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Some 20 years of knocking out a daily online tech publication built up my reputation as a BS Filter, and when I was still spending my days writing Sixteen:Nine posts, I was rarely shy about using words to seemingly roll my eyes like a disgusted teenager when hype-filled nonsense dropped into my email inbox. 

Or after I came across word salads and exaggerations plastered on the walls and screens of trade show stands, or elsewhere. 

So, I was intrigued by a radio interview I heard the other day with an Ivy League university researcher who specializes in corporate bullshit. 

For the youngsters, by the way, radios are devices that broadcast music and talk and have station IDs like DAVE 95.9. It’s that thing with the dials in your car dashboard. But not the one for the AC. 

Anyway … cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell from Cornell University developed what he calls the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool that measures how susceptible people are to impressive but empty marketing and mission statement blabber. 

“Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” Littrell recently told the Cornell Chronicle. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” 

The scary thing is – BS tends to impress at least some people, and move whatever needle the BS generators are trying to shift. 

“The results revealed a troubling paradox,” the Cornell story revealed. “Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and visionary, but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.” 

So why am I bringing this up? Well, it’s a plea based on a whole bunch of experience – decades of it – trying to make sense of things and then relating them to a broader audience in words and terms they’ll understand. 

The pro AV industry is in no way unique in its great love and affection for BS, but oh boy there’s a lot of it. Always has been. 

A lot of that has to do with the types of businesses that populate everything from digital signage (for 25+ years, my thing) to unified communications. Many of these businesses were founded and then led by people with engineering or other technical backgrounds. They LOVE their acronyms, and are excited talking about stuff that mere mortals have zero interest in. 

The common by-product of that is technology marketing that much of the target audience can’t possibly understand. Or if they kind of, sort of can grasp it, they’re lost on how any of it matters to their business needs. Many times, I sent emails to company PR people saying, roughly, “I’ve read this through three times, and I still have no idea what you guys are going on about.” 

The other strains of BS I saw endlessly were: 

• Empty, implausible boasts, the most common one being how Company X is the leading global provider of something or other. Yeah, sure you are … 
• Stretching or ignoring terminology truths, like calling something seamless or invisible when it isn’t, or lately, attaching the term AI to anything, no matter how tenuous the connection may be. 
  
• Saying the same damn things as everyone else, or sometimes, saying a lot but communicating almost nothing. Easy to use is a super-important attribute for tech, but leading with that makes little sense when EVERYONE says their stuff is easy to use. 
  

Years ago, I was wandering the long and many aisles of the NAB show in Las Vegas, marveling at all the stands that had lengthy word salads printed on their feature walls. I’d stop and stare, trying to figure out what the heck the companies had on offer. They were so fixated on trying to sound impressive by paradigm-shifting or synergizing that they neglected to do the real work of getting attendees to quickly understand the offer and be moved to think, “OK, I need that. Tell me more.” 

My big revelation at that show, dizzied by all the BS, was a company that had a very simple headline on its stand: TV Station On A Mac. 

Beautiful. People would get that … immediately. 

My simple point and plea here to pro AV execs and their marketing and communications teams is to steer well clear of BS, and instead focus all of their communications on context and relevance. 

Tell your target buyers and partners what you have and do, why it’s different and better, and help them understand why they should care, and why they want what you have. 

Photo credit: Getty Images/RapidEye