'Your light on the lonely road'

This was the rather melancholic strapline I saw across the front of a breakdown truck recently, under the logo for Lantern Recovery Services.

I liked it immediately, not just for its alliterative qualities but because it did what very few brands are ever brave enough to do, and picked up on a negative.

Not just a negative like 'Your loo gets smelly', which you might use to sell Harpic. (Although I don't recommend that as a line.) But a subtler negative about a real part of life.

Often, one feels brands would rather fold up and die than admit there were any aspects of life that were less than positive. In management speak, problems become 'challenges', and failures turn into 'performance issues'. Likewise, you often get the feeling that marketing tries to pretend that everything in the garden is rosy - and Product X will just make it even rosier. (I reckon it's all a hangover from the débacle of You're never alone with a Strand.)

'Your light on the lonely road' connects because it has a truth in it. Sometimes the road does get lonely, especially at those overly bright motorway services, where you stop to chew rubberised chicken nuggets to the sound of a fruit machine. Fair play to Lantern, I say, for having the nerve to admit it - and play it into a positive.

All this rumination reminded me of the recent blogger discussion I'd come across about 'sadvertising' - advertising that uses darker emotions to make its point. I can't fit it all in here, but if you're interested you can start by checking out the entertaining blog by anonymous ad creative Scamp.