Monday, January 31, 2011

Tagline Hell

This mustachieod man is Frederick Nietszche, father of modern day nihilism. I bring you this famous German philosopher because today I am retiring the old Roundseventeen tagline, "at the corner of west coast optimism and Bronx born nihilism."

Those carefully chosen 11 words have served me well for the past year and a half.

Actually I can't believe I've had the same tagline for that long. I'm not a big fan of taglines even though they are considered the holy grail of advertising. I know I've written at least 10,000 of them over the course of my career. And don't feel particularly attached to any of them.

In perhaps one of my most unwise career moves, I once suggested to our client, ABC, that we have a different tagline everyday.

I loved the idea of challenging ourselves to come up with something worthy every 24 hours. I also loved how it pointed out the disposable nature of taglines. If memory serves, Network Chairman Bob Igor and President Jamie Tarses looked at me as if I were from another planet.

I got used to that look.

So today we fly under a new banner. One that hopefully answers the question asked by millions... ok thousands... alright, my neighbor wanted to know, "how did you come up with the name for your blog?"

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