Bullsh!t baffles brains

Or how the marketing industry learned to love the c-bomb

The etymology of the phrase ‘bullsh!t baffles brains’ is somewhat murky.

Many point to a rich history of usage in the modern British Army. Most often in the context of clever tactics deployed to avert the ‘gaze of Sauron’ during kit inspections, but sometimes also used to describe the challenge of navigating a Byzantine petty bureaucracy worthy of Sisyphus himself. There are even claims of prior art from Antiquity. Did the Romans indeed mutter “merda taurorum animas conturbit”?

Whatever the truth, the phrase is one that has special pertinence today in marketing.

It seems we have become addicted to egregious use of pointless jargon and gobbledegook.

Ironic for an industry that’s all about effective communication and engagement.

But it’s actually much more serious than that. It’s bad for business.

Prima facie exhibit — the c-bomb: CONTENT.

Not to get all semantical on you, but it really is a terrible word. As John Long masterfully describes, content is a vague, pejorative term that actually cheapens what we do.

Content is something in a sock drawer or jam jar, or the listing of things in a document, or worse — the stuff coders built an HMTL container for on a website.

And it’s often applied to things of massively differing means of production value and quality. A Facebook post or a cinematic feature documentary.

There are many other terms that could fill a buzzword bingo card: viral, influencer, storytelling, for starters.

My contention is that all this stems from an inherent fear: how do we prove our value?

As an industry we’ve been terrible at measuring and quantifying the tangible business impact of our work. So, perhaps, baffling with bullsh!t is our attempt to avert the ‘gaze of Sauron’ of senior executives on the client side when it comes to evaluating spend and effectiveness. We hope that terms like content maybe ascribe more value to what we do. Doesn’t content marketing sound intrinsically like something clients should pay more for?

Well, no. It doesn’t. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

We need to cut the linguistic gymnastics and be much more disciplined about accurately describing what we do and the outcomes we deliver. As the management consultancies try to elbow their way into our space, you can be sure they’ll be taking a scythe to all the puffery and we risk being out-manoeuvred in the boardroom if we persist.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, let me tell you about my idea for a content-led, influencer-activated, social-first viral storytelling campaign…