Just Do It Turns 30. So Why Have Brands Stopped Shouting Slogans?

What's the last slogan that gave you a jolt?

Eight letters, three words: Nike's most famous line, Just do it, has just turned 30.

It is one of the greatest advertising taglines ever written, and it has everything a great tagline needs — short, memorable, deep enough that anyone can read their own meaning into it and find something to hold on to.

The line was born at an advertising meeting in 1988, inspired, the story goes, by what the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore said before his execution: "Let's do it."

The man who thought of it was Dan Wieden, founder of the agency Wieden + Kennedy — known for its long service to Nike, and today the largest independent creative agency in the world. Wieden + Kennedy is one of the few agencies still writing taglines people remember.

But in the second half of the twentieth century, almost every advertising person set out to write a phrase like it. A few lines, dreamed up by a great many clever people, were pushed into every corner of the world by companies large and small on hundreds of billions of dollars, and ended up an important part of twentieth-century culture.

• Think different / Apple
• Connecting People; Human Technology / Nokia
• Think Small / Volkswagen
• Be All You Can Be / U.S. Army
• It Tastes Great / Nestlé
• Everything is within reach; only feelings are priceless / Mastercard
• ……

Lines like these are getting rarer, and that is not an illusion. In 2005 the site Taglineguru.com published a list of the 100 most influential taglines since 1948. How objective any single entry on it is, is hard to say, but the spread over time tells you something: two-thirds of the lines were written before 1980. In another top-100 list published last year by Paul Suggett, a copywriter with 20 years in advertising, only six lines date from after 2000, among them Adidas's Impossible Is Nothing — written in 2004 at the Amsterdam office of the agency 180/TBWA. Adidas used it for only seven years; its current line is a set of variations on the word "Creative."

There is a difference between a tagline and ad copy, or a slogan. The latter usually belongs to one product or one campaign, while a tagline can set a whole brand apart. The brand consultancy Interbrand publishes a ranking of the world's best brands every year, and even the companies near the top of it, if they still own a classic line, rarely use it in everyday advertising — Apple's Think Different, written in 1997 at the Los Angeles office of TBWA\Chiat\Day, is one. You won't see it in an Apple ad today.

Many well-known brands now barely show a written line at all. What you remember is the visual mark: Starbucks's siren, IKEA's blue and yellow, Tencent's penguin.

As for Facebook, which more than two billion people use every day, the company paints slogans like BE BOLD on its office walls to spur staff on, but it has never had a tagline to match its own fame. What comes to mind instead is a raised thumb and a lowercase blue f — and, in recent years, more and more Mark Zuckerberg.

A written line became a brand's most important carrier of its message in the first place because the medium of the day was the newspaper ad. Driven by profit, newspaper ad space grew fast. The Boston Evening Transcript carried 19,000 ads in all of 1860; by 1918 the number was 237,000.

Food, tobacco, car, household-goods and cosmetics companies ran long blocks of text in the papers to describe their products, and that long copy needed a short headline. Once a headline drew a good response and was used again and again, it became a tagline.

Just do it was still an exception to all this. It was not the usual feel-good line. It carried power but promised nothing; it was hard, and it hinted at the difficulty and sacrifice that follow once you act.

That is exactly what made it so appealing. Just do it hinted at a new self, a Nike way of living, the idea that in the gaps of your working day you were free to do what you wanted to do.

Those decades produced a whole crop of taglines built on individualism — from L'Oréal's "You're worth it" and McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" down to the Taiwanese honey-lemon drink's "If I like it, why not?" and Shanghai's Reeb Beer with "Truly different." The self-centred current among young people worldwide had been running stronger since the civil rights movements of the 1960s — American at first, then, in the 1980s, carried out to the world in the name of globalization. In 1990, growing overseas markets took Nike's global revenue past $2 billion.

Companies that wanted young people to spend took advantage of this rising individualism. Taglines built on rhyme, puns and homophones became the most rousing form of communication; read on their own, many of them really do sound like slogans from a revolution. In English, an advertising campaign and a military campaign are the same word.

More of the classic taglines, of course, pushed a functional selling point, and what fixed them in people's heads was cable television, which sat an audience down at the same hour every day, plus endless repetition paid for by enormous ad budgets.

• Good to the Last Drop / Maxwell House
• Got Milk? / California Milk Processor Board
• It's the Real Thing / Coca-Cola
• Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand / M&M's
• ……

Taglines do not stay fixed forever; one that goes 30 years without changing, like Just do it, is very rare. McDonald's has used 23 of them, including "You Deserve a Break Today" (1971–1975), "It's a Good Time for the Great Taste of McDonald's" (1984–1988) and "Have You Had Your Break Today?" (1989–1991) ... all the way to "I'm lovin' it" in 2003, McDonald's first unified global line. It was replaced once in 2014, a year of bad results, but was later brought back.

Sometimes a tagline changes because consumers' lives change. Johnnie Walker's Keep Walking, which stood for an English gentleman's attitude to life, ran for 16 years; in September 2015 the line Joy Will Take You Further was tacked on for a while to court millennial drinkers.

