I occasionally give marketing people a quiz about taglines, and credit card lines may sound memorable, but are reallly confusing. I am a believer that taglines are a waste of time. Powerful ideas dont need taglines.

This ad for Discover, using scissors is based on a simple, very memorable idea. People are delighted to see an army of scissors marching into town and begin to feed them with credit cards they want to get rid of. The campaign is called ‘what if’ but it needs no tagline, for sure.

I’m no big fan of the 30-second TV commercial, and could argue why even this could be easily forgottten among the credit card clutter. The reason I single them out is because they allow us to think about whether advertisers spend too much of their resources on tag lines, and cool commercials. This alone will not make a brand more endearing. Check what’s happening to Apple’s reputation, in spite of its hyper cool advertising and branding. They are surely defending their core brand, but by suing podcasters, they are unraveling everything that their advertising has done.