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AdSlogans.com -- Wise Words/19
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From the archives of
comes an investigation on
The End Of The End Line
Remember those classic
endlines of the 70s, like ’refreshes the parts’
and ’Schhh. You know who’? In the summer
of 1998, veterans told Harriet Green, the endline
carried little weight with marketers and creatives.
AdSlogans.com revisits the story.
Reproduced from Campaign
magazine, June 12 1998, with the permission of the
copyright owner, Haymarket
Campaign Publications Ltd.
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| The End Of The End
Line by Harriett Green |
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’Ello Tosh, got a Toshiba?’ ‘Vorsprung
durch Technik.’ ‘Tell ’em about
the honey, mummy.’ ‘The ultimate driving
machine.’ ‘Naughty but nice.’
‘For mash get Smash.’
Everybody remembers legendary endlines.
The best ones are buried in our subconscious. They’ve
entered the vernacular. But each of those crackers
was devised long ago and new classics just aren’t
being written any more.
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Many
practitioners believe the endline is effectively
dead. During the 90s, the gloomy theory goes, advertising
has chucked away its inheritance. Heineken ditched
(but later tried to revive) the 15-year old legend
‘refreshes the parts’ in favour of ‘only
Heineken can do this’. Sekonda axed the ten-year-old ‘beware of expensive imitations’
in favour of ‘time is precious’. And
more recently, Nike dropped ’just do it’
for the weaker ‘I can’.
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| Selling the family
silver? |
To Hamish Pringle, Saatchi
& Saatchi’s marketing director [he’s
now Director General of the UK’s Institute of
Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) – ed.], it’s
like selling the family silver. Pringle is reeling
from the proposal by one of his former clients, Commercial
Union, to dump ‘don’t make a drama out
of a crisis’, following its move to a new agency.
Pringle blames inexperienced marketers. “It
makes me really angry when thirtysomething marketing
directors change famous endlines. The best of these
are incredibly important assets. Dropping them screws
up the agency and eventually the brand.”
Gerry Moira, creative director at Publicis, agrees.
“One of the great forgotten skills in advertising
is consistency. We are not living through a vintage
time with endlines. They don’t get time to become
established. Agencies get bored with them and clients
have a ’not invented here’ attitude.”
But it’s not all the fault of on-the-make marketers
or dilettante agencies. Some gems of yesteryear have
actually been banned. ‘Good food costs less
at Sainsbury’s’ was disallowed by the
Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre. Its replacement?
‘Fresh food. Fresh ideas.’
Media fragmentation, too, has taken a toll. In the
70s, a single, 60-second spot in the middle of the
Sweeney was enough to drive your line into the national
consciousness. That’s why ‘Beanz Meanz
Heinz’, ‘drink a pinta milka day’
or ‘Schhh. You know who’ remain vivid
to an entire generation which was only seven years
old the last time they ran. |
| Spending your way
to recognition |
Nowadays you need a whacking spend
to register at all. ‘It’s good to talk’
may be the most recognisable endline of recent years
- but that’s largely because BT has spent lavishly
on getting it across. Yet the search for perfect lines
continues. Andrew Cracknell, chairman and executive
creative director of Ammirati Puris Lintas, explains:
“Three things occupy more time in an agency
than anything else - leaving cards, the location of
the Christmas party and the endline. Whole campaigns
have been held up because the line isn’t right.
Good ideas are killed off in a corridor by middle
management because the line isn’t right.”
Patrick Collister, Ogilvy & Mather’s executive
creative director, confirms this. After the recent
Guinness pitch, O&M eventually lost to Abbott
Mead Vickers BBDO (and its unfashionably powerful
line, ‘good things come to those who wait’).
“There were awful fights about the endline,”
says Collister. “They’re bloody difficult
to do, and to sell internally.” |
Dave ‘ ’ello Tosh’
Trott, creative partner at Walsh Trott Chick Smith,
spells out the endline’s function: “An
endline is to deliver a USP or branding. If you love
my commercial you shouldn’t be able to repeat
to anyone else what it’s about without mentioning
the name of the product and what the ad is saying.
It is not there for mood, or tone of voice, or to
attract a new generation of users. If you have a five-year
idea, that’s your endline.”
Robert Campbell, creative partner at Rainey Kelly
Campbell Roalfe, calls endlines ideas. “I don’t
think they’re good if they’re just confectionery.
They must mean something. They can be a useful centre
of gravity for a campaign.” But that is not
to say they need to be spoken. “If you look
at Helen Mirren and Terence Stamp for Virgin UpperClass,
the endline is obvious: ‘It’s a simple
business decision.’ But it’s unwritten.
We didn’t use it because it would be too in
your face.”
Moira agrees: “Endlines are a very good place
to start. It’s a very good discipline for writing
TV scripts: you know how you are going to resolve
it. But they are not essential.”
