By and large clients are timid beasts.

Well let’s face it, marketing is a lousy job. No one has a clue what you do, but they know they don’t like it when they see it. Your budget is the first to get cut when money’s tight and your work is the first to take the blame when sales are off. You labour mightily and fight ferociously with the agency, only to have the hard won result rejected by the sales VP’s little woman or the CEO’s precocious brat. Frankly I’m surprised marketing people aren’t up there with dentists in the self-immolation league tables.

I’m constantly amazed at how hard we seem to be working to further complicate their lives, giving them even more unlikely activities to explain to sceptical colleagues.

“So Frank, are you doing a promotion to support the fall sales push?”

“Well no, this year we thought we’d try an immersive trans-media brand experience.”

“You wot?”

“Yunno, we’re enhancing our branded utility by experientially engaging our consumers.”

You could call this an immersive brand experience that expands brand utility…

… or, you could call it a promotion. Actually it’s a fun extension of a perennial promotion when for once it appears the agency managed to get the PR people to do something useful.

Of course, I’m just an embittered old ad guy desperately pissing into the winds of change. Well sort of. The internet and its furiously multiplying spawn provides a glorious parallel universe wherein we can do what we’ve always done, freed from the constraints of traditional media. But what we’re doing is still what we always did: ads, promotions, PR, giveaways, BOGOs, research, customer service.

It might seem as though we’re adding scientific heft to the infuriatingly nebulous business of marketing communications when we surround it with jargon that makes quantum physics sound positively prosaic. But what we’re actually doing is confusing the crap out of clients so that good old integrated marketing strategy is cast contemptuously aside in favour of worrying about their twitter strategy or whether they should be crowd sourcing their next pack design.