Probably the Best Blog in the World... (Well, Arguably... Possibly... Maybe... Realisitically Not)

This will be a quickie (again, I know. Sorry). Occasionally the non-profit industry demands more of my time than this cynical blogroll. I also managed to get ill yesterday, so that scuppered my plans of being very awake today.

Advertising doesn't make much sense these days and it's only going to get worse. I know that this proclamation doesn't exactly make me Nostradamus, but it is all nonsense. Last week I talked about Jesus appearing in Marmite and how I found it odd that the Lord would choose to reveal himself to humanity in a product that willfully alienates 50% of its target market through advertising slogan alone. 'You either love it or hate it' - A slogan so popular that it has made the yeasty spread a watchword for divisive products and figures and yet, like Yorkie, it deliberately takes a stab at a core demographic and eliminates them from eligibility. Similarly it confuses those who don't have a strong opinion on the matter. Perhaps they should add a brief caveat or appendix to their slogan: 'You either love it or hate it! - if you don't have any strong feelings about it, then you probably hate it really...' Not quite so snappy though.

Of course, other famous advertising slogans include:

The Swiss Army Knife - 'Believe it or not, but with just these few utensils you can kill the entire Swiss Army'.

and

George Foreman Grill – 'Should you need to grill ex-heavyweight champions of the world, there really is no finer tool'.

Although I may have made those up. Another baffling long-running slogan is Carlsberg's 'probably the best beer in the world'. For some reason putting 'probably' in front of an inexplicable, false boast allows you to get away with it. As one might glean from that, I'm not a big fan of Carlsberg, I'm more of a bitter man... by which I mean I prefer say Greene King IPA, Brains or 6X (hope my free cases of all of the above are in the post...) and not that I'm a resentful person (although I am that too). I mean 'probably the best beer in the world' is a silly claim to make, they might as well say 'Carlsberg is fucking excellent and all the other beers are crap... probably'. I hope that a fine lager beer such as Kronenbourg pick up the slogan 'arguably the best beer in the world' just to spice up the competition a bit.

What happened to the classic slogans, like Nike's 'just do it' (because sex sells... and yet Volkswagen's 'think small' still made it into the hall of fame...) or 'happiness is a cigar called Hamlet'? These were brilliant slogans with TV ad campaigns to match. Hamlet's legendary ads are up there with the Cadbury's Gorilla bashing out In the Air Tonight and Guiness' high concept surf craziness... and a Russian meerkat explaining the difference between comparison websites and small desert mammals (although it doesn't work quite as well put like that). Today's ad campaigns tend to be odd and as unrelated as humanly possible to the actual product they're selling. Microsoft's new 8 second demo ads are hilarious, especially the man explaining how to clear you browser history so that 'your wife doesn't see the surprise jewellry you ordered for her', because obviously that's why most people delete their browser history...

Ads don't seem to rhyme these days either. While 'Um Bongo, Um Bongo. They drink it in the Congo' is unlikely to shift units in this age (for different reasons than it being an odd rhyme... What do you mean racism? I was talking about it being called the Democratic Republic of Congo now...). If anyone can think of a recent, decent rhyming slogan be sure to comment and I'll prepare to stand corrected. There also seem to be a lot of actors paid to lie about their personal experiences of products, which surely has to be against EU legislation on advertising. Long story short, bring me the head of Barry Scott.

For some reason I think I would quite like to see the slogan 'Um Bongo, Um Bongo. They drink it in the Democratic Republic of Congo'. How times change, eh?