had done this with me when my Jetta was made of fail, I might not be driving a Toyota today!”

Twitter can also be used as a direct marketing tool, something Southwest occasionally does, to announce sales and specials to its Twitter followers (which includes me).

Obviously, if Twitter’s popularity continues to grow, the logistics of following your products and services in real time may become impractical. That is what traditional customer service channels are for. But tech-geek early adopters will always be looking for the next new social media communications platform. And smart companies will follow them there, too. And if done well, it will only help their brand reputation.

If you need help integrating your company into the ever-evolving world of Social Media networking, send me an email at jim at fb-i dot com. Or, if you’re already on Twitter, shout out a tweet to @jimreams. Maybe you’ll end up with some Frank/Best drumsticks.

(This is the blog for Frank Best International, an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee. This post was written by Jim Reams, Twitter Geek.)

Working closely with our Search Marketing group, Work Media, over the last several months has really opened my eyes to the vast amounts of money that changes hands in the world of paid search advertising. We have many research tools that use technology such as web scraping to estimate who is spending how much on paid search. I’m used to the numbers now, but in the beginning, they blew me away. There are some companies that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per day on paid search advertising. If you have ever wondered why Google has so much money, there’s your answer.

But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Search marketing is the most targeted form of advertising in existence. Your ad is only seen by people searching for keywords you choose. In other words, if you are selling spiked dog collars, and someone is searching for spiked dog collars, you’d certainly be happy to pay a dollar or so for that person to click through to your site.

We have the Super Bowl coming up on Sunday. If you are a Pepsi or a FedEx, the $2.7 million dollars you are shelling out for thirty seconds of air time is worth it, because not only is the audience tremendous, but it is one of the few times where millions of people actually look forward to watching the commercials. However, when you do the math, you could buy $7,400 per day for an entire year in highly targeted, paid search advertising for that kind of money. I expect that the marketers buying time on the broadcast will also be buying keywords related to their ad creative. If they’re not, they are missing a huge opportunity to convert the passive experience of watching a TV spot into an active customer connection.

We think that the rumors of the impending death of the thirty-second TV spot are greatly exaggerated. And if you are looking for an advertising agency to do your Super Bowl spot for next year, by all means, give us a call. We still believe in the power of TV. But remember, it’s a brave new world out there. Incorporating search into your overall marketing plan is a great opportunity to make sure your message is getting to the specific people you want to hear it.

Bobby Frank and I just got back yesterday morning from our trip to the NAMM show in Anaheim, CA. NAMM is the organization that used to be the National Association of Music Merchants. It is a convention of manufacturers of musical instruments and accessories who set up booths for the folks who buy such things, like music store owners and buyers.

We were there supporting the work we did on the booth for RODE Microphones, out of Sydney, Australia.

We managed to find two Aussie girls now living in LA, Szilva and Shelly, to act as hostesses during the show. Here I am giving them a pep talk.

You see a lot of musicians walking around at NAMM, many of whom are only famous inside musician circles. (”Isn’t that the guy that played keys in Flock of Seagulls?”) We saw Danny Seraphine, the drummer from the early days of Chicago walking around. He was one of the main influences for both Bobby and me to start playing drums. (Both of us attribute the four bar solo from “Make Me Smile” as pivotal in our initial instrument choice.) So I took Bobby’s pic with him. Danny is on the left. They look like long, lost cousins.

Here’s a photo of Lita Ford. At least, I think it’s Lita Ford.

I listened to a group called Synergy Brass Quintet at the Conn-Selmer booth. They played Rossini’s Overture from “Barber of Seville”, which most of us remember as the soundtrack to Bugs Bunny’s “Rabbit of Seville.” This photo is of their French Horn Player, Jon Hurrell, and his very distinctive hair style.

And finally, speaking of hair, NAMM is known for it. There are tens of thousands of aging rocker dudes who haven’t cut their hair in decades milling about. In fact, much like a company might say “our staff has over 200 years experience” I decided that the NAMM show has “over 1,000,000 years of hair.” I also coined the phrase “Crystal Male” which is the distinctive straight hair down to the belt look that a lot of rocker guys are know to sport. There were mohawks and braided beards and pink hair and green hair and half-shaved heads and any other style of hair you could imagine. Then, there was this:

All in all, it was a good show, there’s a funny story involving blue duct tape, a big magnet, a two-block ride in a stretch Hummer and maybe just a little bit of alcohol. But sometimes, you have to let what happens at NAMM stay at NAMM.

