Audience respect
Travelling back this afternoon from meeting to run through pre pitch questions created an unexpected connection.
The pitch deals with a delicate area; pediatric medicine, specifically the care of someone’s baby during a pretty terrible time. We discussed to great and interesting lengths the amount of work that had been done to define audience understanding, and a set of language and terms with which the campaign can rest on. The importance of tone, terminology and permission was pretty front of mind. The brief requires us to be delicate with the way we approach this. Take our time and get it right. Test everything, consider partnership the only way. Tone down the direct.
Midst this thought, the 4pm train back to Paddington was besieged with school kids heading back home and the proximity of my thoughts and the similarity of carriage d sprung forth. Everyone around me was enveloped in what was almost a foreign language. It makes me feel old to admit this, (I have an Iphone you know!) but the terminology, slang and banter pushed home a thought. That regardless of audience wrapped around each group is always complex knit of terms, behaviours and permissions that tend to need unpicking prior to outsiders diving in a starting a conversation.
I learnt a couple of new terms that I shall be peppering into conversations with ‘88’ (our newest account member, who happens to have been born about the same time as I was drinking Thunderbird in Rock Park with Claire Argle from Pilton).
The delightful ‘Madgic’ (sic) emphasis on the Madonna, meaning; far from delightful and used by a slutty Gem to describe “double science and citizenship” to Carmine who recounted a fine tale when she ‘did blazer’. Doing blazer referred to when you had hit year 12, went to grab your phone out of your blazer pocket only to realise that you were now in year 12 and wear ‘ohm clothes’, not school uniform. A simple mistake, showing how ‘11’ you still were.
Totally delightful. My lesson in respecting your audience all on the 4pm from Maidenhead. I am off to sew leather patches on my elbows.
PS. It best not to type ‘Year 12 school girls’ and many other similar terms into Google in the pursuit of images for your blog.