Southwest's On. Or Off, by a Little.

On and Off. Southwest Airlines is trying a new tagline - "Grab Your Bag. It's On" - as part of an ad campaign to persuade us to... well we're not sure. With some upbeat music and the repeated slogan of "It's On," the ads seem to be saying 'get back out there, keep flying.' The spots are a little bit jerky, a little bit jarring, bouncing from one intense, upbeat image to another, with people driving baggage carts and tossing bags and tearing tickets, all very quickly. The spots end with a narrator saying: "We don't fly around tough times. How about you?" But it's not always the narrator who invokes the slogan: in one spot, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly, sitting in an aisle seat, looks at the camera and says it in his deadpan (if not semi-catatonic) tone.
David Crawford, creative director of the Dallas based agency GSD&M, tells an advertising journal, Mediapost.com, "At some point, we all come to the place where we say: 'You know, OK, enough is enough - let's get on with it, pull up our boot straps, get back at it. We've got to fix this ourselves.' And that's basically what this campaign is about: OK, grab your bags, it's on, we're done. Let's get back at it."

The ads replace a long Southwest campaign that poked fun at other carriers for charging fees for checked bags. This has led some to speculate that the Love Field-based carrier will soon start imposing a fee to check a bag. We don't think so, but we do think that the spots are really a little unfocused and a little herky-jerky. On the other hand, if they work...