Some of the advertising agencies listed below are wildly successful, some are large groups that handle multi-million dollar accounts, and others have since gone out of business. What do they all have in common? They failed to hire the right copywriter.

While uninhibited creativity is great for certain artists, agencies that work with your brand need to tether themselves to reality. If you work in advertising, this is supposed to be your bread and butter.

Some of these taglines are a few years old and have since been changed. Unlike a fine wine, this cringe does not age well.

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+27 — We’re producers of interestingness.

Adex — We create dreams.

Alfred — Everything begins around a table and ends with a glass of champagne.

All Contents — We like to cultivate singularity.

Allen & Gerritsen — Creativity is no longer king. Our new king is inventiveness.

Armando Testa — Cross vision.

Arts & Letters Creative Co. — We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’ve done it a thousand times.

Asahi Agency — Applying Japanese spirit and Western intelligence.

Babel — Give back to communication the power to create value.

Baldwin& — We’re not really sure, and we’d like to keep it that way.

Barker & Christol — We believe in world peace, rainbows and fluffy kitties.

BD — Murder the mediocre.

Becon — Humankind

BMedia — Happy combination of multiple skills.

MF — The home of the long idea.

Camden — We’re a human-scale agency.

Clarity Coverdale Fury — Feeding the emotion between brands and people.

Code d’Azur — Stand out. Fit in.

CP+B — To create outrageously dramatic work.

Cubo — Outsmarting problems by making brands stickier in the mind.

Delphys — Don’t be bound by rules.

Des Cheval — A no-limit agency that takes a fresh and impetuous view of everything.

Deutsch — Human spoken here.

Duncan Channon — Unearth, unfurl and unleash truly distinct identities.

Engage — Data is human.

Exp — We create energy.

Factory — We’ll make things.

Fair&Square — Less money requires more guts.

FCB — Never finished.

Giant Spoon — Ideas through the lens of culture.

Glory — Audacity is a vector of efficiency.

Goodstuph — Never ‘no’ but ‘why not?’

Hometown — Move at the speed of culture.

Hunt Adkins — We blow shit up.

J. Walter Thompson — The world’s best-known agency.

Jung von Matt — Emotional is the only rational.

Kokoro — Heartvertising.

Nova/SB — The popsynergy agency.

Partners & Partners — Boston Consulting meets Ideo meets Droga5.

Quiet Storm — Purveyors of exquisite mind bombs.

Redder — We make brands redder

Sanders\Wingo — We use behavioral science to hack the human OS.

Scholz & Friends — We are the orchestra of ideas.

Sponge — Where narrative, firepower and innovation absorb into one.

Super at the Spree — Super is not just a name. It’s what our ideas are.

Tattoo Projects — No, we’re not a tattoo parlor.

The Jupiter Drawing Room & Partners — Beautiful mayhem.

Uncle — Simplicity and creativity have the same mother.

Wieden+Kennedy — Find the brand’s soul and reveal its truth.

Wolf & Wilhelmine — Obsessed with what it means to be alive today.

Wolfe Doyle — Comfortable ads should make you nervous as hell.

There is a popular Latin phrase by the name of 'Via Negativa'. It is the principle that we know what is wrong with more certainty than what is right. In defining our values, this knowledge grows by subtraction. As the Annecy Agency conveys what we stand for, it's helpful to shed light on the areas of bad copywriting that make us laugh.

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