I don’t know how long FedEx has been using their current logo, but I suspect it has been at least 10 or 15 years. The trucks and boxes are everywhere, and I have seen the logo thousands and thousands of times. A seven-year-old pointed out that there is an arrow between the E and the x. All these years of seeing it, and I never saw it. Now that I know it is there, it shines like a beacon that can’t be ignored.

Well done, FedEx logo designer.

Bobby Frank and I are going out to California this week to the NAMM Show in Anaheim. We are supporting a booth we designed for a new client, RODE Microphones, out of Sydney, Australia. We’ll also do a little networking while we are there, as the music business is one of our specialties.

So I went to weather.com to plan my packing. No surprise, it’s going to be 70 during the day and 50 at night. What I found amusing was that there is a 10% chance of rain every day.

Really? 10%? Everyday? That’s just covering your butt in case somebody feels a rogue sprinkle up in Burbank.

There really is no need for weathermen in L.A., is there?

Steve Martin in L. A. Story

A friend was over watching some football the other day, and he mentioned how bad he thought the Coors Light campaign using press conference footage was. I have to agree. It is ham-fisted and not very funny. But they seem to be sticking with it. He’s a version I found that I can get down with.

Part of my job is finding new business for the agency. One common approach is to send some of our materials, samples of our print ads, our radio and tv work (our reel), to marketing directors and CMOs and other assorted bigshots at various companies. I also send a pair of our very popular Frank/Best International drumsticks. After a week or two, I call to follow up with them. 98% of the time, I get voicemail, so I leave a message. Most of those messages don’t get returned. That’s no big deal, I know I’m cold calling them and I don’t take it personally.

So I wanted to send a holiday card to all the folks who didn’t return my call. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek ode, poking fun at the political correctness that has taken over the holiday season. The boss, Bobby Frank, thought it was funny, but was apprehensive about actually sending it out. I changed his mind at an after-hours meeting at our favorite watering hole. The whole point is to elicit a laugh and maybe someone will actually talk to me. It has worked before. Behold the beauty of my holiday greeting:

I sent you some drumsticks, our book and our reel,
Then I gave you a call, just to see how you feel.

Your phone rang and rang, but from you not a peep,
So I did what you asked — left my name at the beep.

I’ll admit you don’t know me, it was a cold call,
That you didn’t call back, I don’t blame you at all.

Still, - tis the season of goodwill and cheer,
So to get in the spirit of this time of year,

I’d sure like to wish a Merry Christmas to you,
I would, but I can’t, - cause my boss is a Jew.

At Frank/Best we love each religion and sect,
So it’s imperative that I be politically correct.

Happy Holidays.

It’s funny, Bobby feels that the word “Jew” is sort of offensive (or at least off-putting), yet the word “Jewish” is not. The problem is, “Jewish” doesn’t rhyme with anything.

Anyway, if you are looking for an ad agency, give me a call. You’ll get a free pair of drumsticks out of the deal.

(This is the blog for Frank Best International, an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee. We currently have a Christmas tree and a menorah on display in the lobby. Happy Hanukkah!)

Rebranding, or changing your image, is tough. In most industries, there is a scale from economy to luxury, and a brand will fall into some range along that scale. And there shall that brand stay for evermore. Motel Six is never going to compete with the Four Seasons. Subway isn’t going after the Ruth’s Chris regulars. When Nissan wanted to go upscale, they launched a new brand, Infiniti. Same with Honda and Acura. Mid-level brands that try to go uptown do so at their own peril.

A couple of years ago, our president, Bobby Frank, had a case of new-car fever, and he was considering a Volkswagen Phaeton. The dealer was having a good deal on his stock of Phaetons because nobody was buying them. Nobody was buying them because it was a $70,000 car. It was a beautiful car, but is was a $70,000 Volkswagen. There is no way the “car of the people” can pull off hyper-luxury and get away with it. Do they make Phaetons anymore. No. It was a costly failed experiment.

I caught the last couple of minutes of John Mayer’s segment on Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival on PBS the other night. He was playing some screaming blues guitar. I have been watching Mayer with some interest the last few years from a music standpoint. (Like everyone else in this agency, and in Nashville, I am a musician.) But I started to think of it from a different point of view — from a marketing point of view. And what Mayer has done the last couple of years is undertake a bold attempt at rebranding himself.

Rebranding is nothing new in entertainment. When successful, it is said that someone has “reinvented” himself, like when a stand-up comedian gets cast as a villain in a feature film. When it works that person is hailed as a genius. However, it is a risky road to follow if a performer is worried about his fan base or cash flow.

