On the Tube the other day, I spotted a billboard for Heinz with the tagline:

Beanz Meanz Heinz

I liked the wordplay and the fact that the tagline is aphorism-adjacent, if not an actual aphorism. It follows almost all of the five laws of the aphorism… it’s short, definitive, has an author (the Kraft Heinz Company or its advertising agency), and it has a twist (the cacographic spelling and the slant rhyme between the ‘ea’ and ‘ei’ sounds). The one law it does not meet: It’s not philosophical. (Full disclosure: You have multiple food manufacturer options when purchasing beans.)

Advertisements, along with slogans and sound bites, do arguably espouse a kind of philosophy, one associated with a specific product or political party, for example. The philosophies they promote, however, urge homogeneity (of buying or voting patterns, at least), not the iconoclasm of the aphorism. Another crucial difference between advertisements and aphorisms is that ads are intended to induce commercial action, while aphorisms are intended to induce psychological action.

The best ads aspire to the state of aphorism; the worst are filled with a passionless vapidity.

In fact, the closer an advertising slogan comes to being an aphorism, the more effective it is. Take my favorite catchphrase of all time, a statement as profound and urgent as the ancient Latin maxim of Carpe diem, brought to us in the mid-­aughts by the good people at Müller to sell their yogurt (Full disclosure: You have multiple food manufacturer options when purchasing yogurt):

Lick the lid of life

Advertisements and aphorisms are alike in the accelerated kinds of thinking they try to encourage or subvert. A successful ad convinces you you need a specific kind of stuff; a successful aphorism, like the Müller yogurt maxim, convinces you you need to take a specific action or embrace a specific state of mind.