Being a compendium of the trade's terms of art
How to Speak Marketing
Every profession develops a dialect to keep the billable hours mysterious. Marketing, being a profession composed almost entirely of language, has developed the most mysterious dialect of all. This volume collects the field's terms of art — its metrics, its funnels, its synergies — and defines them as they are actually used, which is to say: loosely, optimistically, and often in direct contradiction of their meaning.
The entries that follow are offered in the spirit of usage guides past: opinionated where opinion is warranted, forgiving where it is not, and attentive throughout to the difference between what a word means and what the person saying it hopes you think it means. The reader is invited to disagree. The author, a marketer of some standing, disagrees with several of them himself.
A methodology for moving quickly, coined by people who have never sat through a four-hour sprint planning meeting. In marketing, it means the campaign was due yesterday, the brief changed twice, and everyone pretends this was the plan.
We're very agile here — the rebrand launched before anyone agreed on the logo.
The ancient art of deciding which of the nineteen things that touched a customer gets to take credit for the sale, a question roughly as answerable as which raindrop caused the flood. The model you choose says less about the customer than about which team has the loudest voice in the QBR.
According to our attribution model, the billboard did nothing, which is convenient, since I sold the search ads.
The noble reason a company exists, usually discovered in a workshop by a facilitator named Skye, and almost always more inspiring than the actual reason, which is selling slightly more toothpaste.
Our brand purpose is human connection, which is why our hold music is only 47 minutes long.
Click-through rate. A number so small it must be expressed to two decimal places to appear nonzero. The 0.04% of humanity who clicked are assumed to be people, and not, as is often the case, the intern testing the link.
The CTR doubled after we removed the tracking bug, then halved when we fixed it.
The unmeasurable void where customers actually decide to buy — podcasts, group chats, a stranger's tweet, a spouse's offhand remark. Marketers respond to it the way sailors once responded to the edge of the map: by writing 'here be dragons' and sailing somewhere more comfortable.
We can't track the dark funnel, so we simply do not discuss the dark funnel.
Any measurable twitch a human makes near content, including likes, shares, scrolls, pauses, and accidental taps while reaching for a glass of water. The less it correlates with revenue, the more prominently it appears in the deck.
Engagement is up 300%, mostly from people commenting that they hate the ad.
A shape that suggests customers move in an orderly procession toward purchase, much like a conga line, when in reality they wander in circles, leave, come back eight months later, and buy because of a podcast nobody can remember the name of.
Per the funnel, she is at 'consideration.' Per reality, she bought a competitor's product in 2019.
Marketing, but said by someone in a hoodie who discovered A/B testing last Tuesday. The 'hacking' implies illicit genius; the results imply the button was changed from blue to slightly different blue.
As a growth hacker, my breakthrough was emailing the list. Twice.
A metric that never determines if a unit of advertising made an impression on someone. A million impressions means a million opportunities for a person to not notice your ad, often delivered with impressive efficiency.
We served 40 million impressions, several of which were seen.
Key performance indicator. A number chosen for its ability to go up. When it goes down, it is replaced by a new KPI, ideally one measured in a way no one can audit, and the old KPI is never spoken of again.
Our KPI is 'brand warmth,' which our internal survey confirms is very warm.
The easy wins every strategy deck promises to pick first. In practice, the fruit was picked years ago, and what remains is a tall tree, a missing ladder, and a quarterly deadline.
Let's grab the low-hanging fruit, assuming any fruit remains, or a tree.
The tottering tower of software a company accumulates, each tool purchased to integrate with the others, none of which integrate with the others. Diagrammed annually as a slide with forty logos and one arrow labeled 'data.'
Our martech stack has 47 tools. We use three of them, and one is a calendar.
The single number everyone agrees to follow, like sailors steering by Polaris, except the sailors are a growth team, Polaris is 'weekly active users,' and the boat is on fire.
Our North Star is engagement minutes, which explains the autoplay videos. All of them.
The state of being inconsistently present everywhere. The email says 20% off, the site says 15%, the store has never heard of either, and the customer is omnichannelly annoyed.
We're fully omnichannel: the same broken login on every device.
The craft of addressing each customer as an individual, as in 'Hi {FIRST_NAME}, we noticed you bought a kayak in 2019, so here are fourteen thousand kayak ads.' The uncanny valley, but for email.
Our personalization engine knows I bought a gift for my dad, and will now show him as a demographic until I die.
The number of unique people theoretically exposed to a message, 'unique' doing heroic work here, as it includes the same person on a phone, a laptop, a work computer, and a smart TV nobody watches.
The campaign reached 80 million people, 79 million of whom were me refreshing.
The word deployed when two departments are told to share a budget and neither gets what it wants. From the Greek for 'your headcount is now my headcount.'
The merger unlocked tremendous synergies, chief among them my former colleague's parking spot.
The discipline of having thoughts in public, ideally thoughts that lead somewhere, most often to a LinkedIn post beginning 'I was on a run when it hit me.' Measured in keynote invitations; inversely correlated with having run the thing being discussed.
As a thought leader, I repost other people's thoughts and lead the applause.
A content outcome that cannot be planned, requested, or guaranteed, and is therefore requested and guaranteed in every brief. As in: 'Make it go viral,' a sentence last uttered by someone whose own posts get three likes.
The client asked for something viral, so we made something that spread through their own Slack.
David Berkowitz is the founder of Serial Marketer, a newsletter and community for marketers who read the footnotes. He has spent his career at the intersection of marketing, media, and technology — coining terms, watching them get misused, and now, at last, defining them properly. This volume is his attempt to settle several outstanding scores with the English language.
Isabela Flores de Moura is an illustrator whose work pairs classical draftsmanship with a modern editorial wit — the rare artist capable of drawing an "impression" that actually makes one. Her illustrations for this volume give shape to concepts that, in PowerPoint form, have defied visualization for decades.