A well-turned slogan can be just two words, three, four maybe five. Good ones are short, sweetened with precise word choices, lyricism, capacity for multiple interpretations, i.e. poetic qualities.
‘Just Do It’ ‘Make America Great Again’ ‘Betcha Can’t Eat Just One’
Are these packed with meaning? or shrugged off as ignorable commercial war cries. The slogans noted here have had lengthy stays in public consciousness and popular vernacular; maybe because they all have an element of challenge. In our consumer society with its plethora of pitches, advertising, if only due to its omnipresence, is a cultural artifact.
In Canada, recent loose talk about a 51st state prompted a flourish of patriotism. One place we turned to for succor was the ‘I Am Canadian’ commercial from 25 years ago. Until January 2025, it garnered around 100 You Tube hits a day. Then it spiked upwards to tens of thousands. When an updated sequel was released last March, it got 650,000 views. A You Tube commentator confessed to shedding a maple syrup tear.
Advertising, the shock troops of capitalism, became a source of national pride. The language of advertising, slogans in particular, has penetrated popular vernacular in a way that was formerly the purview of poetry.
After WW1, and still today, In Flanders Fields by John McRae helped Canadians grieve and move on; in the wake of Lincoln’s death, Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! did the same for Americans.
Ad slogans are oft-repeated phrases that enter the vernacular and get repeated, revised and repurposed (message T-shirts: ‘Make Retirement Great Again’, ‘Make America Native Again’). This happens to poetry too. Have you ever heard A Visit from St. Nicholas (‘Twas the Night Before Christmas), a narrative poem written in anapestic tetrameter bastardized into a cheesy radio commercial? (Full disclosure: though wiped from conscious memory, I probably did this in my days as a radio copywriter).
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Poetry to advertising is not an apples-to-apples comparison. More like a David and Goliath deal — in Canada, poetry contributes less than 0.001% of total GDP; the advertising business contributes an estimated 0.45%. There are about 2,500 active publishing poets and roughly 85,000 jobs in and around the advertising business.
The massive investment that goes into the researching, crafting, testing and disseminating of advertising slogans is a big reason why they are so widely known; specifically the frequency and longevity of exposure (Nike has been Just Doing It for over 30 years). Is that the only reason they have such prominence in popular vernacular? Maybe there’s more.
Marshall McLuhan, who never brazenly spouted ‘I Am Canadian’, professed that advertising was the greatest art form of the 20th century. Since that claim half a century ago, dozens of other media innovations (the internet of course but also shopping cart ads, floor decals, digital billboards etc.) have elbowed advertising into a larger and larger chunk of everyman’s consciousness.
Estimates vary on how many commercial messages, however fleetingly, cross our eyes and ears (does the aroma around a KFC outlet count?) each day. Consider any time you stop for gas, nip into a supermarket, spend time in front of a screen or go from A to B in an urban environment. Upwards of 5,000 is the number Google claims. It’s called clutter and the enormity of the clutter is the reason we’ve gotten good at filtering.
But a good slogan, once it’s in, sticks like mental Velcro, like a persistent ear worm. It’s not by accident that slogans are often reinforced with jingles. Anyone who can recall ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent’ would rank it up there with Paul Simon’s catchiest lyrics.
Catchy is a flattering descriptor often tagged onto pop songs. It is present in good ad slogans too. As an example, would this familiar set of words also be labelled ‘catchy’?
… and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep
- Robert Frost
The poet Ogden Nash (a contemporary of Frost) wrote ad copy before he turned to light, humourous verse often found in the pages of The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. He wrote: ‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker’ and
‘I think
that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.’
Nash, clever phrase turner that he was, was clearly conflicted about advertising and where it fits in the vast mosaic of pop culture.
As was Lew Welch, a beat poet of some notoriety whose enduring legacy is Raid Kills Bugs Dead, penned during a short stint writing ad copy during the 1950s. Raid Kills Bugs Dead has been described as haiku-like. It had a 60 year run. (side note, Welch’s step son Huey Lewis was a pop music sensation in the 1980s, his band’s name Huey Lewis and The News is a fairly blatant nod to poetics).
Memorability is a better way to say catchy. Poems you memorized in school and slogans you heard repeatedly on the radio do hang around. Often, they bring on a warm, nostalgic smile. Personally, slogans like ‘Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it’ have been marinating in my consciousness since I started in advertising, around the same time as McLuhan’s declaration.
In researching advertising slogans, it became clear that technological innovations of micro-targeting and metrics and ever-shrinking attention spans have led to more short-lived advertising campaigns. The importance of crafting something really durable almost feels redundant when ‘what’s new?’ is answered and refreshed every few seconds, every few clicks. I fear the golden age of sloganeering may have passed.
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There remains a lot of crossover, a lot of similarity between pop music, poetics and ad slogans. One of the sadder similarities is that both forms of expression — advertising and poetry — are widely ignored. Advertising is actively and consciously ignored with ad blocking software or the imaginary filters used by anyone who claims to be impervious: ‘advertising doesn’t affect me’. Poetry is ignored very passively by simply not noticing, not paying attention. According to Booknet Canada, poetry accounts for a paltry 1% of printed book sales in Canada.
The latter observation is a shame, the former is inevitable as most of the advertising that assaults us daily is crap. Of those 5,000 or so daily messages a goodly chunk are mere announcements, price and product listings, blatant mongering or colourful graphics possessing precious little artistry and very little reason to care or remember.
Don’t get me wrong, I love advertising when it is well done, if it intrigues but good poetry possesses a lot more nobility than the hype I spent a career typing. As a reviewer of poetry submissions, I can also attest that a lot of poetry ought to find its home in the back of a drawer somewhere alongside the horrid advertising.
If you write advertising, you are crafting messages that will likely touch more people than the finest sonnet. Which means what – that numbers rule? that size matters? To call advertising slogans ‘poetry that meets people where they are’ might raise the hackles of the literati. And an advertising copywriter whose efforts are called poetic would likely scoff. And maybe blush.
It is a complex relationship. Academics Klepper and Piller developed an interdisciplinary course on the language of advertising and poetry and here’s their take: “Simply by always being both/and: the same and different, related and separated, artistic and uncompromisingly commercial, advertising as against poetry makes a fascinating topic for inquiry and discussion”.
My mission is now clear: Make advertising poetic again. Wish me luck.
Ian FitzGerald spent 30 years as an advertising copywriter and creative director, including writing for TV and radio plays. Each Mouthful Dripping in its own Rich, Creamy Goodness is a collection of poems stemming from advertising slogans; the chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping … (above/ground 2024) is an excerpt from that book. He is an Assistant Professor (Advertising) at Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary.
