OMG TMI TBH
Acronyms, Marketing Speak, Name Dropping and Other Sins
I was in a meeting once, presenting at CBS Television City. We were pitching BitTorrent as a positive thing for their business model. We had our work set out for us.
I was in the bloated vise grip of a sinus cold. My partner in presentation, Dave F, blonde, tall, surfer build, was with me, we had been doing meetings all over Los Angeles for the file sharing company’s attempt at a legitimate, licensed service.
On the way to the meeting, Dave had suggested we put on a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD. I thought he found it on the floor and threatened to throw it out the window. We had regained an uneasy detente after that.
As we sat in the meeting room, we realized it was actually the company boardroom, and our little meeting was turning into a pitch to the entire executive team.
Dave was trying to turn off his AOL Instant Messenger, which was sending him dirty messages.
“When,” one of the talking heads* asked, “will you have on-demand video?”
Dave didn’t miss a second, “The ETA on VOD is TBD.”
A beat. And then the General Counsel of CBS looked at me and said, “Did you hear that too?”
Marketing speak. Name dropping. These are odious – but sometimes necessary – behaviors.
I’m a name dropper.
I really try not to.
And I’ve been known to drop some “action items” here and there, in meetings, at work. Everything needs to “scale.”
I try hard to rid myself of these behaviors.
Yet, they have ostensible purpose in the right social or career situation.
Sometimes, you have to put on the corporate mask. And yes, sometimes, you have to mention someone by name, regardless of their relative stature. The trick, I guess, is to not be fucking gross about it.
I work in entertainment, so in the course of my life, I run into people with recognizable names. And because I have been a relentless social connector most of my adult life, I know a shit ton of people.
So inevitably, if I say someone’s name, there’s a slight chance they might be recognizable, whether it’s in the entertainment sphere, or in my digital media world.
And the context in which I say this name – if it’s a suggestion, like “Hey, I know XX and they can help us do YY” you can be safe sometimes – is determinant in the relative offensiveness of the mention.
Some meetings, that behavior will get you pushed to the kiddie table. “Jesus, Tangborn we KNOW.”
And nobody, ever, likes a show-off.
But the flip side of this is – the very people who are so disgusted by your so-called inveterate name dropping will 100% call you first if they need a favor from said name.
As my friend Jack says, we are mavens. Mavens are connectors. Idea factories. Knowledge bases. We know people, records, movies, industry. We thrive on social connections and ideas sparking off other ideas. We are synaptic people, electrically charged from one atomized idea to the next.
Name dropping and marketing speak can be crucial in fundraising and business development.
There is a lingua franca of fundraising speak. And if you aren’t with it, you will miss half the conversation.
I am in music because I love songs. I love records. I friggin’ love bands.
I cannot play an instrument. For years I had a sufficient enough haircut to be asked constantly, “What do you play?”
I suppose I had ideas about guitar and keyboard when I was young. In high school, Dad wasn’t too fond of me being in a band and besides, I couldn’t really play anything, except for a few pieces on piano, from sheet music.
It took me years to understand, for instance, that guitar tone has a lot more to do with the type of guitar, the person holding it, the strings, than with, for instance, pedals.
I just wasn’t bent that way.
Which is not to say I don’t love music. Obviously I do.
I come at it by way of hagiography, not practical experience.
I come at it, by knowing names of people.
I read the entirety of Leonard Maltin’s movie guide, cover to cover, for enjoyment, as a child. And I didn’t need to memorize the names. They just stuck there.
If this was my super power, I had found it early.
I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I remember the name of the actress who played the old gypsy woman from the Frankenstein movies.
Maria Ouspenskaya. Didn’t need to look that up.
The flip side of memorizing Leonard Maltin’s movie guide as a child is you are then, quite obviously, a gigantic NERD.
Nerds are narcissists, necessarily. Have to protect that thinly guarded intellect with something.
So you do get a bit of pride in your associations.
Marketing speak and name dropping fall into the same bucket because they are short-hand. They are extremely convenient ways to convey a lot of information briefly and concisely, and in a language that suggests a deeper knowledge.
I’ve had this idea for years to write a Noir-esque thriller but peopled entirely with corporate types who say “open kimono” and “low hanging fruit” instead of “take your flunky and dangle.”
I can’t tell if this idea is hilarious, horrible, extremely clever or inordinately annoying.
My work involves talking to folks in bands. I do this all the time. I have done this most of my adult life.
However, my work also involves, after years of painful discovery that my brain was wired more effectively at operations than creativity, a lot of particularly corporate esperanto.
I build business plans and funding presentations.
I live in two absolutely, fundamentally different, and probably opposed, worlds.
Nobody who wants to know our projected EBITDA in 2027 cares if I have seen all of Jean Rollin’s movies.
Am I well rounded? Or just massively confused?
Well, that’s not true. At one well attended corporate dinner in 1999, famed and exiled Polygram executive Eric Kronfeld, in front of the entire board of directors and executive team, made me name all the members of Monty Python.
I was in heaven.
A friend once told me that using corporate speak is like auditioning for a play. It’s acting. You are convincing everyone else in the room that you are the right person for the role you are filling.
And they, in turn, respond in the same language.
Like, have you ever seen someone in a meeting who is just learning the word “actionable?” They turn into an actionable machine, with the enthusiasm Bobby Brown had discovering the word “Prerogative.”
For the next 2 months, everything is “actionable” this and “actionable” that.
We make a lot of concessions in our personal sphere to get and keep the work that funds our lives.
Human nature is habit.
If something works one time, you’re probably going to keep trying it.
Conversely, if something gets enough of a negative response, a smart person is going to try to figure out a different behavior.
Context matters.
Utility matters.
Tone matters.
I go back to one of my earliest pieces here on Substack, about the concept of Range.
I certainly have a lot of range in my career. And in my personal life.
I don’t know a lot of folks who have managed refrigerated supply chain in grocery and also project managed encyclopedic digital music software.
The flip side, of course, is that the names from Batter Blaster don’t necessarily transfer to my present indie music life.
Nobody in my current sphere is going to rally around the anecdote that John Tesh made Connie Selleca answer the phone when we called him to run a pancake and waffle promotion.
As a matter of fact, that could probably get me shit canned!
But it makes a good story at the bar.
Living in two worlds is a good thing, I’ve decided.
These skills I have are soft skills. There are few jobs out there for someone who can name every John Sayles script, including the unproduced ones.
But something’s gotta pay the bills.
And so I attempt to wrap my brain around context, tone and utility.
Every time I think that someone might be impressed by the fact that I know someone, I remind myself, they probably won’t be.
As a matter of fact, they probably don’t even care at all.
Keep that shit in the boardroom, Tangborn.
Or you’re gonna be SOL TBH.
Thanks for reading Are You Experienced! I hope you enjoyed this one.
I’m Nick Tangborn and I have been a music executive, digital media CEO, pancake and waffle flunky and various other charitably unusual identities in my career.
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*(the corporate talking heads, Jerry Harrison was not in this meeting)
A very fun read!