The New York Times - USA (2020-12-01)

B6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020

MARKETING | FINANCE

crime.”
Every industry has its argot,
but people who work in the adver-
tising “space” seem to love insider
language more than most. In
news releases, ad copy and earn-
ings statements, they have tor-
tured plain talk in service of the
sell, with Frankensteinian combi-
nations and avalanches of acro-
nyms.
“Every tribe has their way of
communicating a message, their
shorthand,” said Michael Kassan,
the chief executive of MediaLink,
a consulting firm that works with
ad agencies. “Our industry is
probably guiltier than most.”
In that spirit, here is a glossary
of selected marketing lingo, new
and old, that has proved baffling,
or just annoying, even for some
who work in the industry.
Adlob:Usually a component of
an ad agency’s presentation that
captures the essence of a pro-
posed marketing campaign. Ex-

ample: They seemed to like the

concept, but we lost them with the

adlob. Short for “ad-like object.”

B4H: This abbreviation has ar-

rived in the wake of “B2B” (short-

hand for “business-to-business”)

and “B2C” (“business-to-con-

sumer”). Bob Liodice, the chief

executive of the Association of Na-

tional Advertisers, invoked “B4H”

in a recent speech that seemed to

echo Mondelez’s use of “human-

ing”: “It’s not about B2B or B2C,”

he told his audience. “It’s human-

ity for growth — B4H, brands for

humans.”

Brand heat: When “buzz” lost

its buzz, brand heatcame to the

rescue. For years Puma, Burberry

and other companies have used

the term to convey strong interest

in a given brand. Nike has invoked

the phrase more than a dozen

times during earnings calls in re-

cent years.

Customer journey:People don’t

simply buy things anymore. Like

epic heroes, they go on a customer

journeythat begins when they be-

come aware of a certain product,

continues through the time when

they weigh whether or not they

would like to have it, and reaches a

conclusion when they buy it.

Hypertelling: Advertising

copywriters excel in storytelling

(see entry below) for their clients.

And when they allow customers in

on the marketing process by, say,

using their brand-specific

memes? That’s “hypertelling,” as

defined by Mike Yapp, the director

of Google’s “creative think tank”

the Zoo.

Occasion: In the real world, an

occasion is often a special event.

In the land of marketing, it’s a lot

more prevalent. A common

phrase is “snacking occasion,”

which is a growing part of Ameri-

ca’s “eating occasions.” We are

now heading into the season of

“gifting occasions.”

Phygital: A mix of the physical

and digital elements in a

customer’s experience of a brand.

A furniture retailer could try to

bridge its online and real-world

sales strategies with an app that

allows a potential buyer to see

how a couch on display in a show-

room might look in their living

room.

Purpose-driven lifestyle brand:

Blue Apron, Chipotle, Goop and

Godiva have described them-

selves with this phrase. It’s meant

to suggest that customers don’t

just want the products sold by a

particular company, but seek a

deeper connection with it and

wear it “as a badge,” as Christo-

pher Brandt, the chief marketing

officer of Chipotle, put it.

Snackable content: Short pro-

motional videos made for smart-

phones and other devices.

Solutioning: Marketers love

making one part of speech into an-

other. A slogan from Hyundai —

“However you family” — turns a

noun into a verb. Toyota turned an

adjective into a noun with “Start

your impossible.” So it should

come as no surprise that many

marketers have taken a perfectly

good noun, solution, and made it

into a verb to describe the process

of solving a knotty problem.

Storytelling: Companies once

hired ad agencies for a simple job:

conveying the appeal of their

products, usually in a punchy

manner. Now they want creative

teams to immerse potential

customers in narratives that

practically mythologize their

brands, and storytellingis per-

haps the industry’s No. 1 buzz-

word. AdWeak, an advertising

studio that also runs a parody

Twitter account, has sold a

tongue-in-cheek coffee mug em-

blazoned with the line: “For the

last time, I’m not a copywriter,

I’m a [expletive] brand storytell-

er.” (And even storytelling may

not be enough, it seems. Mon-

delez says that “humaning” hap-

pens when “storytelling becomes

storydoing.”)

Thumb-stopping:A descriptor

for online content, made espe-

cially for mobile devices, that cap-

tures someone’s attention enough

to stop him or her from scrolling.