Sometimes a tagline changes to meet a new consumption trend. In 2016 Coca-Cola replaced Open Happiness, which it had used for seven years, with Taste the Feeling, emphasizing the taste of the drink itself, in an attempt to cope with the pressure the healthy-drinks trend was putting on soda companies.

Sometimes a line needs only a small tweak to catch a subtle shift in the audience's cultural mood. L'Oréal has used different pronouns to capture the spirit of the age, moving from the feminist "Because I'm worth it" to the gentler, more flattering "Because you're worth it," aimed at a wider range of women, and now to "Because we're worth it," which L'Oréal says reflects today's diversity and inclusiveness.

However they changed, these taglines could once be pushed into the market quickly and settle in consumers' minds, lasting four or five years at the short end and more than a decade at the long. The system behind them was built by family companies with long horizons, which set aside enormous annual marketing budgets and ran big worldwide campaigns inside a set window of time.

In 2016 Ele.me released the line "When you're hungry, don't call your mom — call Ele.me." That was the period when the big food-delivery platforms were pouring huge sums into seizing market share, and this earworm of a line, shouted by the actor Wang Zulan and backed by heavy spending, showed up on every major video site and subway platform. People picked it up fast.

By July 2017, though, Ele.me had changed the line to "When you're hungry, you want ___." One poster's copy read: In this world, most people want it; few dare to.

"Don't call your mom when you're hungry" ranks among the few genuinely memorable taglines of the past few years — probably the only food-delivery line you can actually recall — but it was in use for barely more than a year.

It was written by the local creative agency Karma, whose creative director at the time was Zhu Yu, also known as Marcus, who later wrote Keep's line "Self-discipline gives me freedom." Zhu Yu told QDaily: "When we first started working with them, we naturally went in hoping to build them into a hundred-year brand. But startups like to try other things — they don't feel bound to you forever, the way Nike and W+K are."

Today Ele.me has long since been fully taken over by Alibaba.

New-economy companies work in a completely different way. Successful twentieth-century brands like Nike and Ralph Lauren took ten years on average to reach 100 million in revenue; today's star internet companies get there in four, sometimes faster. But it also means every funding round can bring a new "brand positioning."

And for internet companies that sell a service, the platform's name is the selling point itself — Ele.me, Taopiaopiao. Meanwhile, many of today's genuinely new consumer brands sell products into a market where everything looks alike, and a short, snappy line struggles to carry the values and character behind the brand.

Airbnb's taglines have included Live Like a Local, Belong Anywhere and, most recently, "Love makes travel incredible." For campaigns on LGBTQ rights it uses "We All Belong." Taken on its own, each line stands for only part of the Airbnb brand — and each would sit just as comfortably on another travel site.

As for the Airbnb ad running in WeChat Moments, it read: "Sawasdee ka — stop checking temples off the list. How about getting to know a Bangkok full of inspiration instead?" It mentioned none of the lines above.

Companies have realized that targeted social marketing and word of mouth can sometimes do the work of a television ad worth tens of millions of dollars. Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said publicly in March 2017 that the company would cut its TV budget as far as it could, because "you don't watch TV ads anymore."

None of this is a new subject. But the result is that the advertising industry no longer makes its work the way it used to, something we set out in detail in our report on this year's Cannes Lions. For more and more companies, the model of working with a single giant ad group has stopped working; Procter & Gamble, Unilever, BMW and others have handed marketing to a larger number of small agencies or to in-house creative teams, and what used to be one big campaign a year has been broken into a series of small communication cases. A single simple tagline cannot carry that job; it has given way to longer copy, news-style headlines and #hashtags.

The new carriers of ad messages generally leave no room for the classic tagline — saying only what you need to say is no longer enough. WeChat official accounts now allow headlines of up to 64 characters, Toutiao accounts 30. Newrank studied the headline lengths of posts with 100,000-plus views over the past three years and found the average had grown from 18 characters to 21.6. Headlines keep getting longer because attention is ever scarcer and information gets pushed to the front: rather than wait for a user to open the piece, you put as much of it as you can at the entrance.

The new format for video advertising in recent years is the six-second ad. Because of the time limit, what people remember tends to be a sound effect and a brief scene, and words matter less and less.

Or the hook is not words at all, but something more visual and richer in meaning — a celebrity, for instance.

In 2015 KFC handed its U.S. creative account to W+K, which proposed bringing back and playing up the figure of Colonel Sanders, along with the brand's earliest line, "Finger Lickin' Good" (so diluted in China by over-localized copy that all that survives is Original Recipe Chicken). Over the past three years KFC has brought in more than a dozen different celebrities and comedians to play the Colonel, and won a great deal of attention.

With I Love NY, it is less the words than the visual design that stays with you.

In modern marketing, the biggest obstacle a tagline runs into is data-driven A/B testing. Big data does not necessarily kill human thought, but it can shut off a creative person's inspiration by measuring things that should not be measured. A line meant to take five years to lodge a brand in people's minds is unlikely to prove itself on a real-time dashboard of performance-ad impressions, yet more than half of the world's ad budget now goes to digital advertising, and that reality has already decided that the creative industry follows the results of every click on every screen.

