Speak English, morons

Leading behaviour change agency, Stop It Now Or You’ll Get A Smack (SINOYGAS), today announced a major campaign designed to change behaviour.

Experiential activity leveraged by social media will generate virtual flash-mob gatherings that will stage culture jamming-style protests tailored for multiplatform dispersal.

‘Contemporaneous storytelling is key in today’s world,’ SINOYGAS spokesrobot Weg Haackesabre said. ‘That’s why ours is virtual. We couldn’t actually do it in reality.’

The agency will not be post-analysing the campaign, nor disclosing which aspects of behaviour it was targetting. ‘Numbers are so ugly,’ Ms/r Haackesabre said. ‘Culture jamming is never captive to ugly accountability. We’re not selling peanut butter, or cars you know. Hacks do that. In ads,’ s/he added, grimacing.

Budget is $10 million.

John, you could have closed-the-loop on this piece – I’m not sure I have alignment. I mean, it’s not like we’re trying to turn an oil-tanker here. Practicing some betapreneurialism and crowd-sourcing among your cohorts could have been an easy solve. THAT is how this piece could have gone from good to great. Maybe just run it up the flag-pole moving forwards and see who salutes in terms of buy-in.

Packcepts, because people have run out of time to say packaging concepts.

Is this irony or is this piece riddled with English errors?

e.g

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

BTW out dated is spelt outdated.

DB

Less is more . . .

these guys send it up well.

http://www.collegehumor.com/vi.....rt-up-guys

Doughboy I just love it! Your little awesome observation landed you 3 “English errors”.

Since when does e.g. not end in a full stop?

Since when do you quote someone’s sentence and not let your readers know? “:p”

FYI – I don’t know of any good English words that start with BTW.

I’m sick of reading comments online and coming across this shit. Stay on topic and grow a brain! It’s people like you that slow the world down and hinder progress because all the smart people have stay back and “edumacate” you!

Get a job.

Technically the Einstein quote is “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.

Ubiquitous Connectivity

You guys all need to stop drinking the Kool Aid

Jon transmedia planning means something like telling the whole of the story across many mediums. Not trying to tell the whole story in each medium. Got a better name for it (what you’ve suggested above is longer and not accurate).

Adam

Ps its a derivative from the term transmedia storytelling

@Schmoopie Technically you are right 🙂

Doughboy, you must be so much fun at parties.
I don’t think it’s just advertising or marketing suffering this. And I don’t think it’s a recent trend either. People have always used overcomplicated words to sound smarter than they are.
Perhaps it’s a trend of education, whereby meeting a word count is valued moreso over actually getting your point across in a simple and clear way.

@Adam Ferrier, agreed, and I know where it comes from, and is a fair point.. Wasn’t the point I was trying to make, but note to self to be more accurate in future 🙂

More accurate or more pregnant!?

We singing from the same song sheet on with this article… now we just have to leverage the synergy.

*We’re

This comment thread is a case of ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ – how ’bout we share some jargon-wank and all have a laugh rather than point out each others errors.

Also, you could learn too f***ing spell.

http://iampaddy.com/spell/

Also….

This month we’re really going to break through the clutter with this campaign and deliver some paradigm-shifting news that, at the end of the day, should capitalize both on our core competencies and on your hunger for change.

Things in advertising lately have been all-business, all-the-time. So we’ve decided to spin-up a new communications initiative that I’m calling – and this is a real game-changer – Adwording.

Our messaging this month is all new and standards-based. It’s a bit of a thought experiment right now, but we’re going to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it. If we can get buy-in from a majority of our 300,000 key stakeholders then we may just make Adwording a tentpole of our core messaging strategy and a key differentiator of our value proposition.

Make no mistake – this is some real blue-sky thinking here. We wanted to keep you in-the-loop so that, moving forward, we’re all singing from the same sheet music.
We hope to leverage your interest in what’s new at our organization and align that with our propensity to eat our own dog. FOOD! Dog food. Sorry, I’m still getting the hang of this.

See, that’s an example of what we call “pushing the envelope”. Also “bad business practice.” It’s really just a matter of us honing in on which levers we need to pull to enhance the end user experience, and which levers are really just avenues to fostering user detachment.