Pinterest, Shutterstock and Sam-

sung have all promoted them-

selves as services that help users

to create “thumb-stopping” ma-

terial.

TLA: The ad industry loves ac-

ronyms and initialisms. OTT

stands for “over-the-top” stream-

ing content delivered over the in-

ternet. PDOOH is short for “pro-

grammatic digital out-of-home”

(that is, ads placed through an au-

tomated bidding process on dig-

ital billboards and other signs).

And TLA? It stands for a type of

acronym. Specifically, “three-let-

ter acronyms.”

Top-of-funnel:Remember the

customer’s journey (see entry

above)? Top-of-funnel (also

known as TOFU) describes a spe-

cial part of it, the moment when a

potential buyer becomes aware of

a product or service.

SNACKABLE CONTENTShort promotional videos made for smartphones and other devices. Nothing to do with food.

CUSTOMER JOURNEYRemember when you just bought something? It’s not that simple anymore.

BRAND HEATIt means strong interest in a given brand. It’s better than buzz. So much better.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KELSEY McCLELLAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Strange Language of Modern Marketing: Has It Gone Too Far?

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

tional investors — are treating
Bitcoin as an alternative asset,
somewhat like gold, according to
an analysis from the data firm
Chainalysis. Rather than quickly
trading in and out of it, more in-
vestors are using Bitcoin as a
place to park part of their invest-
ment portfolios outside the influ-
ence of governments and the tra-
ditional financial system, Chainal-
ysis and other industry firms said.
“It’s a very different set of peo-
ple who are buying Bitcoin re-
cently,” said Philip Gradwell, the
chief economist at Chainalysis,
which analyzes the movement of
cryptocurrencies. “They are do-
ing it in steadier amounts over
sustained periods of time, and
they are taking it off exchanges
and holding it as an investment.”
The excitement has been un-
derpinned by regulators and
mainstream financial companies
that are trying to make cryptocur-
rencies safer and more accessible.
The Office of the Comptroller of
the Currency, an American regu-
lator, said this summer that banks
would be allowed to hold cryp-
tocurrencies for customers. And
PayPal announced in October that
it would follow its rival Square and
allow people to buy and hold Bit-
coin and a few other cryptocur-
rencies.
“Our move came as a result of
conversations with government
officials, and then seeing the dra-
matic shift into digital payments
as a result of the pandemic,” Dan
Schulman, the chief executive of
PayPal, said in an interview. More
than a million people — three to
four times what the company ex-
pected — joined a wait list to use
cryptocurrencies before the fea-

ture was started, he said.

Bitcoin’s rise is part of a broader

exuberance in cryptocurrencies

and stock markets, which are de-

fying the gloom of a pandemic-in-

duced recession. The Dow, S&P

500 and Nasdaq have hit record

highs this past month, with Wall

Street buoyed by the presidential

election and the news of potential

coronavirus vaccines.

Bitcoin is a digital currency

with software and rules that were

released in early 2009 by a shad-

owy creator with the pseudonym

Satoshi Nakamoto. The computer

code established that the total

supply of Bitcoin would be limited.

Only 21 million tokens will ever be

created, distributed in small

blocks each day — through a

process known as mining — to

some of the computers that main-

tain the currency’s online infra-

structure.

Like gold, Bitcoin can be creat-

ed, moved and stored outside the

purview of any government or fi-

nancial institution. Bitcoins exist

on a financial ledger, known as a

blockchain, which is maintained

and updated by a volunteer net-

work of people on thousands of

computers worldwide — a system

meant to ensure that no one com-

puter or institution can change the

rules or control the network.

The open nature of the system

— and the fact that anyone can

join it and create a wallet without

providing so much as a name or a

phone number — has made it pop-

ular for those who want to circum-

vent the traditional financial sys-

tem. They have included terror-

ists, drug dealers and countries,

like North Korea, Venezuela and

Iran, that want to evade American

financial sanctions.

“This technology already plays

a role in many of the most signifi-

cant criminal and national securi-

ty threats our nation faces,” the

Department of Justice said in a re-

port in October. The report de-

scribed how deeply Bitcoin had

been woven into the infrastruc-

ture of the criminal world.