John Mayer got incredibly famous for his frat/pop music with songs like, “Your Body is a Wonderland,” and “No Such Thing.” Well, he decided a couple of years ago that he was going to release a greasy, dirty, screaming-guitar blues record. He hired two legendary musicians, Steve Jordan (drums) and Pino Palladino (bass) and went to the studio and got down and dirty. And he did the morning and late night show circuit to back it up. And people let out a collective, “huh?”

In current popular music (leaving out genres like Gregorian Chant and Aboriginal Folk Music) there is a scale similar to the economy/luxury scale. It isn’t so much a scale of quality of music as it is a scale of musical refinement. (I’m not saying one end of the scale is “better” than the other. I’m talking about refinement of harmonic complexity, instrumentation, production values, etc.) I think it is tougher as a musician to reinvent yourself down the scale of musical refinement than up. If Mayer had started as a greasy blues guitar player, and then evolved into a pop star, he might have pulled it off on a bigger scale. Two examples are Green Day and Goo Goo Dolls, who both went from punk to pop. But to go the other way — Connecticut pop star wants to be taken seriously as a down-home blues guy — is tough. The blues purists won’t take him seriously and the pop fans won’t like it.

In my opinion, Mayer is a fine blues guitarist, but I don’t think he’ll ever get the traction or fan base as a blues guy that he did with his pop stuff. And, truth is, he probably doesn’t care. If he did care, he might have gone the other way, up the scale, and professed his love for the standards, releasing a record full of Sinatra and Nat King Cole tunes.

Thankfully that didn’t happen.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best International, an ad agency in Music City USA.)

We are putting together a trade show for a client. The show is in January in Los Angeles. The client is in Australia. We are doing an Australian theme for the show. The others in the office decided that I would be best suited to find the six Australian bikini models that we have worked into the theme of the booth.

I shall do my best.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best International an advertising, marketing, PR and trade show firm in Nashville. If you are an Australian model and you will be in L.A. in mid-January, drop me a line.)

I just received an email from a company that specializes is on-hold phone stuff. The email was nicely laid out, with several fetching stock photos of phone-y stuff. Behold a portion of the message:

This is {REDACTED}, VP of Sales & Marketing, for {REDACTED AGAIN}. We specialize in producing professional on hold messaging programs for your in bound calls.

(Isn’t “redacted” a great word?)

Features:

* Strategically Crafted Scripts through Client Consultation
* Extensive Music Library
* Professional Voice Talent
* Digital Players with Superior Sound Quality

Results:

* Synergize your Advertising Campaign
* Empower your Taglines & Messages
* Capitvate your Callers
* Increase Sales!

Never mind that she sent it to an ad agency. I understand that cold calling, even through email, is a numbers game. But let’s break it down, shall we:

Features:
* Strategically Crafted Scripts through Client Consultation
We will convince you that we have interviewed hundreds of folks about voice mail hell. Then, we will charge you to write something along the following lines: “Thank you for calling Frank/Best International. Your call is very important to us . . .”
* Extensive Music Library
We will pick some music out for you.
* Professional Voice Talent
We will charge you to have my neice record your messages. She went to drama school once.
* Digital Players with Superior Sound Quality
We will sell you our “proprietary” box which will sound good during the demo in you office, but will sound just like everything else does over the phone.

Results:

* Synergize your Advertising Campaign
I’m not even going to pretend to know what that means
* Empower your Taglines & Messages
But wait, people are frantically pressing numbers to talk to a real person. How much more power can you give to my taglines?
* Capitvate your Callers
My callers already feel captive, because they have gone to the trouble to call, and now they are stuck in phone hell. Oh, wait . . . you said “capitvate.” I’m sure you meant “captivate” didn’t you? No time for spell check?
* Increase Sales!
OH! Great! Do you have numbers to back that up?!?

I thought finding new business for advertising services was a tough job. I’m glad I’m not selling that.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best International. We have an automatic voice messaging system. But we have a woman with a saucy English accent doing it, so it is more tolerable.)

Adweek is reporting that there are only two 30-second spots remaining for the next Super Bowl on FOX. What stood out to me is this:

ABC holds the record price for an in-game Super Bowl spot, getting $3.3 million for one 30-second Super Bowl spot from netpliance.com in the 2000 Super Bowl.

Ah, the irrationally exuberant days of the dot com Super Bowl wars. Netpliance basically disappeared in November of that same year.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best Interanational, an ad agency in Nashville. If you want one of the two remaining spots on the Super Bowl, we can make it happen.)

I saw this ad somewhere over the Thanksgiving break, I’m pretty sure it was in Esquire.