PS Ecosystems. Feedback loops. Transmedia.

People who set up their own thing, have 1 – 3 employee’s and call themselves:
CEO, Social Media Expert, CSMO (Chief Social Media Officer), UEAD (User Experience Architectural Director); are all FIGJAM…

CAN’T…
think of a relevant example that will deliver the ROI required to push the brand beyond the normal boundaries that have effectively been established by our creative forefathers!

New media – are you serious about “employee’s”?

GUYS TAKE IT OFFLINE!!!

LET’S PARK THE SENTIMENT AND TAKE A MORE BLUE SKY APPROACH!!

It’s the job titles that get me, as you pointed out in your article those that self-style themselves as ninjas, gurus or Jedis; one of my favourite is the person on LinkedIn who has called herself “The Queen of Social Media” however my favourite by far is a life/business coach helping businesses with Twitter since only Nov 2010 who calls herself “The Queen of Twitter”

I met a lady the other day who sold herself (personally and on LinkedIn) as an “Internet Visionary”, upon investigation she had been in her “visionary” role for about 4 years…

This thread is going gangbusters.

Transmedia??? Isn’t it a case of simply telling a good story, and it’ll be retold across whatever medium is best for the storyteller and the audience?

Reminds me of that whisper marketing fad, where marketing gurus contrived promises that people would talk about products in social places.

Never understood that concept, because the social places I frequent are filled with pretty good live music, so when I’m pontificating about mUmBRELLA’s ‘quantum leap progress in real-time knowledge aggregation ‘to my mates, I fail to remember to whisper. And then a flash-mob of gen-yers forms celebrating this child of a baby boomer! (If only it would form and they would flash…)

My all-time favourite nomination is: ‘cross-vertical’
On enquiring what it meant I was informed in terms that reminded me of ‘horizontal’

FML guys! Stay on topic FFS!

:–)

Guilty as charged sometimes. No surprise my inner child wants to kick me in the arse.

Also:

“the whole one-upmanship of this crazy advertising and marketing world is making us all look like clowns.”

When I showed my inner child the above thread, she said that’s not the kind of circus she was talking about… and kicked me in the arse.

Barry White – sinze wen dose “because all the smart people have stay back” knot have a “too” in it ?

Soz Baz – could’nt help my self… smiley face

Contemporaneous – it’s a combination of contemporary and anus – for use when talking about arses in the now.

Who said there wasn’t any creativity left in the world? 😉

anyone who uses the word ‘gamification’ can gamifyTFO.

Jon (not John),Doughboy,Barry White, et al you seem to have got it all.
I could not find anyone suggesting this could for “our new platfom” but the quintessential elements seem to have been covered.
Well done,can we get back to the work we were doing to improve our collective productivity goal
Otherwise we could low perform on our KPIs and reduce the (already stated )ROI

Solutionising

Emotionality

Concepting

Meal occasion

Ideation

All words clients have used in meetings.

All words I’m not really fond of.

There’s lots of things that make us advertising people look like clowns, Jon. Things like most of the advertising. And really serious PR photos. One day you’ll grow to accept that we are all clowns. Then we hope to see you smile.

@Clown 2,425 – I look like a clown in all photos, this one took 15 shoots, 3 art directors, make up and many months of photoshop editing.. finally, I look normal, yet miserable.. Madness

Ha- great post and comments,recently had a bet with a colleague as to how long it might take to hear “end to end solutions” at a trade exhibition, answer was in few minutes…

@Butt-boy. Love it. Freakin’ hilarious.

lets just park that, we can take it offline later and just put it on the back burner

I hope I win Jon –

social currency content platform.

Another, more simple, and even more infuriating misuse of language is the continued use of words like ‘digital’ ‘social’ and ‘transmedia’ as nouns.
These are adjectives.

‘Digital’ and ‘social’ are ‘skunked’ words. They’ve been used wrong-like enough that their meaning changes.

Like hopefully, presently, decimate, anxious, disinterested and nauseous.

Also called ‘pedant catchers’.

