Opinion

Speak English, morons

In this guest post, Jon Holloway has a short rant about industry jargon

Plain English. Is it really that hard? As an industry we are obsessed with baffling, the whole one-upmanship of this crazy advertising and marketing world is making us all look like clowns.

Einstein was right; ‘if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it enough’. Does that sum up our industry; do we not care enough to actually understand what we are talking about?

It is so easy to become a social media guru, a marketing Jedi or a digital ninja by spending 10 minutes on twitter, reading a few blogs and some out dated books. Then vomiting them all back up in a random order over unsuspecting people who come to you for advice.

The access to information we now have at any time in any way we need it (or as we might say it, access to the knowledge superhighway in hyper-real-time) means that everyone is becoming more educated, although education in the marketing world is a fluid concept, dispersed between the doers and the bullshitters.

Transmedia – what you mean an idea that isn’t reliant on media channel?

Social media – connected people talking about stuff, probably not about you?

SoLoMo – fuck me, really? Why do we need this crap? Yes everything is social, everything is local and my god, everything is mobile. You must be a genius! Yawn.

At what point in our transition to working in advertising do we stop thinking like normal people on the street?

Share your favorite ‘Ad-English’ phrase and my top choice will win something special.

Jon Holloway is strategy director at The Works Sydney

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