The weird & wonderful words of agency culture
Since working in agency-land, I’ve noticed my vocabulary change. Perhaps it’s, in part, the move from the North to London (where nobody says ‘our kid’ or ‘mither’, or when ‘tea’ means ‘a cup of’ and not my evening meal). But mostly I think it’s the unofficial comms of comms, that has become second-nature to everyone who works within it.
And it’s a language that I’ve become fluent in over the years. Somewhere, in his study surrounded by Chaucer and Wordsworth, my English Literature professor is twitching…
For a collective of wordsmiths who are apparently paving the way, at the top of our game, in stringing sentences together better than anyone else can — our own internal jargon is, just that, jargon. As a bright-eyed English and journalism grad, I thought I had the whole language thing nailed.
I was wrong.

So, we thought it was time to take a long, hard look at the words and phrases that us agency-types have created and use on the reg with such reckless abandon.
- Strategy: We’re BIG fans of this one. Got a plan, an idea, a rough accumulation of events in a sort of order? Call it a strategy — gain 10 points. Level up.
- Decks: Non-exclusive to Manifest by any means (though we do big decks and we do them good). The humble Powerpoint presentation, maybe Keynote if you’re posh, has been re-named the ‘deck’ by PRs everywhere. Why? Not a clue either.
- Flagging: We bloody love a flag. Busy? Don’t worry, be fine once you flag it. Not sure that idea is a good’un? Flag it. Journalist ignoring your circa. 900 emails? You guessed it. F.L.A.G. I.T.
- Stacked: A personal favourite. Stacked = busy. ‘Maybe tomorrow, I’m stacked today’. Not sure why we say stacked, it’s a longer word. If you’re too busy, would recommend using ‘busy’ to save precious seconds.
- Warm leads: An industry wide and universally-accepted term for when a journalist might like your story, but might sack it off altogether and say it’s shit later. For the non-committal types. Not quite good enough to be considered a definite yes, but they didn’t totally ignore you so it’s luke-warm. Can also be used in dating, ‘Got a few warm leads on Bumble’.
- Integrated: The golden rule. Nobody wants just boring old PR anymore, don’t you know? We need a video, and a social content plan, a brand playbook, a manifesto, chuck some influencers in there for good measure, maybe we should make an advert? Maybe we should make 10?
- Roadmap: Definitely not the AA map your dad whips out for long car journeys, we have those built into our car/phones now cos we’re just so integrated. PR roadmaps are a wanky way of saying timelines, to make sure we don’t miss any ‘key milestones’. God forbid.
- Chem meeting: Very much not your GCSE chemistry class, no Breaking Bad vibes here. Formal, PR way of saying you’re meeting potential new biz clients to ‘check you have chemistry’. Maybe we should rebrand dates as such. (See next instalment for ‘tissue session’).
For the few chosen here, there’s a hundred more (being transparent I don’t have the capacity to really frame the narrative and ensure we’re smashing the KPIs on this one, but have ticked off the low-hanging fruit so let’s ladder back to the initial brief…)
Sadly, eradicating all our jargon agency-speak is a tough ask. It’s so intrinsically part of our culture, our ‘comms currency’, our colleagues get it and our clients do too.
It’s universal. You could argue it’s a language of love. All we can do is recognise that (sometimes) we sound a bit like dicks and maybe, just maybe, as with all good ideas, the simpler words might work too.
…Just wanted to flag.
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