The Target Audience

Corporate campaigns are often sneered at as "boardroom advertising," placed by management to convince the directors that their vineyard is properly tended. Actually, most board members have been carefully screened for doctrinal compatibility and are paid more for attending a few meetings than you are for working the entire year. So they generally agree with the executives that theirs is a splendid organization whose ventures are, at last, about to jell, and that this message should be trumpeted to other corporations, customers, prospects, creditors, financial analysts, takeover targets, legislators, regulators, and "thought leaders."

They may also fear that if the company doesn't do a lot of public boasting, everyone will be free to think of it as a rapacious, polluting, bribing, thieving, conniving, exploiting snake-pit of venality and deceit squirming on the verge of bankruptcy.

Thus it is the presence or absence of corporate advertising that matters — not its content. Subjects for the ads may be chosen more or less at random, so long as they bear some vague connection to the company's business (which for an international conglomerate means that the TV commercial’s vignettes should be filmed on this or a neighboring planet) and so long as they don't anger a big customer, a federal agency (during Democratic administrations), or the chairman’s wife.

It's assumed that the ads will outrage consumerists, environmentalists, and feminists regardless of what they're about, so these sensitivities are ignored.

In Search of a Slogan

Since it’s unheard-of for anyone actually to read a corporate ad, most advertisers try to smuggle at least one simple thought into the reader’s or viewer’s memory — usually in the form of a self-serving* themeline or slogan attempting to sum up the ego-ideal of the company. There are two reasons for this:

First, a lavish expenditure on corporate advertising has to be justified as serving some sort of business purpose. The usual "proof" that the money is well spent consists of audience surveys and attitude studies that show how well the message is getting through.

Since no one in the target audience is paying much attention to the message, the only way to win at the polls is to keep repeating one catchy slogan and then survey the readers and viewers on whether they’ve ever heard it. The process is called "aided recall."

Asked about the slogan, respondents may say such things as:

"Oh, that awful thing!"

"Yes, I heard it, and it's a monstrous lie."

"Oh, yes – isn't that stupid?"

"If I hear that thing one more time, I'll scream."

Each of these answers counts as a "yes," and all the yes votes, however scathing, are added up into a grand total called "awareness." High awareness proves that the investment was brilliant.

The Boast, Personified

The second reason for corporate slogans is that companies are abstractions, and nobody except a theoretical dermatologist responds well to an abstraction. Cingular doesn't mean anything, nor does Verizon. Koninklijke Philips NV is not only meaningless, it's meaningless in Dutch. Gadzooks Networks means something to somebody, but it's hard to tell what.

Confronted with an abstraction, people tend to ignore it completely or to personify it. So a company is often thought of as if it were a person – a nice guy or a nasty one, a bully or a patsy, a fat cat, Col. Blimp, Ma Perkins, Gordon Gecko, or the Wizard or Oz.

So the question the slogan addresses (sometimes inadvertently) is, "Who do you think you are?"

"Think Different." (Apple)

"Where You At?" (Boost Mobile )

"On the Wings of Goodyear"
(This won out over "We Tire Easily")

"Who Would You Give a Volvo To?"

"Travel Should Take You Places." (Hilton)

But when it's all said and done, most companies revert to self-glorification and bombast, which fit in better with the corporate culture:

"Beyond Petroleum" (BP)

"It's not TV. It's HBO."

"The Heart of Commerce" (MasterCard)

"The Wings of Man" (Eastern Airlines)

"Boundless" (AT&T)

"Uncommon Wisdom" (Wachovia)

"The Proud Bird with the Golden Tail" (Continental Airlines)

"Impossible is Nothing" (Adidas)

And if a company has a flagrant weakness, there is an overpowering temptation to deny the tragic flaw by proclaiming its opposite:

"Fair and balanced" (Fox News)

This harkens back to the days of "Doctors recommend Phillip Morris" and "More Doctors Smoke Camels..." Better to be an honest bungler, as one vacuum manufacturer demonstrated with, "Nothing sucks like Electrolux."