Advertising – the communications industry – is full of words that lock people out. Hilarious unless you’re trying to enter the advertising industry.

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. FCB has created AdLingo, a fun online dictionary to help explain ad industry jargon to young people entering the industry, an idea begun by FCB junior creatives, Amy Bland & Sacha Burke.

Bland & Sacha found the industry’s assortment of never-before-seen language can be a huge barrier 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 commented, “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 added, “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 of which they didn’t quite understand the meaning.”

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, 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 aims to produce a website as well as a physical book to make it as accessible as possible.

Owen Lee, chief creative officer at FCB Inferno, stated, “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.”

Bland and Burke seem to be a young team that knows how the industry works:

Credits:

Agency: FCB Inferno 
Junior Art Director: Amy Bland 
Junior Copywriter: Sacha Burke 
Lead Social Creatives: Greg Harvey & Mike Mackenzie 
Joint Design Lead: Sarni Strachan 
Designer: Dante Attuoni 
Chief Creative Officer: Owen Lee