But Bitcoin’s stateless nature

has also won over investors inter-

ested in legitimate uses of the

technology. Some have been moti-

vated by a libertarian distrust of

governments. Others who are less

ideological have gravitated to Bit-

coin as an alternative to the finan-

cial system.

Still, Bitcoin is not backed by

anything other than its computer

network and the faith of people

who buy it and give it value on ex-

changes. Many of these people are

betting that someone else will be

willing to pay them more for their

Bitcoin in the future.

That has made Bitcoin prices

volatile. It fell to its most recent

low in March when fear over the

pandemic hit global markets.

Soon after, though, investors be-

gan talking about Bitcoin as a ben-

eficiary of the global downturn.

In May, Paul Tudor Jones, one of

Wall Street’s best-known hedge

fund managers, said he had put al-

most 2 percent of his portfolio in

Bitcoin. He said the cap on Bitcoin

production made it an attractive

alternative to the declining value

of traditional currencies, which he

thought was inevitable as central

banks printed more money to en-

courage an economic recovery.

“Every day that goes by that

Bitcoin survives, the trust in it will

go up,” Mr. Jones told CNBC at the

time. He did not respond to a re-

quest for comment for this article.

Some public companies also

dived into Bitcoin because of con-

cerns about the value of the dollar.

In August, MicroStrategy, a soft-

ware company in Virginia, said it

bought $250 million of Bitcoin to

store some of the cash it had in the

corporate treasury.

Michael Saylor, MicroStrat-

egy’s chief executive, said in an in-

terview that after knowing almost

nothing about Bitcoin at the be-

ginning of this year, he had be-

come a believer in how the hard-

coded limit on the number of to-

kens would help it hold its value

over time. He became so enthusi-

astic that he put $175 million of his

own money into the currency.

MicroStrategy later bought an-

other $175 million of Bitcoin.

“For anything that anybody in-

vested in as a store of value, it

starts to look like it is better to

move that into Bitcoin,” Mr. Saylor

said.

In October, Square said it was

putting $50 million of its corporate

cash into Bitcoin. In 2018, Square

also began offering the digital cur-

rency on the Cash App, its phone

app that people use to send money

between friends and family. The

company, led by Jack Dorsey, who

is also Twitter’s C.E.O., said in No-

vember that its customers held

$1.8 billion of Bitcoin, up 180 per-

cent from a year ago.

In October, analysts at JPMor-

gan Chase wrote a widely circu-

lated note about how using Bitcoin

as an alternative to gold — espe-

cially by younger investors — was

creating a significant market for

the tokens. Given that the total

value of all outstanding Bitcoin,

around $350 billion, was a small

fraction of all the gold in the world,

the analysts said they could see

the value of Bitcoin going much

higher.

Bitcoin’s rally has been accom-

panied by a broader bull market in

cryptocurrencies, just as in 2017.

While much of the fervor three

years ago centered on new coins

from scammy so-called initial coin

offerings, interest has shifted to

coins trying to take part in what is

known as decentralized finance,

or DeFi. These systems, which re-

main buggy and unproven, aim to

make it possible to take out loans

and insurance or collect interest

without involving any financial in-

stitutions.

Central banks from countries

such as Singapore, Sweden and

the Bahamas are also looking at

creating national digital curren-

cies, inspired partly by Bitcoin.

The biggest project, from China’s

central bank, appears to be the

furthest along.

The national coins, which would

leave behind the volatility of Bit-

coin, could make cryptocurren-

cies obsolete. But they could also

make it easier to move in and out

of digital currencies of all kinds.

Given the uncertainty around

Bitcoin’s value, any excitement is

likely to be followed by a another

contraction. But the number of

crashes Bitcoin has survived is

changing the conversation

around the technology.

“Now it’s LeBron James play-

ing at age 21 and starting to domi-

nate the court,” Mr. Saylor said.

“It’s not LeBron James, age 13,

throwing a temper tantrum.

You’ve got a hardening and a ma-

turing of the asset.”

Daily Highs for Price of Bitcoin

Source: CoinDesk THE NEW YORK TIMES

2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000

16,000

$18,000

$19,850.11

Bitcoin Is Back, and Hitting New Highs

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

‘It’s a very different

set of people who are

buying Bitcoin

recently.’

Philip Gradwell, chief economist at

Chainalysis.