For all those who like to criticise pendantry, trying reading one of Don Watson’s books. Suggest ‘Bendable Learnings’ and ‘Weasle Words’. Both will encourage you to speak and write so you can be understood the first time. After all, we are in the communications business!

Baudrillard uses the term “Transmediade appropriation” to denote not discourse, as the dialectic paradigm of expression suggests, but subdiscourse. Reicher implies that we have to choose between predeconstructivist textual theory and neocapitalist cultural theory- as we see here in Jon Holloway’s article .

And while this piece could be seen as a simple case of raging against the perceived wrongs of the modern (or indeed post modern) ad/digital industry, if one examines semantic transmedia one is faced with a choice: either reject predeconstructivist textual theory or conclude that the industry is capable of significance. It could be said that many deconstructions concerning mythopoetical transmedia paradox may yet be discovered.

Guilty as charged Peter P!

“Lets focus on managing the clients expectations and caveat it”

Masstige

Reading through the comments, I’m astounded that we’re so far up our own arses that nobody has called out the word ‘space’ as insufferable wank. Same goes for ‘price point’ rather than ‘price’ and the inexorable use of the word ‘diarize’ – I don’t care that it’s in the dictionary, saying it still makes you sound like a cock.

Solution.

Advertisers seems to have a ‘solution’ for everything.

a certain formerly-KKK-run chicken house heralding the term – and accompanying website – “goodification” springs to mind…. Makes me realise just how dire the situation must be in terms of sourcing unique domain names…
But then, the other day, I saw a beauty salon with a painted proclamation that promised cheap and painless “Eyebrown Waxing” and have often wandered past the “Phone Assessories” outlet near my work, so perhaps innovation should be recognised for “all intensive purposes” in an abbreviated world of spellchecking abbreviations…

Almost anything that requires ‘verbing’ nouns …

Speaking of reading blogs and vomiting it up pretending to be an expert…

This article sounds very similar to one written by Dave Trott a week earlier.

http://davetrott.campaignlive......hye-story/

Pot calling the kettle black?

@Nick #24, I take it she’s never met the REAL Queen (of Twitter)… https://twitter.com/#!/Queen_UK

Harry’s comment is a bit harsh. The article by Dave Trott was aimed at people posing as “creativea” to enter the induatry. This thread concerns the over use of jargon by those in the industry.

All industries have jargon that is used as “shorthand” When I was performing surgery I would ask my assistant for a “piece of steel with a cutty bit on the end and a sort of scissors but blunt”.

We lost many patients before we got on the same page by saying scalpel and forceps.

JRJ

I meant “creatives” and “industry”
LMFAO
JRJ

@JRJ I think the two articles are discussing different manifestations of the same problem – the use of jargon in an attempt to sound more intelligent.

This piece even misquotes the misquoted Einstein quote in Dave Trott’s piece.

Seems to me, a bit audacious to then call your readers “morons”.

Harry

I did not know about the Einstein misquote.

My point was that jargon is part of any job and advertising is no exception.

As long as it is used by those that know what it means and are using it to convey an idea I don’t have a problem with it.

JRJ

Yippee. Some new words to add to “wank word bingo” for my next meeting. Interesting also to note that many still confuse education with intelligence. Ho Hum.

Someone said to me “Jean you are such a trendsleeve”.

Every (pseudo-)profession tries to develop its own jargon to confuse outsiders and exclude the out-crowd. That’s how they justify the high charge rates.

Doctors do it with Latin, IT with acronyms, and marketers are just the latest group to seek respectability through in-house language. Or should I have quoted ‘Thieves’ Cant’ as an example?

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

“Identify relevant and compelling hooks for the audience, create content around the hooks and integrate it into their social repertoires”

“Target influencers with engaging assets to act as platforms for conversation”

I just learned of the phrase “manage the optics” — which I guess is related to properly “spinning” something.

Kill me. No wait, let me kill whoever came up with that

Compelling behavioural research into digitally penetrated subsets show strategically aligned paradigm shifts incentivise opthalmic influencers through extra-syllabic group sessions using sexually suggestive linguistics.

Basically, sex sells.