Commentary

Moving Past The Echo Chamber Of Our Own Jargon

GRP. CPM. CPA. DSP. DMP. That is how we talk to each other. That is how we talk to our clients. That is a problem.

The media industry has an echo chamber problem, and it’s holding us back. Not only do we spend massive amounts of time working together, but we also dine together, conference together, vacation together, drink together, commiserate together, marry each other, and on and on. You get the picture. I don’t know whether we are the most insular massive industry out there, but we’re certainly close.

For sure, one of the reasons we spend so much time together -- apart from the obvious fact that our industry requires a massive amount of human communication, interaction and negotiation to operate -- is that people in the industry tend to be pretty interesting, fun and stimulating to hang out with. But all this hanging out also creates a problem. When it comes to market myopia, we’re sometimes not much better than the railroad industry. We love our own products so much we can’t imagine that everyone else doesn’t.

advertisement

advertisement

When it comes to confusing shorthand references and nuanced jargon that’s practically impenetrable, we’re not much more accessible than inside baseball (thus, the notion of talking “inside baseball” language). In our digital realm, we’re now using more acronyms than the U.S. military, and ours aren’t nearly as creative (think DSP and CPM versus FUBAR).

This isn’t a column about how we use too many acronyms when we talk. I’ve written that one before. This is about our problem making what we do relevant to the broader leadership in business enterprises, because we talk too much as if we’re talking to ourselves.

CEOs don’t care about rating points, nor do they care about reductions in fees paid to media agencies. They care about sales growth. They care about market share growth. They care about great brand stories. They care about happy customers. They care about ROI.

One of the reasons the media industry finds itself under attack today -- with a record number of media agency reviews, along with calls for even further reductions in fees -- is that many of us find too much comfort in hiding behind our own antiquated and isolated way of doing business, with an inability to translate that into language and metrics that the broader marketing business enterprises can understand and care about.

If the media industry put as much effort into proving the return-on-investment it delivers for advertisers -- proving, and communicating simply and clearly, that the vast majority of advertising expenditures are actually self-funding, given the sales results they drive -- as it does on celebrating and lauding itself at its many hundreds of annual awards shows and conferences, our business would not face many of the challenges that it does today from clients, investors and pundits.

I think solving the problem won’t take much more than just stepping outside of our echo chamber, recognizing that CEOs and shareholders want sales growth and ROI, not GRPs and DSPs. What do you think?

5 comments about "Moving Past The Echo Chamber Of Our Own Jargon".
Check to receive email when comments are posted.
  1. jeff white from Media Analytics, July 10, 2015 at 3:26 p.m.

    Great topic. I transitioned into the world of media/advertising two years ago. Coming from the world of technology, I have been bewildered as to how this industry measures success and is able to continually drive these arcane metrics simply to protect the "norm". Too many times I have been part of the disruptive force that changed an industry and witnessed how this story plays out. Success in the world of capitalism has been and will remain straightforward, profit and growth is what matters and only metrics like ROI that directly correlate to these objectives should be institutionalized.


    Jeff White CEO Media Analytics

  2. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, July 10, 2015 at 8:15 p.m.

    Hooray for Hollywood ! Notice how they do the same ? As for the WWA, you really have to get out more. Really... work what you are selling. When you go back, you will sell more.

  3. Glenn Jewett from Services1223, July 12, 2015 at 12:08 p.m.

    Remember who you're talking to. Specialty Speak, the shorthand we adopt to eliminate repeating twelve syllables every five seconds may be killing your communications with the very people who need most to understand. How can you prove your value if no one in the room can figure out what you do?

  4. Dave Morgan from Simulmedia, July 12, 2015 at 5:41 p.m.

    I totally agree Glenn. The focus on efficiency in industry communication is killing communication.

  5. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, July 13, 2015 at 5:15 p.m.

    Great post... As a media outsider who manages media but also gets to observe the jargon inside companies, my sense is the jargon is used more often to obscure what's happening or excuse plans that aren't effective but meet arbitrary metrics than it is used to be helpful.
    I'm reminded of a re-purposed old technology industry joke... What's the difference between a media plan salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman knows when he's lying. (We used to say this about computer salesmen..when I was one. :-)
    I'm also reminded of Campbell's Law. Campbell's law:  "The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
    Campbell applied this within government. But this is true in any field. The more "likeability" is used in evaluating advertising the more it distorts the advertising it was used to evaluate. The more GRP, Reach, and other metrics are the entire focus of media evaluation, the less they mean and the more they distort the process.

Next story loading loading..