Bob Hoffman calls it "The Golden Age of Bullshit."

The toughest thing for me about the world today, not just the advertising world, but the whole world, is that a set of liars or prevaricators or, charitably, double-talkers, are inventing new words or terms faster than I can learn them.

So I sit in meetings or listen to people on the news and I always find myself a sentence or two behind. Mostly because I’m trying to decipher what whoever was talking just said.

“We have to make our advertising through the line,” someone spouted to me recently.

“What does through the line mean?” I asked.

“360.”

“Well then, don’t we need a single strategic brief.”

“No, it’s through the line, not end to end.”

If I were a cartoon character, my head would have spun off my neck and rattled around the conference room we were sequestered in.

Worst of all, are media discussions.

If you understand what’s really going on in digital media, you know that a good portion of ads never appear and even more ads are ad-blocked. All you need to do is spend half an hour with Bob Hoffman over at adcontrarian.blogspot.com to get a sense of the broad-dysfunction in the media world.

However, when media tongues start flapping, you hear nothing about these issues. All you get is a buzzword buzzsaw about dynamic banners, programmatic advertising and so on and so on.

I try to come back to what should be the point: no one is actually seeing our ads, and no great communication has ever been constructed that works in an ad space that’s approximately the size of half an index card.

But those aren’t the things we hear.

I’ll tell you the truth.

I don’t know what these words mean.

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a programmatic ad. Or an end to end, through the line 360 communication, or a dynamic banner. I've certainly never responded to one.

Maybe I am just dumb.

And I certainly don’t get the lingo.

So call me cynical.

I think there are a lot of people who are just bull-shitting.

It's time to call them out.