Crossing the Line
I’m hearing the phrase “below the line” way too often at my house these days.
The local elementary school has adopted the phrase “below the line” to replace “inappropriate behavior” — which sounds catchy, but is tough to illustrate in construction paper.
These days, actions are either “above the line” or “below the line,” and anyone acting below the line is given three chances to haul himself up over the line before being shipped off to the principal. There’s a mural on the cafeteria wall with brightly colored footprints atop a thick, black mark and the boast “Greenvale Park Walks Above the Line.”
We used to call it “being good” and “being bad.”
To me, of course, “above the line” means media advertising and “below the line” means promotional marketing. Over the years, I have come to envision Below the Line as a great big jumble of the fun stuff — premiums and street parties and quirky prizes to long-shot sweepstakes. The upper reaches of The Line may be black-turtleneck creatives and storyboards, but down here it’s a mish-mosh of sampling crews and shelf-setters, wind-up cars, keychains, and Polaroids from bars. It’s like a big velvet bag with packages spilling out, all different shapes, all different wrapping paper — some of them duds, some of them gems. Down here, hands get dirty and work gets done.
You can imagine how jarring it is, then, to have an eight-year-old report scornfully at dinner, “Hailey was so below the line today.” That same night, at bedtime, he busted his own sister. “Whistling in the bathroom is really below the line,” he hollered. (It isn’t, of course, even though whistling in the house was against the rules when I was growing up — it got on my mom’s nerves.)
Funny how we didn’t hear about any of the goody two-shoes above the line stuff until the day he got a Caught You Being Exceptional (exceptional!) chit, good for the trinket of your choice in the principal’s office.
Some of the teachers had a tough time adopting The Line lines after years of saying “unacceptable” and “negotiate” and “consequence.” The underlying premise is that kids choose to walk above or below the line, and can choose to be good (if it’s still p.c. to say that) instead of bad. No one seems to have noticed that the really bad boys don’t walk anyway — they swagger.
My 10-year-old seems too savvy for all this, by the way. To her, kids are either being good or being bad. She has no stomach for jargon. So much for her ever getting an MBA.
Since I don’t (and won’t) have an MBA either, it’s almost embarrassing to have that old accounting notion of line items so ingrained in my head. But it’s weird to hear the familiar industry buzzwords crammed into black-and-white buckets of “being good” and “being bad.” It feels like falling back into the days when marketing strategy boiled down to: Advertising good for brand; promotion, bad.
And just when promotion marketers have finally (mostly) ditched that feeling of inferiority. Just when “media fragmentation” and “experiential marketing” and “consumer touchpoints” and all the rest of the cocktail party nattering has coalesced to swing things our way for a change, to make promotion as cool (cooler?) than ads.
To make matters worse, I’ve been chatting over several months with a London agency exec who routinely refers to promotion as “BTL.” I picture a sandwich every time she says it.
But maybe confusion is the solution. Maybe this school discipline thing is just the ticket to dispel the accounting term. If we get in the habit of thinking that niceties are above the line and wickedness (tailgating, stealing, whistling in the bathroom) is below, that could evolve into a “paradigm” of: Successful marketing is above the line; lame attempts are below. Couldn’t it?
What is The Line, anyway?
Maybe it’s the point where things get on your nerves.
