Karaoke on Tuesday, the sticky-floored place in Southeast, and the host who calls everyone baby ran a slideshow of local ads between singers. A car dealership. A dentist. A mattress store. Each one ended on a line. Driven by you. Smiles that last. Sleep is everything.
Nobody read them. Nobody could have. They flashed for four seconds under a screen where a man in a Blazers jersey was queued up to attempt Total Eclipse of the Heart.
Walking home I tried to name one tagline written in the last five years that I have heard an actual human say out loud. I could not. Just Do It. Think Different. Got Milk. Every line I can summon is older than my career.
That is not a writing problem.
The tagline is dying because brands now speak so constantly that no single sentence can carry the weight of the whole.
The tagline was a compression device built for scarcity. You got one thirty second spot, one full page, one endcard, and the line had to hold everything the brand believed in seven words because there was nowhere else to put it. Under that constraint, a great line was worth a fortune.
Scarcity is gone. A midsize brand now publishes something forty times a week across five surfaces. The audience does not meet you at the endcard. They meet you in a caption, a reply, a shipping confirmation, a support message at eleven at night. What accumulates across those small moments is the brand impression, and no tagline touches it.
Which is why the brands that feel sharpest right now mostly do not have a line you can quote. Wendy's built more distinctiveness in two years of being rude on Twitter than a decade of endcards gave them. Oatly's point of view lives on the side of the carton, in paragraphs, in a voice that sounds like one specific irritated person.
Nike is the exception everyone cites. Nike earned that line in 1988 and has spent thirty years paying the maintenance on it. That is not a strategy you can copy. That is an inheritance.
So here is what I would keep. Write the positioning. Fight for the positioning. Then let the line summarize it instead of substituting for it, and stop paying six figures for seven words that will live only in the brand guidelines PDF.
The audience does not meet you at the endcard.
The mattress store line held the screen for the first eight bars of Total Eclipse of the Heart. By the key change nobody in that room could have told you the store's name, including me, and I do this for a living.