Confessions of an Ad-Man VII: More From the Buzz Word Dictionary

Throughout my advertising career and I use the word “career” advisedly, I became familiar with the industry jargon. I’m not talking about the trade terms such as “Progs,” which used to mean “progressive proofs” or “T-nap” which was a system I have never understood. All I know is, it was a proof that made your ad look a whole lot better than it would in its final resting place in the magazine or newspaper for which your client paid a fortune and was required to indenture his first born. They don’t do T-naps any more. I don’t know about progs.

That’s what I’m not talking about. What I am trying to explain in this all-too-brief dissertation is the kind of language that is used to impress clients and make them feel that you really know what you’re doing.

I picked up this language by osmosis. There’s no lexicon or glossary of these terms. Hell, there isn’t even a thesaurus, although a great many of the words and phrases are so old and hackneyed that they may have made it into Roget’s by now.

Such a term is “differentiation.” It’s used in conjunction with a whole lot of other bafflegab and it follows the rule: “Never say anything to clients in simple language when you can overpower them with complex circumlocutionary verbiage.” Yes, I did that on purpose. Circumlocutionary isn’t in the MS Word spellchecker. It is, however in the dictionary.

You would never dream of telling a client that you have to make up a reason for people to buy the product you’re advertising rather than that sold by competitors. No, you must say (and marketing proposals are chock full o’ this) “We need to develop a U.S.P. (Unique Selling Proposition) that will give us product differentiation and establish our competitive edge.” This is ad-speak for “We have to make up something that will give consumers the idea that our nail clipper is different from everyone else’s nail clipper.”

Here are three things to remember when using differentiation:

1. Always use the word “consumer” instead of “customer.” That way you won’t feel guilty because you are hoodwinking actual human beings. Consumers are just statistics. Customers are people.

2. Always use “our” instead of “your” when you’re addressing the client in print or in person. This makes you appear part of the team, rather than a predatory consulting business with the sworn, but secretive mission to milk the client for every nickel of “our” advertising budget.

3. This strategy gets “us” away from the “value added” approach which is less cost effective. In this case, less cost effective means, “The agency doesn’t get to keep as much of the money because we have to buy spool-winders or thumb-warmers to give away with the product and that cuts into the fees.”

That’s enough about differentiation. The other words I want to cover, or perhaps I should say, uncover, this week are “qualitative” and “quantitative.” In the ad game, these words are most often used in conjunction with the word “research”.

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Quantitative research is done by mail, telephone or in person. No matter which of these techniques is used, it is extremely annoying to the respondent. Thousands of people are surveyed. The results however, as plainly stated by the research companies, are accurate to within plus or minus 5%, 99 times out of 100 divided by the square root of infinity and multiplied the number of your birth month. Hard to beat that.

Qualitative research is another matter. It doesn’t involve nearly as many people so it has some major advantages. You don’t have to hire a bunch of high school students with IQs equal to their shoe sizes to annoy thousands of “respondents.” You don’t have to “cross tab” the results. I still don’t know the meaning of the term “cross tab” but it’s something university people do that generates approximately forty pounds of computer paper covered in numbers which research analysts look at for many billable hours. Every so often they say things like, “Aha.” and “Hmmmm.” This is known as analyzing the cross tabs.

Qualitative research is done by a couple of different methods. You can ask Shirley in accounts payable or you can assemble a “Focus Group.” A focus group is a bunch of people, usually slightly smaller than a jury. These people are locked in a room, given a sheet of questions about the prominently displayed product and then starved and deprived of breathable air until they come up with the answers you want.

I had a friend named Melvin, now deceased, who once told me that two focus groups he ran came up with identical results. After viewing a television commercial several hundred times, the groups each arrived at a consensus that the most important word in the commercial was “and.” Shirley in payables was far more succinct. She watched it once and said, “It really sucks, you know?”

The agency, when it undertakes a research project, has to choose which type of research will be more meaningful to the client. This determination is made by the head of the accounting department, who decides, after exhaustive number crunching, which method will allow the agency to keep more of the research budget.

One of these days I must do a column about Melvin. You would have liked him in spite of the unusual circumstances surrounding his death and the ultimate failure of his lifelong quest to obtain a copyright for the word “and.”

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