Advertising jargon: Is what your agency saying Brilliant or just B.S.?

Last week the RWA team attended two seminars on marketing with Social Media both conducted by advertising professionals. Although the topics were the same – how to get better results with social media – the presentations couldn’t have been more different, leaving us to wonder were these two companies talking about the same thing?

Herein lies the conundrum with social media. Everyone’s talking the talk, but half the time you can’t figure out what they’re saying. It sure sounds impressive, but is it Brilliant or just a bunch of B.S.?

Our first seminar was a phone seminar with two hosts: one an advertising professional, the second a client who had used this professional to build his business through social media. They spoke very conversationally about their social media strategy, execution and results, then gave some great tips for boosting social media results. At the end of the presentation, they fielded questions from callers – many of them not advertising professionals – and answered them directly, patiently explaining concepts that those new to social media might not fully understand. They took the time to reiterate key items such as integrating keywords into everything you put out there and creating as many backlinks as you can. We “walked away” thinking it was an hour well-spent.

That evening, our RWA team also attended a cocktail party where another group of advertising professionals spoke on the same topic. We were the only advertising people in the room; the rest of the crowd was made up of business owners and managers. Shortly after the presentation began, I watched the eyes of these business professionals slowly start to glaze over. Yes, the two men at the front of the room were talking about social media, but with the amount of industry jargon being thrown their way, the audience could not decipher what they were saying. Even our RWA team that works in the social media sphere on a daily basis had a hard time following the trail of buzzword breadcrumbs. At the end of the presentation, the presenters asked for questions, but the audience was simply too intimidated to ask any. This may have been the strategy all along, though. Their presentation was peppered with “If you need help, call us” comments. Subliminal advertising at its best.

Like all industries, advertising has its jargon, those fancy-dancy words that we like to sneak into conversations just to make ourselves sound impressive. After all, we are in a creative industry; you have to expect a little razzle-dazzle. But, when your advertising agency starts speaking in tongues and things get lost in translation, you might want to look elsewhere. After all, it’s not brain science. It’s just advertising.