Real estate signs are a great source of “copy in the wild”. This one caught my eye, but not for the right reasons. At the bottom right of the sign is a small ad encouraging viewers to list their houses on the company’s website: “Register at hockingstuart.com.au and let the house do the hunting.” (It’s a bit difficult to read on this picture, but trust me, that’s what it says!)
This is a pretty obvious homage to an old classic, “Let your fingers do the walking”. Advertising Age gives the latter slogan, used internationally for many years by Yellow Pages, an honourable mention in its list of the Top 10 Slogans of the [20th] Century. So famous was it that it became what the linguists at Language Log call a snowclone: a phrase with one or more substitutable words that becomes a kind of cliché generator, a template for new phrases, like “X is the new Y”, or “the mother of all X”, or (for the geeks among us) “I’m in ur X, Y-ing ur Z”. A quick Google search for “Let your X do the Y” comes up with “Let your thumbs do the trading” (about using a mobile phone to play the stock market), “Let your feet do the talking” (about an awareness-raising sponsored walk), and “Let your subconscious do the thinking” (about…well, I guess that one’s fairly obvious). “Let the house do the hunting” changes the template slightly by using “the” instead of “your”, but it’s still a very clear nod.
So we can’t give whoever came up with this slogan very high marks for originality, but does it actually work? I don’t think so. What made the Yellow Pages slogan so successful was that it was a metaphor that was both clever and instantly comprehensible. It’s hard to transport oneself back into the minds of the people who first heard it, but I imagine they knew straight away what it was getting at: their fingers flipping through the Yellow Pages were being compared to their feet making the arduous journey from shop to shop. Of course the message became especially clear when it was reinforced by advertising and by the famous logo of two fingers pointing down (a dream collaboration between copywriting and design, that one). But on the other hand my immediate reaction to “Let the house do the hunting” is more or less “huh?” My brain is immediately filled with the image of an actual house running from inspection to inspection, which sounds kind of difficult even for a house on stilts, and doesn’t leave me any clearer about what’s being offered.
Yes, after a while it sinks in: the metaphor is that, by listing your house online and allowing it to be automatically matched with buyers whose profiles fit certain criteria, you are effectively bringing buyer and seller together with less effort than was traditionally required. Having worked that out, you might even concede that it’s a rather clever use of the “let your x do the y” snowclone. But clever doesn’t mean good, and I think any slogan which requires you mentally to fill in that much background information is probably not doing its job, especially out of context on a roadside sign. It does make a bit more sense on the website itself, but when you’re advertising across several media, you want a slogan that’s going to work in all of them.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe this really is just as easy to understand as “Let your fingers do the walking” and my initial reaction was just obtuse? Let me know what you think.
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