To: Sub Shop Owner-to-Be Around the Corner from My House

From: Jobless Marketing Exec

RE: Signage

Dear Sir,

You may potentially want to hire an agency or, at the very least, a marketing consultant before taking out further advertising for your soon-to-launch submarine sandwich shop on Overland.  From the sign in its window (shown above), you could use some help.  Perhaps you are not American born-and-bred — certainly, immigrants display a certain kind of scrappy tenacity about achieving “the American Dream” that few Americans can even feign anymore — but sometimes, the difference in a mere letter can take your communications strategy from passable to failing.  Punctuation, for those of us who do not use our cell phones as our primary authoring tool, can also help  drive home a message that, left to people’s own interpretation, can flail about in a sea of ambiguity.

I’m sure what you meant to communicate is, “Fast. Fresh.  Mmmmmm!”  This is a definitive statement about the quality of your product (“Fast. Fresh.”) that produces a desired result (“Mmmmmm”, a recognizable — if not particularly lucid — statement of culinary enjoyment).  Features and benefits, reduced to admirably simple copy.  Not particularly memorable, but clear.

What you have now is a bit different.  The above, in short, says, “Fast…(pause) Fresh…(pause) How does any one person compete against the likes of Subway and Quizno’s in today’s age of automation, and I wonder if double meat and cheese would give me such explosive diarrhea that I’ll never be allowed to eat here again.”

See?  Different, and probably not what you were going for.  But welcome to the neighborhood, and best of luck!

“Mr. McTiernan was also ordered to surrender his passport. It was unclear what his sentence would mean for a movie he was preparing to film in Argentina, ‘Run,’ about an Interpol agent who uncovers a conspiracy while pursuing a murder suspect.”

It’s perfectly okay – expected, even – to foreshadow upcoming events with a blunt instrument in the movies.  But if you’d rather not have a judge make you fork over your passport, don’t take a directing gig on a film called “Run” to be made in a shady South American country while being accused by being a shifty liar.