July 12, 2019
We love to use them, we love to hate them, and we certainly love to write blogs about them. They range from harmless to annoying, with kind-of-useful in between.
True, we certainly need to know about chatbots this year. And Gen Z’ers are quickly becoming the next Millennials, so we have that to look forward to.
But we can all agree that words like funemployed, freemium, netiquette, entertrainment and wantrapreneur – while fun to say – are completely superfluous.
Or that adding ‘y’ or ‘ish’ to clickbait-y and real-time-ish, serves no other purpose than to add fuel to the fire.
Since we’re in advertising, we should ask ourselves if buzzwords help us brainstorm. For example, do we need to go through ideation to come up with an idea? And once we have an idea, do we need to flesh it out or flush it out? Does it matter?
And what about the content we create? Should it be snackable, or actionable, or authentic? Is it enough if it’s engaging, or does it have to be disruptive as well? Who knows?
At the end of the day, do buzzwords help us communicate to the end user? Or do we need to get our ducks in a row and agree that if they’re not adding value, we should just drop them from our jargon as the low hanging fruit of language they really are.
I for one, am done drinking the Kool-Aid.