Flowers & Pearls: Bling Bling
In her column «Blüten und Perlen,» Sarah Pally focuses this time on the rare moments of brilliance in advertising language—and explains why true linguistic gems are so hard to find.
Ad copy is a mirror of our clichéd world: every headline is a little clever and funny. But even «Let me entertain you» gets boring after a while. Sometimes—but only sometimes—certain pieces of copy still make me truly happy: a little allusion here, a really awesome turn of phrase there, a razor-sharp thought that thunders straight into my heart and mind as unexpectedly as a kid’s trick. Goooal!
Pressure, Time, and Heat
These hidden gems usually grow only in completely inaccessible places, protected from the sun and fresh air—and, above all, from the eyes of overly cautious editorial teams. But when you find one, the world sparkles for a moment. Of course, there are areas where these treasures tend to cluster a bit more. Namely, where pressure and warmth are high and time is available. Pressure drives one to surpass oneself, and it arises simply from taking the task seriously. The warmth is palpable through the care that’s been poured into it. In other words: love. And not some cheap, sexy, sleazy kind of love, but love as if it were your own flesh and blood. What about time? After all, you don’t have it, yet you have to make time for it. On the one hand, this takes the form of undivided attention, because that makes time feel as though it stretches into infinity. And on the other hand, experience is nothing other than time: it is the time invested so far in developing skill—and thus also in the result.
A bunch of expensive bullshit
Anything produced under different circumstances is just cheap rhinestones—at first glance, to the untrained eye, sometimes almost indistinguishable from the real thing and widely accepted. But still, they’re just replaceable trinkets.
Sure, our business demands exactly that—because it’s cheap, fast, and can be produced reliably in the quantities needed. So it’s mass production; it’s empty talk by the meter. Legitimate, but not precious. Unless it is. Because no one’s stopping you from trying your hand at gemstones anyway and getting the most out of the process—or, rather, pouring love and time into it. Oh wait, sorry. There is something that stops you from doing that: the fact that you’ll still only get paid for cheap goods. And that if you don’t succeed, instead of a diamond, you’ll be left with a pretty expensive but unsellable pile of bullshit.
Analyzed since 2025 Sarah Pally In her column "Blossoms and Pearls", she uses industry-related terms and comments on them with a personal touch, from a linguistic perspective - as well as with a precise view of developments in the industry. Pally is a partner in the Partner & Partner agency in Winterthur. She has been working in the fields of content marketing, text/concept and storytelling in the communications and marketing sector for 15 years.
