The line I couldn’t Use
I collect sentences the way a magpie collects buttons, with no regard for whose coat they fell off. A phrase from a train carriage, a line in a book about beekeeping, a rival's slogan I'd cheerfully have stolen if theft were quicker. They go in a notebook, and they wait, and most of them wait forever, which is no tragedy. A hoard isn't measured by what you use. It's measured by what you had the sense to keep and the restraint to leave alone.
Years ago, for a wellness brand long before this one, I wrote the best line of my career. Eleven words. It promised a serenity the product could deliver to almost nobody, and I knew that as my pen formed it, the way you know a pudding's too rich while you're still adding cream. The line was true to the feeling we were selling and a flat lie about the thing in the box. Bill Bernbach, who knew more about this than I ever will, said a great campaign only makes a bad product fail faster. More people find out it's bad, sooner. I had written, in my eleven gorgeous words, an unusually efficient way to be found out.
Because they do find out. Not on the day, not at the click, but later, in the gap between what I promised and what they unwrapped. That gap doesn't close when the campaign ends. It migrates. It moves out of my marketing and into their morning, and from there into the verdict they pass on us to everyone they meet, which is the one piece of advertising I can't write, can't buy, and can't take back.
So I struck it out. Not from virtue, I'd happily take the credit for virtue if I thought you'd believe me, but from a slower species of self-interest. I have watched brands win the click and lose the room, and then spend a year and a fortune nursing a disappointment they posted to themselves, first-class, on day one. Ogilvy had the measure of the buyer we kid ourselves about: she isn't a moron, he said, she's your wife. Ours certainly isn't. She is a sceptical, switched-on professional who has been marketed at since birth and can smell a stretched promise through six inches of brand guidelines.
The line is still in the notebook. One day, it'll meet a product that can keep its word, and then it will have earned its outing, and I'll deploy it without a tremor. Nothing in the hoard is wasted. It simply has to wait until it can be true.
That, under all the plumage, is the trade. Knowing which shiny thing to keep, and declining to let the brightest of them sign a cheque that the work can't honour. A buyer worth winning can tell a brand selling her a mood from a brand telling her something so. The second is slower, plainer, and far less fun on the day. It is also the only sort anybody troubles to forgive.
If you take one thing from a marketer, take her most useful suspicion: distrust the message that's landing a touch too sweetly, going down a shade too easily. Ask what it's vouching for in your name, and whether you'll meet the buyer's eye a year from now and not flinch. If the answer's no, it was never clever. It was an invoice to your future self, and that account, in my experience, never goes uncollected.
- Margot, Head of Marketing
