Advertising needs to lose the jargon

Always-on engagement.

Media-neutral ideation.

Leveraging cultural currency.

Three phrases. Still no idea what anyone is going to make.

Jargon can compress a real distinction among specialists. More often in advertising it acts as solvent: pour it over an unfinished thought and the edges disappear. Everyone nods because requesting a translation risks looking junior. Confusion achieves consensus.

Translate each fashionable noun into a person, action and observable consequence. “Drive engagement” becomes “get lapsed buyers to use the service twice this month”. Perhaps that was the intention. Perhaps nobody had decided. Plain English is cruel in the useful way: it identifies the missing decision before production makes it costly.

The industry’s defence is that clients expect sophisticated language. Some do. This creates a daft little arms race in which buyers and sellers exchange phrases neither would use to explain the work to a friend. The work eventually reaches ordinary people and is asked to communicate clearly despite being conceived in fog.

Jargon also distributes blame beautifully. If “the cultural platform failed to drive engagement”, no person chose a weak idea and no audience rejected it. An abstract process merely experienced an outcome. Plain words tend to bring the decisions—and decision-makers—back into view.

Keep technical terms that distinguish something exact. Bin terms that cannot survive one example.

“What does cultural currency mean here?”

A reference our audience recognises.

“Which reference?”

Silence.

That silence is progress.