Choice Words

The TV of Babel

Happy Monday Peaceniks. Ready for a new language?

As an industry, we love to confuse ourselves. We bundle. We unbundle. Then we re-bundle. We invent a medium for ads. We remove the ads. Then we add the ads back again. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and the professional television community gives itself recurring amnesia by bonking ourselves in the head with our own massive, swinging pendulum.

In my relatively studied opinion, a major cause for our collective selective memory is the labyrinth of lexicon we constantly compound to describe the voluminous variations of models, measurement, devices, delivery, and audience that we continue to invent, reinvent, wind up, and unwind. To demonstrate this, I created the TV Taxonomy lexigraph above.

Before, during, and after I crafted this textogram, I knew it would spark debate, disagreement, even derision. Ask one hundred TV professionals to classify our compendium of terminology and you’ll get a thousand answers. So, before you ask: No, I do not consider these terms and categories to be complete, conclusive, or official. The intention of this visualization is conversation – to incite a community confabulation about the nomenclature we use to characterize what we do and why.

How should we define our audience? Should we consider them subscribers, viewers, monthly and/or daily average users, in demos, households, as unique or perhaps unduplicated? Is programmatic truly programmatic if the ultimate value of an ad is still determined by human bias? If 90% of US homes now have connected televisions, isn’t all TV now CTV – and, correspondingly, isn’t CTV now just TV?

To some this may seem superficial or inconsequential. But as someone who writes about our business for a living and constantly receives complaints, corrections, and contradictions about his word choice (my recent report on Share of Ad Voice generated hundreds of “well, actually’s”), I hope you’ll pardon me for taking this shit serious.

So, I lay this topic at the feet of you, the TV community, and humbly request your considerate consideration. Assess my assemblage. Grade my classifications. Take on my taxonomy. Our industry’s glossary should be a work in progress, so your feedback is not just welcome, it’s expected and appreciated!

But before you do, consider this: Is there not a way to simplify and clarify our industry’s jargon? Can we strive to combine and/or eliminate our duplicative and/or anachronistic and/or fatuous phraseology? As I compiled that lexiconic visualization, I became convinced: Yes we can, we should, and we must.

Prior to setting you free to roam the comments section, let me first present some proposed vocabulary revamps, intended to economize, elucidate, and unify the language of our business: