FCB Inferno Juniors Create "AdLingo" to Take the Confusion out of Advertising Jargon

Aug. 12, 2021

FCB Inferno has decided it’s about time someone explained what all the weird and wonderful language thrown around in the advertising industry actually means. Introducing, AdLingo, a fun online dictionary to help explain ad industry jargon to young people entering the industry.

We often take for granted our knowledge of words, phrases, abbreviations, and acronyms that we accumulate over our time working in advertising. But for people new to the industry, especially placement teams and juniors, this assortment of never-before-seen language can be a huge barrier to entry.

This was the case for Junior Creatives Amy Bland & Sacha Burke when they started their first job at FCB Inferno in January 2020. The pair began writing out a list of all the strange language they came across in briefs, team discussions, and client meetings and begun finding simple ways to remember them.

Sacha Burke, Junior creative at FCB Inferno said:

“We soon realised this must be a very common problem for people just starting out in advertising and decided that we’d like to share our learnings with everyone else in our position.”

 

Amy Bland, Junior creative at FCB Inferno said:

“We mentioned the idea to a few colleagues, and it soon emerged that people across all departments, even people who had been in the industry for years, still came across words they didn’t quite understand the meaning of.”

 

The FCB Inferno project team, led by Amy and Sacha, began to write and design an AdLingo dictionary, containing over 100 words and acronyms specific to the industry. The book aims to be more than your standard dictionary. Each word has a short definition and a quirky illustration to accompany it, created by designer Dante Attuoni, in order to make the definition come to life for the young creatives likely to use it.

The project is still in its early stages, with only a few designs released on the FCB Inferno Instagram account, but the team aim to produce a website as well as a physical book to make it as accessible as possible.

Owen Lee, CCO at FCB Inferno said:

“This is a fun and useful initiative that everyone who works in advertising will recognise. But as we strive to bring people from different backgrounds into the industry, it also serves to highlight how the everyday language we use can be a barrier to new people joining the business. Hopefully this is a fun way of debunking some of the impenetrable nonsense we sometimes speak.”