BrandSniper: There's _____, and then there's...

I just saw a TV commercial for "The Promise," the new album by the Simon Cowell-created operatic pop group Il Divo. The voice-over included this line:

"It's not just music... it's Il Divo!"

This immediately raised two questions in my mind:

1. Are you sure it's not music? It sounds an awful lot like music to me.
2. Will this particularly lazy brand of copywriting ever go away?

There's Pennzoil's current tagline: "Not just oil, Pennzoil." (So you're saying Pennzoil's not oil?)

There's Wendy's current tagline: "It's waaaay better than fast food. It's Wendy's." (Actually, it's remarkably similar to fast food.)

There's Michelob's old tagline: "There's beer, and then there's Michelob." (There's beer, and then there's colossally average beer.)

It's not just the aesthetics I'm protesting here. There are probably a half-dozen other recent examples I could cite of this construct, in which we're told the brand in question is different from the category it exists in, with no reason to believe whatsoever. And that's the problem: Any brand could create one of these taglines by simply filling in the blanks, and it would be every bit as unconvincing. It's lazy, it's undifferentiated, and it claims or proves nothing.

So beware. If you find yourself or your agency drafting similar copy - "Not just a bowling alley, but _______," or "There are post-nasal drip remedies, and then there's _______." - it's an immediate red flag that something's gone horribly wrong. You're either doing nothing meaningfully different than your competitors, or you are and you've (inexplicably) elected not to talk about it.

I believe the average small business can write a better tagline than the agencies to which Pennzoil and Wendy's are paying millions of dollars. Prove me right.

ADDENDUM, November 21: I just saw an ad for Kmart which featured the line, "There's smart, and there's Kmart smart!" Hands up if you ever in your life associated Kmart with the word "smart."

Anyone?