Who killed the great ad slogan?
- Chris Godfrey
- Jul 6
- 5 min read
The slogan used to be the ad. It was the cherry on the cake. The line that brought a brand to mind when a purchase was imminent. But that's all gone now. A 2025 ASA survey found that Tesco's "Every Little Helps" remains the UK's most memorable slogan, alongside decades-old lines from Nike and Heinz. And that's it. We haven't had another line to challenge these all-time greats in more than 20 years.
Every year, the words written for ads, films, books and plays run into the trillions, yet almost all are instantly forgotten. You disagree? Think how much film and TV dialogue you’ve heard in the last twelve months. Now try naming five spoken lines you still remember. You can’t. It’s all gone into the woodchipper we call ‘blur, blur, blur.’
“You're gonna need a bigger boat” from Jaws, is one of just a handful of movie lines most people can recall unprompted. “I’ll be back” from Terminator and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Apocalypse Now are also in the club. But the club is highly exclusive - and it seems they’re not taking on new members .Because, after more than a century’s worth of film, most of us can only remember a dozen lines or less.
Some will say that’s sad. But I think it says something else: rarity like this is worth studying. Because the same scarcity shows up in advertising.
The evidence is a graveyard of anniversaries
In January 2025, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority published a survey where more than 6,800 people were asked which ad slogans they actually remembered. Tesco's “Every Little Helps” came out on top, followed by Nike's “Just Do It,” McDonald's “I'm Lovin' It,” and Heinz's “Beanz Meanz Heinz.”
Autoglass, Smash, Calgon, Specsavers, Gillette and Morrisons rounded out the top ten.
Now look to the dates behind the slogans. Heinz goes back to 1967, Smash's Martian campaign to 1974, Nike's to 1988. Tesco to 1993. The newest entry with any real staying power is Specsavers, and that campaign launched in 2002. Nothing from the last two decades has come close to reaching number one.
So why is that?
What made the old ones stick
There's genuine psychology behind the reason certain lines lodge in our memories while most just fade away.
Researchers have documented something called the rhyme-as-reason effect: rhyming statements get judged as being more true, not merely easier to remember, than the same statement without the rhyme. It comes down to cognitive fluency. The easier a sentence is for the brain to process, the more credible and trustworthy it tends to feel, and that quirk is doing a lot of heavy lifting inside a line like “Beanz Meanz Heinz.”
Repeating the brand name inside the line also matters more than most people may think. Kantar's ad-testing data shows that slogans built this way, and used consistently across a campaign, can lift branding scores by as much as 6%.
Set the line to music and the effect grows again: sung or jingled slogans can see a 25-point jump in brand recognition, alongside real gains in impact and involvement. “For mash get Smash” works not because it's clever, but because it's four words, it rhymes, and someone put it to a tune and left it alone - forever.
Why the well is running dry
The fact that all the big hitters are more than 20 years old doesn’t mean today's creatives have lost the knack. The conditions that made a mass-memorable slogan possible have simply thinned out. Kantar's own tracking found that roughly 74% of ads tested in 2014 included a slogan; while today the figure sits at 50%. Website addresses, hashtags and calls to action have crowded out the end frame a slogan used to own.
And of course, there's a bigger shift going on. Apart from during major sports events, (hello World Cup), there's no longer a Saturday night with the whole country watching one channel at the same time. Attention has scattered across platforms, screens and formats built for skipping and scrolling rather than dwelling. A slogan can't earn the status of a national catchphrase if the nation never heard it in the first place.
In case you’re thinking this only applies to consumer brands and not to B2B, you’re wrong. Because the underlying question is identical: what does someone remember about you once you've left the room? A buyer weighing up a professional services contract might sit on a decision for months, comparing notes with colleagues long after your presentation is over. What tends to survive that gap is rarely the pitch deck, but the one line someone can still repeat from memory when the conversation starts again.
What's replacing the slogan
The closest thing to a modern equivalent isn't a line at all, but a hashtag challenge. Chipotle's #GuacDance and Calvin Klein's #MyCalvins do roughly the same job a slogan used to do, giving people a repeatable, brand-owned phrase to gather around, except the audience now performs it back rather than simply repeating it.
Specsavers remains the rare survivor still earning new attention nearly a quarter of a century after launch, because the line was never retired or refreshed, just left to gather speed. In B2B, the strongest current examples skip rhyme altogether and lean on identity instead: Slack's “Where work happens,” Accenture's “High performance. Delivered.” Short, benefit led, the brand name close by even when it's not inside the line, and never altered once it's chosen.
Does this hold up as a tutorial?
I believe it does, although there's a caveat: nobody can hand you a formula that guarantees the next “Just Do It.” Budget, timing and plain luck still do more work than any structural trick.
Instead, what the research offers is a way to shift the odds, and I think that's strong enough to use. So here we go...
Put the brand name inside the line itself, not simply beside it. “Beanz Meanz Heinz” needs no logo to do its job.
Write for how the line sounds read aloud rather than how it looks on paper. Rhythm and rhyme are a measurable trust signal, not just decoration.
Keep it short enough to survive being repeated across a pub table or dropped into a client meeting without losing its shape.
Leave it alone once it's chosen. The line's power comes from years of unbroken use, not from being refreshed every campaign cycle.
If the budget stretches to it, give the line a sound rather than just words. The recall gained from a sung or jingled version over a spoken one is one of the largest single levers in the data.
Judge a new line by whether it survives being said by someone who wasn't in the room when it was written, not by how it tested in its first week.
Final word
In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never written a slogan that clings like glue forever. Creating a world-beater is far harder than it seems.
Accordingly, none of the tips above guarantee a slot on next year's top 10 list, but they form the honest version of a tutorial: not promising a shortcut to genius, just a way to get the odds on your side and stay out of your own way.
Hmmm. There may be a jingle in that thought.
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