The English language has suffered so much violence at the hands of marketers it’s too time-consuming to get irate at all of it. So when Dell decided that “yours is here” would be a good slogan, I ignored it just like a small child screws his eyes shut to make monsters go away.
Unfortunately it seems like Dell is escalating its campaign. Today, I received a flyer with this strapline:
YOURS IS SO EASY TO SHOP FOR AT DELL.
What?
It reminds me of a bloke I once trained in IT. He was a truly talented graphic designer, but he couldn’t write to save his life (not a criticism: my drawing skills never went beyond potato printing, and I’ve made the English language scream for mercy on many occasions).
Anyway. This was the copy on one of his portfolio pieces:
WHATS NEW IN CARS
FORD SIERRA THATS WHAT
To be honest, I quite liked it. And it’s a damn sight more readable than the Dell advert – an advert that no doubt cost Dell a lot of money. Or as Dell might put it, money a lot of cost Dell advert good very not.
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0 responses to “Now I’m nostalgic for “dude, get a Dell””
Bloody iPhone autocorrect. Yes, I know about the typos. Can’t fix them from here :)
My dad would tell you that everyone thought American Express’s slogan “That’ll do nicely” was a major marketing miscalculation because the sentence was so clunky and alien-sounding in British English. And now no-one even realises that it was American Express who introduced it to this country. Sounds completely unexceptional.
“Yours is here” is fine compared to “Quote me happy”.
I hate that one too :)
I hate all slogans that include the word “forward” – such as the execrable “Taking you forward”.
Bastards
Yeah, I hate it when people at work say “going forward”, as in “So, going forward, how are we going to deal with these issues?” What exactly was wrong with “from now on”?