Commentary
Hyperbabble Watch
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, February 6, 2013
“A first-of-its-kind multi-channel B2C customer acquisition solution that maximizes customer conversion and online marketing ROI by delivering the most valuable prospects and customers to
leading brands.”
That, hands-down, was the winner of today’s edition of Hyperbabble, a contest I play with myself each day to select the best (or as the case
may be, worst) examples of advertising and media technology jargon.
Today’s runner-up, by the way, was: “A breakthrough platform that allows advertisers to
target their audience with an unprecedented level of pinpoint accuracy through a multi-layered approach to customer targeting and segmentation.”
I’ve decided
to make Hyperbabble available for public consumption, and plan to begin featuring it each day in RTM Daily, for a couple of reasons. One is simply to point out how silly the language of our business
sometimes gets. Another reason is that it may encourage some of you to post samples of Hyperbabbles you’ve come across in the course of your business. And if you don’t feel comfortable
doing that, just send them to joe@mediapost.com, and I’ll keep your name out of it.
What I haven’t decided, is whether to make the source of those hyperbolic
pearls public. I’m thinking not. Not just to protect the innocent -- the poor PR schleppers who begrudgingly have to pitch the hype and meaningless jargon -- but because if I start outing
sources, my supply of hyperbabble may dry up.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
@Joe... This is an artisanaly curated proposal that will liberate holistic inspiration for those of us tasked with the ideation of deliverable metrics. It will obviously engender the growth of the cloud via the fabrication of even more "Big Data." Well done sir.
George "AdScam" Parker
@George: Well said, er, hyperbabbled!
What hyperbabble needs is hyperfilter, a set of words that act as babble flags. The more they are used, the greater their score.
That way you can run any sentence through the hyperfilter and kick out a HB Score and rank them.
Some people think that HuffPo (HP) is a great abuser of HB in its headlines.
Agree, you should go for publishing HB online,
@Andre: Brilliant suggestion. The irony, of course, is I can already hear the hyperbabble pitch from the company that develops it.
As one who was born and raised in the jargony world of traditional media, I am sometimes overwhelmed and humbled by the excesses and liberties taken by the digital folks.
But, I have also come to realize how baffling all our traditional media hyperbabble must have been (is?) to our clients.
Thnx for a great article.
A Hyperbabble watch is a great idea. The irony is we've become a post literate society and send only fragments of thought in most emails, tweets, text and voicemail messages, yet we seem to overcompensate in our formal business communications.