• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 19, 2008

Late last year I wrote about the terminology and the lexicon of the advertising industry, and how many of the terms we use on a daily basis are relatively foreign to anyone not directly involved in online advertising. Of course due to the creativity of our industry and the people involved in it, some of the terms in use are actually completely made-up on a case-by-case basis, so it's no surprise that no one else knows what we're talking about!

Wouldn't it be great if there was a site where you could go to find terms related to our industry?

I found just such a site: a central repository for all the terms and phrases that we make up on a regular basis, called the Addictionary. There are versions available for many industries, including the Advertising Addictionary. Found at http://ad.addictionary.org. it's a little wiki-type site where you can enter in your own advertising-centric terms, whether they're used in wide circulation, or created solely for a pitch and were intended only to show how intelligent and witty your team can be!

Some of the old standby terms should be there such as "DINKs" (double-income, no kids). "Millennial" is included; it is a newer term and refers to people coming of age (17) around 2000, the generation after Gen X and Gen Y.

Some are terms that were coined in recent years such as "permission marketing," created by Seth Godin in the middle-to-late '90s to refer to the permission granted by a consumer to receive marketing from a specific brand (typically refers to email, but also can be used for social media platforms). Of course the most widely used terms such as "the long tail" (coined by Chris Anderson and referring to the billions of small content-oriented sites on the web with small, yet very targeted audience) and "engagement" (unsure where it was coined, but refers to the ways that brands would like to measure media based on interest and attentiveness -- rarely if ever actually defined by our industry) are included and are more standard fare nowadays.

Some of the funnier ones that I came across on the site were terms like "wiitard," which refers to a person who is incapable of holding a Nintendo Wii properly and even less capable of playing a game on the console (It might refer to me, but who's telling). Another term that I found humorous was "adnausea," which refers to a feeling of sickness or discomfort in the stomach tprompted by excessive advertising. I sometimes have this feeling when visiting sites that still employ pop-ups and pop-under ads, both of which have served to give online advertising a bad name in recent years.

In an industry with so much creative talent, it's inevitable that we would find ourselves making up terms and phrases and names for the situations and services we see. So much of online advertising is based on traditional advertising, but with a twist - so we find it easier to massage existing terms into terms that fit our daily needs much more appropriately. These can be useful for creating a bridge between old ways and new ways, but they can also get in the way when we have to explain them, further alienating the involved parties and making it more difficult to foster integration.

Either way, take a peek at the site and maybe add some of your favorite terms, either widespread or those in limited use. Maybe it will help someone else at some point to bridge the gap between online and offline advertising.

At the very least, it can be a fun read.