"The meek shall inherit squat."

Sermon From the Mount

June 8, 2009

Recommending Best Practices to Positively Impact the Verbiage-Based Communication Space

Filed under: Marketing Language, People — Tags: , , , — admin @ 5:27 pm
small-hmmm-woman

I'm imagining inserting a pushpin into this guy "at every possible touchpoint."

About three weeks ago, I launched a thoroughly unscientific survey on Facebook to identify the 25 most clichéd, credibility-wrecking examples of Biz-Buzzpeak that people are coming across in conference rooms and the Barnes & Noble “Business and Money” section these days.

I’m talking about words and phrases that, when they come out of a person’s mouth, immediately make you subtract about 40 points from that person’s estimated IQ.  You know, terms that make you think, “If that man says ‘optimize’, ‘empower’ or ‘go-to-market’ one more time, I’m going to force-feed him that PowerPoint clicker.”

So, here’s the list (alphabetized because, as I said, it’s an unscientific survey). Please keep in mind, I’m just reporting the data, not passing judgment, and, if anybody ever hears me use one of these terms, know in advance that I’m using it “ironically”.

  1. Anything “2.0”
  2. Best Practices
  3. Center of Excellence (personally, I’ll be happy to be part of a Center of Extreme Adequacy)
  4. Change Agent
  5. Circle Back
  6. Client/Customer Centric Strategy
  7. Continuous Conversation/Improvement
  8. Core Competency
  9. Dialogue (as a verb)
  10. Eco Anything
  11. Inclusion
  12. In The _________ Space (Example: “We’re having a game-changing impact in the emulsified, starchy-tuber-based, salty snacks space” instead of “we’re selling a lot more potato chips”)
  13. In today’s (Choose at least one from (1) and one from (2))
    1. globalized / challenging / recession-ravaged / interconnected / high-speed
    2. economy / society / workplace / world / corporation
  14. Let’s Take This Offline (translation: “I need some time to come up with a better response than “oh, yeah?!”)
  15. Low-Hanging Fruit
  16. Maximize
  17. Relative to _________ (as in “…how people feel relative to cufflinks” instead of “…how people feel about cufflinks”)
  18. Stakeholder
  19. The iPod of ________ (as in, “We believe we’ve created the iPod of galvanized roofing nails.”)
  20. Thought-Leader
  21. Touch Base
  22. Touchpoint
  23. Turnkey Solutions
  24. Traction (unless describing tires)
  25. Value Proposition

Here’s a thought: when a person uses a phrase like “optimizing throughput”, there’s a good chance that 50% of the people in the room will think he sounds smart and the other 50% will roll their eyes (most will do this in their imaginations, but it doesn’t matter, the damage is done). If that same person says “”becoming more efficient”, nobody will roll their eyes.

_________________

22210991NOTE: This entry was inspired by the excellent and tiny book Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky. The book has been around a few years and some of the jargon has changed, but based on the way we hear a lot of people talking, the subject matter is still relevant.

So, before you buy another book that purports to tell you how to create win-win scenarios by seizing the long tail of downstream, value-added, best-of-breed, seamlessly-integrated strategies, buy this book so you’ll be able to tell people what you’ve done, in a way that won’t have at least half of them rolling their eyes.

June 6, 2009

Hey. Check it out. The New York Times no longer has “readers”.

Filed under: Consumers, Marketing Language, Media — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 8:36 pm
Photo of a man using a newspaper

Photo of a man using a newspaper

When we founded Drumcircle in 2008, my partner Anne and I set out on a quixotic mission to eliminate the term “consumer” from the lexicon of our industry (there’s a whole page on our website devoted to the subject, in fact).

Just substituting the word “people” for “consumers” will instantly make every one of us better at our jobs. It just makes sense. Thinking about people instead of consumers will give us all one less chance to forget that it’s breathing, brains, blood and bone individuals, just like you and me, but nothing like you and me, that we’re dealing with here.