Ad Age recently asked a number of advertising people what frightens them most right now. Nick Law, chief creative officer of Publicis, the world's third-largest ad group, answered: "A world where creative reports to the CFO, the consultant, the data engineer."

"Looking for a job? Talk to the boss directly!" — the brainwashing ads that drew a torrent of bad reviews during the 2018 World Cup came almost entirely from internet companies expert at testing.

The falling quality of taglines is not only a problem of data marketing, either. Mark Duffy, a copywriter of 20 years, wrote of Lexus's 2017 line, Experience Amazing: "Look, it just lies there, dead. Say it out loud and notice how your brain reacts — driving any gas-powered car in 2017 is not 'Amazing.' Falling in love in the back seat of a driverless car, driving up and down the highway 100 times, that's 'Amazing.'"

Tesla has no tagline. It lives in the headlines instead — though not always the headlines Elon Musk wants.

"People now want us not to say 'Just do it,' they say 'Help me do it.'" Stefan Olander, Nike's vice president of digital sport, said as early as 2012 that the relationship between brands and consumers had changed a great deal: a hard one-line message planted up front had given way to the soft influence of vast amounts of content.

Handing the right to speak to a medium the brand does not control naturally carries risk. In 2016, timed with the launch of its new line Taste the Feeling, Coca-Cola ran an interactive online GIF-making campaign, inviting users to type in their own ad copy to generate animations set against a swimming pool, a summer's day, people drinking Coke, and encouraging them to share.

The company quickly saw the danger and built a banned-word list of more than 3,415 entries — swearing, drugs and alcohol, politics, religion and -isms, black, white, yellow, and any word that might make you think of obesity. Even that did not stop internet users from finding a way to mock it.

More brands are dropping their guard and going out to embrace controversy and eyeballs. The ad agency JWT recently surveyed Americans' attitudes toward commercial brands and found that, across a group of respondents spanning generations, 78 percent believed brands "should take action on important social issues." In 2018 there was no end of brand copy hitched to the #MeToo hashtag, but what people remembered in the end was still #MeToo.

Riding a trending topic is the norm now. You will not remember a single Durex tagline; the brand gets attention by other means. Extreme self-regard, though, really can make a brand stand out on social media. The wool-shoe brand Allbirds calls itself "the world's most comfortable shoes"; the nut brand Emerald's new line in 2017 was "Yes Good," made of the two most positive words available — the brand says it came from a user's online comment about its nuts in the summer of 2016.

Companies still loyal to the tagline are trying to find a balance in their new lines too.

This week Ford, a company in crisis, announced a brand-new line, "Built Ford Proud" — three words again, and the work of W+K again. The three words call up several different images at once: a Detroit carmaker under pressure from electric vehicles, a builder proud of the brand's history, and the Make America Great Again cap of a Trump supporter. In the television ad, Bryan Cranston, who played the lead in Breaking Bad, says: "Let others keep dreaming about the future. We're going to be the ones who build it."

Ford showed the new ad to 1,800 dealers in Las Vegas, the company's largest gathering since the slump the auto industry went through after the 2008 financial crisis. Ford plans to roll out a dense run of new models over the next few years.

"This ad really does speak to the whole car industry," said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Autotrader. The one problem is that these three awkward words try to carry too many meanings at once, a good many of them memes peculiar to the American politics of the moment, which makes the line look like just another trending topic. Ford says, though, that it will not entirely replace the old line, "Go Further."

In the end, Just Do It is changing too. This year's thirtieth-anniversary campaign, "Dream Crazy" — a traditional, large-scale campaign — put Just do it back at the center once again. But the way it drew attention had already changed.

The first 30-second film issued the call to action through the voice of the 12-year-old YouTube star Demarjay Smith; by September, a tweet from Colin Kaepernick — the former NFL quarterback who became a political flashpoint for refusing to stand for the anthem before games — set the topic alight and landed on news front pages around the world.

Just do it's 30th-anniversary ad, Dream Crazy. The man in the wool coat reading the voiceover is Colin.

In 1988, in Nike's first Just do it television ad, the 80-year-old Walt Stack ran across the Golden Gate Bridge, talking about his 17-mile-a-day running habit and joking that in winter he leaves his dentures in the cabinet.

Thirty years on, Nike offers the counterpart: Marjorie Kagan, the oldest runner in the 2018 New York Marathon, rolls her eyes at the camera and says, "Eighty-one years old and running my first marathon — everyone says I'm crazy. But that's the best thing about getting old: I can pretend I didn't hear them."

Just do it - Late Bloomer

This is why advertising was ever qualified to take part in shaping culture.

What is different is that we now live in a much noisier world. It is less that the classic tagline is disappearing than that humanity has entered a stage in which agreement is harder and harder to reach — every person, every day, sees different news, different entertainment and different ads.

Cover image from Unsplash and Diesel.