If you work at a marketing agency, tech company, major consumer brand or you’ve studied philosophy in the last fifty years, you probably know what I mean by Impotent Jargon.

You’ll be walking down a hallway, in a meeting or sitting in a lecture when you’ll hear people string together buzz words and phrases that have no real world application. Here’s a small sampling of what I’ve heard/read in the last hour: “accepted notion of media diffusion,” “decoupled employee-engagement and digital-engagement initiatives,” “previsualized the media product possibilities,” “exponential development in the way consumers interact with content in a dynamic setting” and finally, “engaging with the market dynamics.”

Now, I could spend the next ten minutes going through word by word, explaining or attempting to explain what each of those phrases mean, but that’s preposterous. What’s so important about marketing that we need to coin self-indulgent jargon to describe what we’re doing?

On Sunday I was browsing nyt.com when I came across an article by Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti titled, “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/world/asia/15contractors.html?emc=eta1).

It wasn’t that I was surprised by the fact the US Defense Department was funding private special ops contractors to track and kill militants in Afghanistan (although that is alarming), it was the front companies the DoD was using to do this:

“Among the contractors Mr. Furlong appears to have used to conduct intelligence gathering was International Media Ventures, a private “strategic communication” firm run by several former Special Operations officers.”

International Media Ventures you ask? http://www.imediav.com/

It’s a digital marketing and media company being used as a front for special operations! And look at the words they use on their website: “the way we communicate transformed exponentially moving rapidly from linear processes of the Industrial Age to the global conversations of the Age of Knowledge” and “the activities are in compliance with statutory guidance and instruction.”

When covert operations are using your industry and the language of your industry as a front operation, you should take that as a hint that a lot of what we’re doing is bullshit.

The adoption of complex jargon is a sign of weak mindedness and the people that use it are sheep. If we don’t stop and think about how we’re talking to each other – when the wolves come (and judging by the nyt article above, they’re already coming) they’ll be wearing our clothes.

As a discipline and an industry, if we want to innovate and survive, we have to start communicating clearly and effectively with each other.

In the worlds of Pharcyde, we need to “get on up off of that bullshit.”