We have to get a person’s attention. We have to connect with that person at a level he may not even have direct access to himself. Then we have to change, reinforce or create something new within that person.

So, today, I came across this in Creativity Online:

“Why The New York Times Doesn’t Call Its Readers ‘Readers’

“In a world of near-ubiquitous computing, where an ever-expanding collection of devices turns readers into…co-creators and distributors, The New York Times…(needs to turn)…its readers into, well, something more.

Speaking at the CaT: Creativity and Technology conference today, Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The New York Times, said the company has quit calling online readers “readers,” instead referring to them as users.”

Until now, only software developers and drug dealers have referred to the people they sell their merchandise to as “users”. So this is a big step forward. Congratulations to the folks at the venerable Gray Lady who were in the meeting where this decision was made. This is exactly the kind of thinking that’s keeping newspapers in their current state of relevance in today’s dynamic media climate.

Come on, people.

June 5, 2009

Who does Bill Mount think he is to name his blog that? And, for that matter, who is Bill Mount?

Filed under: Advertising, History of Marketing — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 4:15 pm

Yes, I named my blog “Sermon From The Mount”.  And, to explain why, I’m about to severely date myself. But it’ll be worth it if I can remind the world of one of the greatest trade advertising campaigns ever.

From sometime in the 1970’s to sometime in the 1990’s, The Wall Street Journal ran a series of more than 100 ads aimed directly at the people responsible for filling the newspaper’s pages and coffers: ad agencies. The campaign ran in just four publications: Advertising Age, Adweek/Mediaweek and the WSJ itself. It was called Creative Leaders and each full-page ad was a long-copy quasi-interview that explored the roots, philosophies and general worldview of an exalted figure in the Advertising Creative Pantheon.

All were minimally designed and beautifully written, but, bizarrely, had these goofy, get-you-flunked-out-of-University-of-Texas-School-of-Advertising, bad-pun headlines: Ed McCabe’s ad was headlined “The Real McCabe”. Lee Clow’s was “Clow, as in Wow”.  Penny Hawkey’s was “Penny For Your Thoughts”. Lois Korey’s was “Korey’s Story” (you can see the whole campaign – and I encourage you to do so after you’ve finished reading this – here at the Advertising Educational Foundation website).hawkey1

Naturally, all of us young creative guys (of which I was one during most of the years the campaign ran) devoured every word of every ad and, much like wannabe baseball players imagine themselves batting cleanup in the World Series and ‘tween girls doodle “Mrs. Zac Efron” on their notebooks*, we all spent an absurd amount of time dreaming up often viciously insulting bad-pun headlines for each others’ eventual Wall Street Journal Creative Leader ads.

Now, I remember some of the headlines we came up with for one another and, don’t worry, guys (and you know who you are) I won’t reproduce them here since I don’t have permission from my former colleagues to use their names. But I certainly remember many of the headlines my creative buddies came up with for me. Some of the G-Rated ones included “A Mound of Mount”, “Bill Shills” and “Five-Dollar Bill.” I also remember the day a young art director, fresh out of (you guessed it) The University of Texas School of Advertising, poked her head into my office and told me that she had the perfect headline for my WSJ ad. “Sermon From The Mount”.

An ACD who was sitting in my office at the time rolled his eyes and delivered, with absolutely flat affect, the withering put-down, “That’s not funny. That’s actually decent.”

About fifteen years have passed. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t run that campaign any more and I’ve been out of the Ad Guy Business for quite a while. This blog is about the last place that not funny but decent headline is going to have a chance for exposure. It certainly isn’t intended to imply that this blog will be filled with sermonizing. But I hate to waste material (especially if I didn’t have to think it up in the first place) and it’s a chance to say thanks for a good idea to a really talented art director (and you know who you are).

As for the “who is Bill Mount” part, please go here for my official Drumcircle bio and here for my Facebook page.

* Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m ready. Bring it. I place this link here for anybody who questions the painful but undeniable truth of my reporting

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