Introducing EPT…the Endline Preservation Trust

Frustrated by bad copywriting, Dominic Mills wonders if it’s time to introduce a body designed to both preserve endlines and cultivate good ones…

For one reason or another I’m particularly sensitive at the moment to the way business mangles the English language.

This may be because I’m currently teaching the senior executives of a corporate how to write better. It may be because this particularly ugly euphemism caught my eye last week. After four people died in a theme park accident, a spokesman for the Queensland Ambulance Service said “they had sustained injuries that were incompatible with life”.

Er, right. They were dead, or as some other corporate drone might put it, ‘an ongoing zero-life situation’.

What is meant to communicate or clarify ends up confusing or just plain annoying the reader.

This degradation of the language is ubiquitous, and nowhere more so than in the advertising industry. I’m indebted to the Copyranter blog for pointing this out in a piece a couple of weeks ago about taglines.

So maybe it’s time to introduce the Endline Preservation Trust (EPT), a body designed to both preserve endlines and cultivate good ones.

To me the endline is critical. In theory, it is the essence of the brand proposition boiled down to a few memorable words – anything from two to five, but probably no more – and used everywhere so that, by dint of repetition and ubiquity, it’s like a worm in the consumer’s mind.

A good one is worth a lot, but bloody hard to write. And for service brands it sets a benchmark that they must live up to at every customer contact point.

Of those that Copyranter highlights, two particularly irk me. One is Stella Artois’ ‘Be Legacy’.

I have absolutely no idea what this means, and anyway it breaks every grammar rule in the book. It’s utter, self-centred nonsense. Does anyone remember its predecessor – ‘Reassuringly expensive’ – ? Now that was an endline of exquisite and subtle power.

The other is Cadillac’s ‘Dare Greatly’. As Copyranter points out, what is remotely daring about buying a car that costs $100,000?

That of course is deeply annoying, but not as much as the pitiless murder of language. First, dare is a verb that needs to be followed by ‘to’. Second, the whole construction is tautological.

The dictionary defines greatly, an adverb, as meaning ‘by a considerable amount’ or ‘very much’. Well, isn’t the scale or the ambition suggested by ‘greatly’ implicit in the word ‘dare’?

It’s like being told to ‘dare boldly’. It’s unnecessary: to dare is to be bold.

And do you notice something else about those? Yes, they’re both instructions from the brand to me. Personally, I don’t like being told what to do, think or feel by anybody, let alone a corporation with which I might have the most distant or perfunctory of relationships.

Yes, I know Nike’s ‘Just do it’ is both successful and enduring – but it also is an instruction from the brand to the consumer. It’s neither a promise nor a product truth.

I’m not sure things are quite as bad over here as in the US. An entirely random survey (i.e. scrolling through magazines and newspapers) reveals the endline to be hanging on but, both in terms of usage and quality, in need of nurturing.

Ford has ‘Go further’. Why? I just want my car to take me from A to B. Yes, yes..I know Ford isn’t talking about my ‘actual’ journey but my ‘personal’ journey. But when did I give it permission to talk to me that way?

Vodafone has ‘Power to you’…which is, well, so inept I can’t think of anything else to say about it.

BA has ‘To Fly. To Serve’. I hate it, because ‘serve’ has become an utter wank word, and today often conveys the opposite of what is intended (i.e. servility, docility, helpfulness), but at least it describes what BA aims to do – get me from A to B and be helpful in the process.

Many brands don’t even bother – Head and Shoulders, Sky (what happened to ‘Believe in better’, which was a cracker, but entirely missing from any current print ads?), Jeep, Virgin Holidays, Lindt, HSBC…and others.

Thank heavens then for Tesco and Sainsbury’s – honorary members of the EPT. A few years ago Tesco inexplicably dropped ‘Every little helps‘ when it hired Wieden and Kennedy and replaced it with ‘Love every mouthful’. Sacrilege.

It was a line of genius, underpinning everything it did, whether it was its queue promise or the decision to remove sweets from checkout areas. Thank goodness it soon saw the light, and the line was returned to its rightful place.

Sainsbury’s ‘Live well for less’ similarly does the business. Let’s hope its hiring of W&K doesn’t mean we need to bring out the EPT police…as in ‘Oh here are some endlines we did earlier and found in a bottom drawer’.

In fact, skimming through ads there are pockets of good practice or – and it’s better than nothing – at least adequacy.

I quite like ‘PayPal is new money’ – it at once conveys a certain utilitarian value and disruption.

First Direct (‘The unexpected bank’) and TSB (‘Local banking for Britain’) suggest a service quality that they hope will differentiate them (and does so, I believe), but NatWest’s ‘We are what we do’ leaves me a bit puzzled.

Does it mean it’s just a bank? Or does it have some deeper philosophical message to convey – perhaps that RBS is undergoing some kind of spiritual metamorphosis from an institution that once sucked the life out of everything it touched but now wants to be a fully paid-up member of society – ?

I think it’s the latter but I can’t see the average citizen devoting much time to decoding the message.

I’m trying to work out why we’re in this position. There are a number of forces at play, I believe. One, the written word is perceived to be less powerful than it once was, so fewer brands pay as much attention to an endline as before.

Two, it may be that some of the craft skills involved in writing powerful endlines have gone. It ain’t easy.

Three, brands are increasingly solipsistic – they see the endline as an opportunity to tell the consumer what they, the brands, would like them to do, and not as the means by which to convey the opposite – what they do for the consumer.

They need to think of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech: “Think not of what society can do for you, but what you can do for society.”

Four – and corporates are especially guilty of this – the endline has fallen victim to the wider tendency to use language as a tool to dissemble, obfuscate and even lie. I wonder how many brilliant examples lie scrunched up in the CMO’s bin.

The EPT will have its work cut out. Of course it needs its own endline.

Er, I’m working on it.