Vanity for Content Sanity

Moving to the U.S. from London, I have been particularly struck by the small differences between how things are done in my homeland and in my adopted country.

Vestibules attached to New York restaurant entrances during the winter to keep diners from feeling an icy blast every time the front door opens – not something any London eatery I know does. The devotion to college sports, baffling for Brits. And the puzzling way the word ‘salad’ has been co-opted in America to mean any food mixed with mayonnaise – tuna, chicken, egg, whitefish – whether or not it contains lettuce, cucumber or tomato.

But perhaps the smallest thing that has made the biggest impact on me is vanity plates on cars. Since moving to New York two years ago, I have become obsessed with taking photos of any license plate I see that makes me smile or provokes a chuckle.

Although they often whizz by before I can whip my phone out, I have still managed to amass a decent collection of pictures snatched either from the passenger seat on a car ride, or simply from ambling along the sidewalk (and occasionally running into the middle of the road to get a better angle).

While personalized plates are permitted in the U.K., the rules governing them are draconian, requiring leaps of imagination to make actual words – let alone phrases. You’re doing well if you can get them to spell out your initials.

In America, by comparison, the relative free-for-all approach enables far more creativity. This has valuable lessons for us in the public relations business and especially those, like me, responsible for producing content.

If an idea, a joke or a sense of personality can be conveyed in seven or eight characters, the implication is that we can afford to be a lot more concise in our working language. Like the best vanity plates, we should be able to express ideas and key messages as crisply as possible.

This is not easy to achieve, but it is where we should all be aiming. One of the most common faults in bad writing is wordiness. Intuitively, you might think it would be easier to keep things short, but the opposite tends to be the case.

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously said: “I have only made this letter rather long, because I have not had time to make it shorter.” When writing, we should keep in mind the advice we give clients when we prep them for interview: say what you need to say, then stop. 

There is no room to ramble on a humble license plate. Just as we have grown accustomed to the shorthand of SMS messages, we know how to decode license plate meanings when letters are dropped out of a word to make it fit or when numbers are substituted for letters.

Some of my favorites, in no particular order –  “FLGTRISK,” “1M BATMN,” “ASKURMOM” and “CACH ME” – all strike me as either amusing or convey personality.

The apparent confidence of drivers is also something to behold, judged solely by their license plates. “COOL GUY,” “2 SMUUV” and the mind-blowing “GOD DNA” are particular standouts. (I’m not sure what was going through the mind of the person who plumped for “SO SO” on theirs.) Electric car drivers seem to have a particular fondness for personalized plates. I’ve seen Teslas sporting phrases such as “CLN AIR” and “HAHA OIL.”

Before discovering the joy of vanity plates, I would have said that the height of crafting something clever or funny with as few words or letters as possible was the preserve of the tabloid headline writer. It takes a special talent to do that job. But if brevity is the sole criterion on which we judge creativity and craftsmanship, then perhaps the license plate should be our benchmark.

And on that note, I will leave you by wondering if the car owner who had the license plate “STRYTLR” is a public relations professional.