Not a Good Tagline.

Two weeks ago I was in a meeting here with Carl, Carl Jr., Stoner and the sales guy, "Don Johnson". No, that's not his name. He doesn't even resemble the "Heartbeat" singer from the 80's. I just thought it was a good fit for a sales guy. But I digress.

So, the meeting was about coming up with sales material to arm Don Johnson with when he goes after new clients. We all agreed that a brochure would be needed. Then came the discussion of what should be in the brochure and who should write it. Thankfully, Don said he had a freelance writer that he has used in the past and would be great for this project. I was relieved, because that meant I wouldn't have to grind my teeth into dust by reading anything that the bosses here might have scribbled down in crayon for this brochure.

With that decided Carl asks,"Designer X, now... should you design something first and then give it to the writer so that they know how much room they have to work with?"

To which I replied,"Uh no. Typically a brochure would be designed based upon what your messages would be. Since we don't have that yet I might be wasting time designing in the dark." With the group convinced of the next steps, we start talking about the messages we would like the writer to write about.

A lot of it was standard stuff. What do we do? Who's it for? Why we're better than the others? Etc.

The golden nugget that shined through in this meeting was when Carl started talking about print quality. (I'm not saying what the company does, but one of the many things it does is some printing). Carl, goes on to explain that there can be differences in color depending on material, what's on screen, we can match any color, blah blah blah. Carl then goes into this phase of his process where he just starts spouting taglines without any real thought into what he's saying. It's usually some rip-off of someone else's campaign, but this one was all his own. Carl makes the gesture for headline with his hand and says, "How about something like... 'Not all blacks are created equal'?".

I dropped my head in shear disbelief and said, "You can't say that!!".

Carl's blank expression showed me that his little hamster had fallen off the wheel. 10 seconds later, when the hamster climbed back on, Carl said,"Why not?". 5 seconds later, the hamster was moving again and Carl just laughed.

After a few minutes of Carl and Carl Jr. exchanging some horrible racial comments the meeting ended.

I walked back to my freezing cubicle and tried to think of what awful acts of evil I must have done for karma to have put me in such a meeting.

I hope you never work here.