The Infinite Possibilities Of Being Banal
Agency straplines and mission statements are generally biblically bad. But does it matter?
I was surprised that it was just me who found BBDO’s new strapline - ‘Do Big Things’ - funny as well as not very good. Maybe that reflects my juvenile scatological sense of humour - a reflection that doesn’t do me much credit, in truth.
Fully expecting some wags to question whether BBDO’s chief creative officer Chris Beresford-Hill had come up with the positioning while shuffling around and doing a big thing of his own, I ended up disappointed.
This is clear evidence that the commentariat the industry is blessed with is now afraid of tackling anything unless it includes datapoints or requires pointless footnotes. Or maybe it’s just grown up.
I was cheered to note that AMV isn’t entirely embracing ‘Do Big Things’ as its own mission statement, using the rather more coherent ‘Big Ideas Real People Love’ as its own domestic positioning.
The new ‘Do Big Things’ positioning, which replaced the 30-year-old ‘The Work, The Work, The Work’ (no - I had no idea either), spurred my sluggish brain to consider some of the other agency repositionings that have taken place recently. And to see if they could provide a design for life; a new version of the Ten Commandments. So let’s have a go:
‘Make Our Children Proud’, (Mother, 2022).
‘Feelings First’, (adam&eveDDB, 2024)
‘Cultural Power’, (M&C Saatchi 2024)
errrr… and that’s all I could remember.
Proof therefore that most of them are instantly forgettable.
Mother’s is at least instructive and achievable - a useful lode star. Adam&eveDDB’s seems to be an implicit acknowledgement - much like AMV - that in a post-truth world, feelings have primacy over facts (and to be fair having making ads that make you feel something or provoke an emotion is no bad thing). And M&C’s ‘Cultural Power’ doesn’t really mean much at all. It’s not even intriguing.
So what have we learned here? Well, that on the whole agencies aren’t very good at articulating what they do into a pithy strapline, which, in the overall scheme of things, is just a little thing.
But then we all knew that anyway. So maybe ‘Do Big Things’ isn’t such a turd after all.
When the world zigs, zag Jezza! And the black sheep logo. I always thought it was a great thing that the Agency was applying it's own advice to itself and having a logo and mission statement routed in truth about the biz.