In some New Statesman
literary competition,
I once read the following
quatrain:

I love my Kellog’s All-Bran,
It fills me with elation;
It’s quick and easy and ensures
diurnal defecation.

For those who don’t know, I should explain
that: All-Bran is a cereal that looks like
twigs, designed to deter constipation; Kellogg’s is
a very very rich cereal company. And was founded, apparently, as the
Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, by Will Keith
Kellogg, being an outgrowth of his
work with his brother John Harvey Kellogg
at the Battle Creek Sanitarium following
practices based on the Seventh-day Adventists. Thank you, Wikipedia.

That All-Bran poem was a submission to a competition
that asked readers to praise
some household product in the same way that the
following quatrain
praises
Carnation evaporated milk:

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
Here I sit with a can in my hand —
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,
You just punch a hole in the son-of-a-bitch.

There are several versions of the Carnation poem. Here’s another:

Carnation Milk is best in the land;
it comes in a little red-and-white can.
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch;
just poke a hole in the son-of-a-bitch.

That one, I found at Snopes.com’s
Carnation
Slogan Contest,
from their
collection of pages which explain
the history of famous advertising promotions, and debunk some
urban legends about them.

I think I first came across the poem in David Ogilvy’s book
Confessions of an Advertising Man. He writes:

Unless you have some special reason to be
solemn and pretentious, write your copy in the
colloquial language which your customers use
in everyday conversation. I have never acquired
a sufficiently good ear for vernacular American to
write it, but I admire copywriters who can pull it
off, as in this unpublished pearl from a dairy
farmer.

The
Marketing Sleuth
agree. In their blog posting
The
Best Language For Writing Copy, they
say:

Don’t say things like —

• engage next-generation functionalities, or
• enhance killer web-readiness, or
• monetize visionary technologies, or
• leveraging webinars to sell services

Or any bullshit like that.
No one wants to know how clever you are.
They just want to know what your product will do for him or her.
And they want details in language they can understand.

But I must go. I’m just off to enhance my killer
Java-hacking-readiness by demonetizing my wallet
and leveraging caffeine into my bloodstream
from a cup belonging to my local Summertown Costa. It shall engage my
neurotransmitters, implementing within me an entire next-generation
level of coding functionality. As my American friend Pat Nicholls
used to say, bullcrap. And the bull didn’t even need to eat All-Bran.

Written
for Dr. Dobbs