The name that left the room

There is a particular kind of billboard that only makes sense to about nine people.

The offer had a name inside the building. It got that name early, in a meeting, probably from whoever was drawing on the whiteboard, and for six months the name was useful. It carried the whole argument: the customer they decided to go after, the thing they decided to stop doing, the reason the pricing moved. Two words holding a strategy, and everyone who said them heard the strategy underneath.

Then the launch arrives, somebody needs a headline, and the two words are right there. They have been said out loud in every meeting since spring. They feel obvious. They feel earned. They go out onto the road.

And the person in the car was in none of those meetings.

He reads two words with no argument behind them. Not confusing, exactly. Weightless. A phrase polished smooth, sitting above a logo, meaning nothing in particular to a man in traffic with eleven seconds to spare.

The approval chain never catches it, because the approval chain is made entirely of people who were in the meetings. Clear to us and clear to them are two separate tests, and only the first one gets run in the room.

The check is cheap. Take the line off the layout and hand it to somebody who has heard nothing about the project. If they need a sentence of context from you before it means anything, then the line is not the line. The context was the line, and it stayed in the deck.

Most of the best copy I have seen was somebody's explanation of the internal name, written down almost by accident, on the way to explaining it again.