In fact, successful advertisers can manage without
them. Renault’s long-running ‘Nicole and
Papa’ campaign never carried a line, and Levi’s
was considered too cool to bash consumers over the
head with a motto.
Recently, Rover has scrapped the line in its TV commercials
after four years of fiddling about. KMM’s ‘above
all it’s a Rover’ became ‘relax’
when the account moved to APL. Cracknell believes
that if you can’t come up with the perfect endline
you shouldn’t reach for second best. “People
feel naked without it (but) that’s just using
up screen time or another blob at the bottom of the
page.”
In the old days, according to Collister, there were
two schools of advertising. One, spawned at Collett
Dickenson Pearce, treated the endline as the idea,
and “you then executed the hell out of it, like
Heineken.” The other, favoured by BMP, was to
start not with an endline but with strong, consistent
visuals, ‘branded property in the advertising’.
For instance, Hofmeister’s George the Bear or
the Arkwright character for John Smith’s.
Similarly, there are two types of line. “One
is the summation of the campaign, an advertising line
like ‘for mash get Smash’.” The
other is a “corporate positioning statement
which runs everywhere - not just in advertising.”
It’s easier to make the first sort entertaining.
“When the endline is just a description of your
advertising, there is plenty of scope for wit and
humour.”
Which is probably why most corporate endlines are
far from fun. Some sound more like a rallying cry
for staff than a call to consumers. Think of Tesco’s
‘every little helps’, British Airways’
‘the world’s favourite airline’
or British Rail’s ‘we’re getting
there’.
And a catchy, easily translatable endline can be invaluable
in a pan-European campaign. Rainey Kelly dreamed up
‘quality is a right not a privilege’ for
the Vauxhall Astra. Says Campbell: “It can be
translated for 20 countries. It’s not a pun,
it makes sense. Across markets it brings huge synchronicity.
It called to order what could have been a Eurovision
song contest disaster.” Ford, too, is working
on a line for a pan-European campaign to describe
‘Fordness’.
So what makes a good endline? In endline heaven, weird
is good as long as it addresses the issue. Says Cracknell:
“The ones that stick out tend to be slogans
written in the public language. There has to be rhythm
or a rhyme or a quirkiness in the line that catches
the ear.”
Hence the success of ‘it’s a lot less
bovver than a hover’, ‘Vorsprung durch
Technik’ and ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’.
But Trott cautions against using rhymes for the sake
of it. He devised ‘ ‘ello Tosh’
to ram home the name of what was then a little-known
brand, Toshiba. Repeating the name made it appear
a credible competitor to Sony.
But “because it was successful,” he says,
“everyone thought they needed lines that rhymed.
So they came up with ‘scream for cream’
or ‘slam in the lamb’. But that didn’t
work, because getting people to know the name of the
product was not the issue for these products.”
Trott believes agencies have lost the knack of creating
brilliant endlines: “People don’t start
with an endline any more,’ he complains, “and
that’s like driving a car backwards. You don’t
see where you are going, you just lurch from one ad
to the next. An endline is not the most important
part of an ad, but it is the first part. And it’s
the most important part of a five- or ten-year campaign.”
To illustrate his point, Trott identifies an ad created
without a line: Vauxhall Astra’s ‘babies’
commercial. “I was with six people who saw it
and four didn’t have a clue what it was for.
The best you can say is that Tony Kaye made a really
nice piece of film. But it’s not an ad.”
According to Trott, the dearth of endlines can be
blamed on planners and young, prize-hungry creatives.
“Planners care not about branding your product
but understanding the market. They think they must
do an ad the market likes. What hasn’t occurred
to them is that we are in the process of selling products.”
Meanwhile, young creatives are more in love with awards
than selling brands: “Everybody thinks endlines
are old-fashioned and cheesy – that they’re
something for the punters not for the Grosvenor House.”
LEGENDS
- Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet - Hamlet
- Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach - Heineken
- Beanz Meanz Heinz - Heinz Baked Beans
- It’s a lot less bovver than a hover - Qualcast
- The ultimate driving machine - BMW
|
MODERN CLASSICS
- You know when you’ve been tangoed - Orange Tango
- Just do it - Nike
- It ’s good to
talk - BT
- Australians wouldn
’t give a XXXX for any other lager
- Castlemaine XXXX
- Who would you most like to have a One 2 One with? - One 2 One
|
LAME DUCKS
- It talks your language
- Renault Megane
- Because I ’m
worth it - L ’Oreal
- Welcome to the world
- Fanta
- The airline for Europe
- British Midland
- More than just a
bank - NatWest
|
CORPORATE GOBBLEDEGOOK
- An essential British
company. Piping gas for you - Transco
- A company from over here that’s also doing rather well over there -
Hanson Trust
- Together we make some
alliance - Sun Alliance
- For all our tomorrows
- BP
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No portion of this article may be copied, retransmitted,
reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the
express written approval of the author. |
| AdSlogans.com -- Wise Words/19 |
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