The headline for a JC Penney ad in The New York Times reads, “Full Spring Ahead.” It doesn’t make sense unless you know that the original phrase is “full steam ahead,” a relic of the age of steam-powered ships. But I would bet that this fact sailed past 99.9 percent of the ad’s target audience.
We copywriters assume that our audience has access to a huge cultural warehouse of buzzwords, maxims and slogans, ready for the tweaking. In reality, many age-old sayings no longer, um, ring a bell.
I’ve noticed that when young singers cover old songs, something often gets lost in translation. While I was shopping before Christmas last year, I heard a rendition of “Winter Wonderland” in which Parson Brown (“In the meadow we can build a snowman/ Then pretend that he is Parson Brown”) was transformed into the meaningless “person Brown.”
For those who are still confused, the conceit of the song (written in 1934) is that the snowman is a minister who can marry the singer to his sweetie.
Today, of course, we have new sayings that just about everyone knows: Just do it. Have it your way. Got milk? But they were all dreamed up by copywriters, not by somebody’s great-great-grandma, Ben Franklin or folks down on the farm.
So what does this mean for copywriting?
I think we need to remember who our audience is before trotting out a hoary maxim that no one is likely to recognize. Sad but true. (No, I am not referring to the Metallica song.)
© Cathy Curtis 2010
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