I have no problem with the manly stereotype that the ad flaunts, that back in the day men were men and your dad was a player and he drank whiskey and you should too, if you want to be a real man like your dad. After all, the ad business deals in stereotypes. We just call them different things, like demographics and image. What struck me as wrong about this ad is that I have always perceived Canadian Club to be fairly gender neutral as far as whiskey goes. It’s light and smooth and I always assumed that a lot of women drank it too. I guess I was wrong. I’m sure they know their audience, and if they are willing to sacrifice women for more men, this should help do the trick.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best International, a full service marketing firm in Nashville. We have been known to do taste tests with whiskey around here, but mostly with the kind from Kentucky.)

There is an article in Brandweek about the impending death of the tagline. Much like the impending death of paper magazines and the imminent introduction of flying cars, there is a bit of hyperbole involved in the article. Case in point, the opening sentence:

Not long ago, every ad had a tagline that stuck with the consumer after the message was delivered. But that former rule may no longer be the norm.

Look at the first sentence: “Not long ago, every ad had a taglinethat stuck with the consumer after the message was delivered.” OK, whatever. That’s a bit of lazy journalism, kind of like dismissing someone’s point with the phrase “OK, whatever.”

So, getting into the meat of the article, it actually seems that the tagline isn’t going away, but there are getting to be fewer of them. One reason:

The reasons range from ever-shorter tenures of CMOs (13 months on average, according to recent research) to ever-splintering consumer demographics.

And another:

Taglines are often more utilitarian and less emotional, experts say. They tend to be fed through the focus group mill until they’re watered down beyond recognition. That process does not produce “Think Different,” “Got Milk?” or “Just Do It.”

So let me get this straight: Taglines are going away because of CMO tenure and because big corporation business tactics churn the life out of them? I guess I can buy that, to a degree. But there is another reason they may be going away. It’s because most of them suck.

One example of a currently used tagline mentioned in the article is Sony’s “Like. no. other.” This line is being used in Europe to sell their new MP3 Player. My first reaction is that it falls into the category of taglines that suck. Here are my reasons. First) The “me too” method of creating a tagline of three words with three periods, making each word its own little highly important sentence has played itself out. It has got to go. (The worst offenders are developers of the trendy mixed-use developments going up these days. Do these folks really think “Live. Work. Play.” is going to drive any new business to their new communities when there are hundreds of other “Live. Work. Play.” communities going up all over the place? Maybe that hasn’t happened in Europe, where they have had Live. Work. Play. communities for thousands of years.) Second) It is just weak. Their point of differentiation with the iPod is that the battery lasts longer. That’s all fine and dandy, but unless your MP3 player can make me popcorn and let me fly on a unicorn to the moon, it is like the others, only with a longer battery life.

Many taglines that could easily have been considered weak can work from sheer frequency of use alone. “Just do it” is a great example of that. So is “Is it in you?” Both lines could have faded into obscurity, if Nike and Gatorade hadn’t stuck with them. Now, they’ve become part of our current American culture.

Memorable taglines can stick with a product decades. Folks of a certain age (mine) will remember “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” and “Plop plop, fizz fizz.” for Alka Seltzer. Tim Best, our Creative Director, was working on Chrysler at the time ‘If you can find a better car, buy it!’ made it’s way into America’s homes. As anyone over age 35 will tell you, that was the mantra for Chrysler’s chairman, Lee Iacocca.

I spent several years as marketing director at a live theatre, where, like the movies, the tagline is still king. I wrote some good ones and some forgettable ones, but I had to come up with one every eight weeks for a new production. It can take minutes or days to come up with the perfect one. And sometimes you just give up and use the best you have. There are also some interesting new factors involved in tagline writing the past decade or so. Is the top-level URL available? Is it associated with anything negative that comes up on Google’s first couple of pages?

I came up with a tagline for our trade show division here at Frank/Best International yesterday. It says exactly what we want it to say. The domain name is available in a couple of different variations. If you Google the phrase in quotes, there are no results returned. It is six common words, strung together in a brand new way. That’s rare. I can’t tell you what it is yet. While we would never run it through a focus group, the head of the trade show division hasn’t said whether she likes it or not yet. If she doesn’t, we may have to come up with something else. Or, more likely, just use it anyway, since she is always off doing trade shows and probably couldn’t do anything about it.

(This is the blog for Frank/Best Interantional, a full service ad agency in Nashville, Tennessee. If we ever propose a tagline to a client in the future that is three One. Word. Sentences. I am going to have to consider quitting.)