PRIVATE VIEW: Andrew Cracknell is open to suggestions.

Of the three activities that waste most time in a creative department (thinking up leaving cards, deciding on awards entries and writing straplines) we all know the last is the most pointless. If you've stumbled on to or inherited a good one, such as 'The home of the Whopper', use it. If you haven't, sod it. Account handlers and clients of the world, when are you going to acknowledge that no-one's interested, no-one's listening, that it's just more rat shit under the logo? And, of course, you agency and client chief executives, when are you going to stop confusing slogans with an idea?

Many great organisations have got away without one. Many others change theirs every year. You're in the business and how many can you recall, let alone have any significance for you? Yet every week around the world, thousands of creative teams sweat out drivel such as 'Threepwoods tap washers - where tomorrow meets yesterday' and, embarrassed, accept the praise of the account and client team, all the time knowing it's bollocks and doesn't make a rat's arse of difference to the communication.

Lucozade Sport, with the line 'Water. Plus', watery graphics and an earnest voiceover, makes the astonishing claim that Lucozade is more than water and Lloydspharmacy, with stuttering direction and a confused construction, makes heavy weather of the honourably simple: 'Your local health authority.'

'The girls are ready, are you?', the revised strapline for the 24-hour Lynx effect, is, as these things go, pretty nice and if you're a bloke, pretty reassuring. But its main function is to help decode a marginally confusing idea that elicited five different explanations from the five different people who I showed it to. Mind you, in this arena, does absolute slavish comprehension really matter? If you're a bloke, you won't resent the 72 viewings necessary to get to the bottom of it.

One of the more meaningful and enduring straplines, 'Never knowingly undersold', has rarely been advertised and doesn't appear on the new John Lewis poster campaign. Just about everything else does, though, and I bet I'm pushing at the art director's open door when I say this will be a first-class campaign when they take away all the extraneous babble to leave just the headline and the logo.

If you buy Kingsmill bread, you'll be contributing to buying kit for your local sports club, which means pudgy blokes won't have to run around the park playing football in their underpants and children won't have to use shovels for cricket bats, as shown in its commercials. This is a likeable campaign, which sounds like faint praise. But that's because one of the many downsides of our awards obsession is that you're taught from a very early age that work is either great or it's shit. But it ...