A New Era of Marketing Gobbledygook

Marketing has long been the platform of choice for $#!t-shovelers, wise-crackers, pseudo-scientists, bs-artists, hucksters, shysters, and so on. I believe the Post 9-11, post-internet-boom, “social media” era has upended a large rock under which these people have been hiding, crawling, secretly practicing their weasel words, inventing new ones, creating verbs out of nouns and vice versa, and collecting data by polling each other on their blogs in order to come up with a NEW AND IMPROVED proven method for separating the average person from his hard earned money.

To wit:

I am the Knowledge Sharing Partner, meaning that I am tasked with ensuring information is distributed, knowledge is gained, and best practice deployed for systems and tools to help learning within, and beyond, the company.

It’s hard to summarise what we do succintly but here is our attempt at explaining ourselves in the digital marketplace we work in.

We believe in working collaboratively with our clients to understand their business goals.

We believe in gaining an intimate understanding of our clients’ customers, their behaviours and motivations, the language they use and the networks and communities they belong to.

We believe that a successful brand understands, grows with and seeks to become more influential within its network – it connects with its customers.

We believe in communicating with people authentically, every step of the way is what builds trust in a brand.  Trust is the only basis for a long lasting relationship.We believe in working with responsible clients who understand the need for  an authentic approach. 

What do we do?

We create simplicity out of this complexity.

We help you understand your new opportunities and where to get started.

We find the people that matter most to your business, identify the language they use, describe what they’re looking for and explain how to provide it quickly.

We exploit technology that listens, maps, visualises and reveals customer behaviour and journeys. This insight is the basis of the strategies and programmes we develop with our clients.

We connect brands online by understanding the role of online advertising, user generated content, brand generated content, search engines, information architecture and web development – and the role that they play in the customers’ online experience.

We blend traditional and digital channels, such as search, advertising and creative content in innovative ways to deliver measurable results

We take part in the conversation online by being an active and useful part of the network.

We use proprietary engagement metrics to measure how well connected a brand is with its customers. We ensure our metrics are useful and understandable by presenting them to our clients as stories, pictures and numbers.

Who are we?

We are a full service digital agency, with a ten year heritage in search. We have 650 people in 13 international offices.

We’re the best of a new breed – innovative, results driven, accountable, agile. 

We act as a lens to help you maximise engagement and value.

We’re on the journey as Agency of Record for Coke, Epsom, Unilever and more.

If been able to make it this far, congratulations, I hope your eyes haven’t dried up the way mine do when I read it. And I’ve had the masochistic displeasure of doing so several times in the preparation of this post. My favorite paragraph is this, where he talks about his “authentic communication,” and how they require their clients to communicate authentically (even though they can’t authentically tell you what they do):

We believe in communicating with people authentically, every step of the way is what builds trust in a brand.  Trust is the only basis for a long lasting relationship.We believe in working with responsible clients who understand the need for  an authentic approach. 

GRR!! You’re in the COMMUNICATION business but you can’t even create a sentence with a noun and a verb! “We believe in communicating…is what builds trust in a brand”. Whaa??

Lets look at some of this more closely. That all sounds very nice. If I were going to spend $100,000 on a marketing campaign, I would want some seriously flowery speech to decorate my thinly veiled excuse for traditional marketing tactics that a student could execute. I think what their really saying is that they will act as an agent for companies who desire some control and brand monitoring whithin various social networks, they’ll check blog postings for you, get you on Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and basically infiltrate internet communication about your company in order to either: retain customers or acquire new customers.

Go to the Plain english site and study up over the weekend, you’ll make at least one more friend.