Sunset Your Modality, Please

DURING A RECENT INTERview, a high-level marketing agency executive said his company's goal for a recent acquisition was to “create an integrated marketing platform that allows for multichannel marketing on a real-time basis and sunsets the current modality of episodic marketing campaigns.”

Sunsets the current modality of episodic marketing campaigns?

Ow. My head hurts.

Folks, this is why everyone in operations hates marketing. The craft is polluted with words and phrases that serve no purpose other than to attempt to make the people who use them seem smart. The hall-of-fame empty marketing word, of course, is paradigm.

Yeah, yeah, the IT department is buzzword central, but they're weird. They have to speak that way or they might be forced to date someone.

In any case, too many transparently vacant words and phrases are one reason why the marketing department is the first to get slaughtered every time the economy takes one of its regular “episodic” dumps. Colleagues in other departments assume the words are veneer. And in a sense, they are. They are an attempt to make what is still mostly an art and make it sound like science. But it's not as if marketing needs to be gussied up with opaque language. The craft is complicated enough as it is.

The executive referred to above is bright. He is at the top of a fairly well-known agency.

Obviously, figuratively rolling around on the floor and speaking in marketing tongues has gotten him very far.

And it's not his fault. He is only responding to market conditions. The reason Mr. Modality feels compelled to speak in such a fashion is that clients and prospects eat this stuff up.

Having lived with a marketing-agency executive for close to five years, I can say from observation that the more “episodic-modality” gobbledygook new-business pitches contain, the better their chances of success. Also, the more meaningless numbers and graphs agency reps can toss at prospects during a new-business pitch, the more likely the prospect is to be wowed into signing a contract.

Fortunately, there often are enough good worker bees behind new-business-development folks that the client ends up with a decent marketing campaign in spite of the nonsense in the pitch.

One would think the dot-com boom, with its comical buzzword culture and subsequent bloodbath, would have served as a lesson to eliminate verbal veil dances from business communications altogether. But then one would be naive.

The buzzwords get particularly bad when marketing and technology get together.

For example, check out the lead sentence from a recent press release concerning apparel merchant Casual Male's adoption of new CRM technology:

“NSB and Casual Male Retail Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CMRG) are pleased to announce that the leading national retailer of men's big and tall apparel has commenced piloting NSB's Connected Retailer Store and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions on Symbol Technologies' (NYSE: SBL) MC50 Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDA).”

Never mind the alphabet soup. How about the phrase “commenced piloting?” For those of you who haven't mastered the language, commenced piloting would be the opposite of sunsetting the current modality.

Do these people listen to themselves?

Do they speak this way to their spouses? Imagine it if they do:

“How was your day, honey?”

“Not bad. Remember the episodic marketing campaign we commenced piloting the other day?

“The what?”

“You know, the episodic marketing campaign. Well, we finally sunset its current modality.”

“Here, honey. Have a martini. And please don't speak again until 20 minutes after you've finished it.”