Can we please ban the word "right-sizing"?

Maybe I'm not known for my empathy on this blog, but I feel so sorry for chief people officer Rose Zory at Carat, who apparently hit the uber-send key yesterday and sent documents outlining the communications plan for layoffs there to the whole company instead of just the management people who were supposed to get it. The memos and PowerPoint, in all of their awkward attempts to communicate the painful truth, were posted at Advertising Age, and reading them made me cringe, on a number of levels.
For one, it was like a bad acid flashback. My last act while at Organic in late 2000 was to manage the internal communications, and some of the external, for a layoff of 25 percent of the staff. Twenty-five percent! (Lucky me, I wasn't part of the "reduction in force", but had been hired by Ad Age anyway, and was leaving the company in a couple of weeks.) Just writing the talking points for those who would deliver the news to both the saved and the unsaved was enough to make one want to run for the nearest psychiatrist, and I had the good fortune not to send the entire communications plan to the whole company beforehand. Can you imagine what it must have felt like for Zory at the excruciating moment when she discovered she had sent the email to the whole company? And the further horror of having it posted on adage.com? This is the stuff of which nightmares are made, people.
Another thing that made reading these documents so cringe-worthy has nothing to do with the fact they leaked; it was their use of corporate jargon to explain an extremely unfortunate human event. Like most reporters, I have a disdain for jargon, and have always found the word "right-sizing" particularly offensive. True, companies sometimes have to readjust staffing to get it in line with reduced revenue, but to describe this as "right-sizing"? That's a term designed to distance whomever is saying it from the cruel realities involved. It's not "right" for employees who lose their jobs in a touch economy, nor is it "right" for the lucky people who keep their jobs, but are probably saddened by the departures of some good people and working harder than ever. Carat isn't the first company to deploy this term instead of the more accurate "down-sizing," but if I had my way, Carat would be the last to use it. Ever.

Correction shows Gotlieb isn't testing limits that much

There's always a bit of "There but for the grace of God go I," in seeing another reporter's story generate an excruciatingly long list of corrections. When you're a reporter, any of your bad days at the office can become very public. Still, one can only wonder how BusinessWeek's March 3 story on GroupM's Irwin Gotlieb, "An Ad Man Tests the Limits" could result in a correction approaching 150 words and highlighting four factual errors, some of which were central to the story's premise, that Gotlieb is pursuing some new revenue streams that might be seen as controversial. As one example, the original story claimed that Gotlieb predicted GroupM might not even represent advertisers within five to seven years. Not true, says the correction. Someone slipped me a copy of the correction from the print edition, and I'm running it in its entirety here. In his column today, fellow Mediapost columnist Jack Feuer described it as the Iliad of corrections. Well, at least BW did spell Gotlieb with only one 't'.

You're not a creative agency, you're a boutique

I should check if Group M’s Rob Norman has said this before, but he said during his speech yesterday at the IAB, and during his a later brief conversation I had with him at the airport that, “Creativity is inherently a boutique business.” Don’t go telling that to the head of a major creative agency. If you take a step back further, to what Norman sees as the future of his own Group M, you’ll see why he might be right—if media agencies are able not only to buy, sell and track campaigns, roll-their-own content and most importantly, aggregate data in such a way as to have their hands at the controls of consumer insight, they also have the fuel that keeps the marketing engine running over the long-term. In that context, creatives certainly are allowed to produce moments of magic, but what they are essentially doing is providing one-off solutions to more immediate positioning problems. OK creatives, it’s time to be pissed off.

Once upon a time, ads were about storytelling

It was fun listening to Universal McCann CEO Nick Brien rattle a few cages in his opening keynote at @d:tech on Tuesday. Among those shaken a bit: the current structure of the advertising business and people say the business, "Is all about storytelling. It's not. It's about exceptional experiences." Take that!