UPS Is About Way More Than Just Shipping Boxes in Its Heady New Global Push

UPS knows you've got problems, and it wants to help.

The shipping service is repositioning itself as a business-to-business solution for companies with logistical considerations trickier than just picking up and dropping off boxes. To that end, a new global campaign from Ogilvy & Mather debuts the tagline "United Problem Solvers" (because abbreviations can be puns too, see?).

The debut ad essentially calls on viewers to bring UPS their stickiest package delivery issues, while a montage of action shots shows examples of how the company is working behind-the-scenes in of-the-moment industries. That means making sure medicine is transported at the right temperatures, and offbeat companies like paramotor manufacturers get the parts they need, and artisanal, fragile products arrive where they're going in one piece. 

The new tagline does earn the honor of being more relatable, at least in theory, than the company's last, similar-in-spirit "We [Heart] Logistics." But the new execution feels, overall, a little like a self-help speech for snail mail—a heady conceptual attempt to communicate the idea that UPS is keeping pace with the design-and-innovation zeitgeist.

The overwrought copy, in particular, struggles at moments to turn the corner—trying to repurpose adjectives like "baffling" and "audacious" as nouns, which is kind of distracting, especially because baffling actually is a noun that means something totally different. Presumably UPS would be happy to ship your baffling, too, if your problems include baffling. That, assuming you didn't actually want to ship your bafflements (also a noun UPS should never use in an ad) by writing all your big questions down on slips of paper and overnighting them to your future self for better, wiser answers. 

Or you could just post them somewhere on the Internet. Like, here's one—what's this ad about again?

(Via WSJ)