Five buzzwords that need to go and die in a hole
One of them Vietcong holes, with the spikes and the dung
If there’s one thing I hate about marketing, it’s LinkedIn influencers talking utter shite. I wish they’d all go to some sort of twatfluencer Fyre Festival on an island somewhere and get botflies laying eggs in their earholes. Seriously. Nobody gets up at 4am as a life hack. Get to fuck.
Ahem.
If there’s a second thing I hate, it’s the insistence on using dogshit jargon and buzzwords.
Don’t get me wrong, giving things silly names is a grand old tradition. I know some people didn’t like Platty Joobs and Cozzy Livs, saying it wouldn’t have happened in their day, but I’ve just read about the Hasty Pees (1. Canadian Division, Hastings & Prince Edward Regiment) invading Italy, so that doesn’t hold up.
No, what I mean is shite like this.
XaaS (X-as-a-Service)
Oh right. It’s video as a service, is it? It’s pizza as a service? Razorblades as a service.
It’s bastard video, pizza, razorblades, whatever. Stop adding aaS to things so you can have a shitty acronym. It was played out in 2018.
AnythingVerse
Remember Metaverse? No? Course you don’t. Nobody does. And nobody remembers all the idiots riding the Metaverse bandwagon by hastily chopping the aaS off something and sticking a verse in instead.
Unless you’re a poet getting paid by the word, there is no reason to ever, ever, stick a verse in.
Blockchain-enabled
What a month that was. Lockdown had finished, and suddenly everything was going to be blockchain. Data security, bidets, your nan. All of it would be blockchain, because some turbo-virgins in Bumfuck Missouri want us all to think Bitcoin is the future.
Course you’ve forgotten all about that by now. Bet you don’t even remember knowing that you’ve heard the word Blockchain so much that it’s rendered somehow even more meaningless than it ever was.
Architected
Made. You mean made. Or designed. Whatever it is that architects do. I can tell you what they don’t do, and that’s come home, pull out a chair, and tell their husbands that they architected the fuck out of a building today.
Fuck off.
Synergistic
ARGH.
What gets your goat? Put it in the comments section for me. Let’s see if I can stay mad.
Something mint - a quirky bit of personalisation
What do you buy the woman who has everything for a milestone birthday? She’s already got the greatest husband under the sun, an insane pet dog, and more sparkly rocks than one person strictly needs.
That’s the quandry facing yours truly this month. Today’s my good lady wife’s birthday. I can’t say which milestone it is in a public forum, but it rhymes with wheely cluckin’ gold.
Devoid of one good idea, I bought her a smorgasboard of stuff, including some nice little keepsakes of places we’ve been that she can wear on her new handbag.
I hope she likes them.
Me, I just really, really like the confirmation email.
There’s nothing difficult about that, technically speaking. It’s a mailmerge that pulls in FNAME and FNAME + LNAME at various points. That said, some people don’t even do that, cough cough BOOTS.
“Dear nameless peon. We aren’t listening. Your shit’s in the post. We’ve taken our cash. There’s a robot you can speak to if you’ve not got the hint that we don’t give a fuck.”
Wander Club at least make it seem like they’re happy to have a customer. Deliriously so.
But what I really like is that they committed.
They’ve got a voice. Its playful energiser turned up till the knob falls off. So they committed to that. Told a story about how excited they were to get my order, and make me feel like a real big deal into the bargain.
I couldn’t tell you about any of the other confirmation emails I got for the other gifts filling the shoebox1 of nonsense I presented to my better half this morning. If she likes them and asks where they’re from, I’ll not have the slightest clue.
But if she likes the Wander Tokens, I’ll remember where I got them. And all it took was using a tiny bit of personalisation and a whole lot of personality.
I’m a size 15. It’s a big fucking shoebox.