Every agency starts a project with a kick-off deck. Ours has a slide called “Words we won’t use.” We put it second, right after the introduction.
The list is short. It’s also extremely specific. And every word on it has cost real clients real money before we figured out why.
The banned list
Leverage. A verb that means “use,” but tries to sound like more. You don’t leverage email; you use it. You don’t leverage influencers; you hire them. Every time someone writes “leverage” in a deck, the deck gets 2% longer and 0% clearer.
Synergy. If you have to use this word to describe how two things work together, they probably don’t.
Ecosystem. A real ecosystem has tigers, decomposers, and the threat of extinction. Your CRM does not.
Holistic. Means “we don’t want to commit to which specific thing we’re doing.” Usually shows up right before a vague invoice.
Thought leadership. If you have to call yourself a thought leader, you aren’t. If you actually are one, you’re called something more useful, like “the person who wrote that one article we all read.”
Why this matters past being annoying
Words like these aren’t just irritating. They’re a tax on the client. Every one of them moves the conversation one step away from “what are we actually doing this month.”
When an agency says we’ll leverage your existing equity to drive holistic synergy across the influencer ecosystem, the client has three reasonable options:
- Pretend they understand and pay the invoice.
- Ask what each word means and be quietly mocked in Slack later.
- Find someone else.
Option 3 is the one we’d take, so it’s the one we plan for.
What we say instead
Mostly: less. Here’s the same sentence in plain English:
We’ll use the trust you’ve already built with your audience to hire three Indian creators in your category and run a four-week campaign. Here’s the budget. Here’s what we expect back.
It’s longer, but only because it’s specific. The vague version is shorter because it doesn’t actually say anything.
One rule for your own briefs
Read your last email to your agency, your team, or yourself. Highlight every word that could be replaced with a more common word without losing meaning. If you can replace more than three in a paragraph, the paragraph is selling something to you, not telling you something.
The fastest way to spot a good agency: they tell you what they’re going to do this week, in words your accountant would understand. The fastest way to spot a bad one: they tell you what they’re going to do this quarter, in words you have to nod through.
This was the first post in a series we’re calling “Words we won’t use.” If you have one to nominate, send it to hello@socialmocktail.com and we’ll add it to the banned list. The voice on our brand identity work follows the same rules.
More from the list we keep adding to
Omnichannel. Means "we post on multiple platforms." The useful version of this idea is "consistent" — your message is consistent everywhere a customer might see you. That's genuinely worth doing. "Omnichannel" is just the jargon wrapper around it. When an agency says "omnichannel strategy," ask them to describe what they'll actually do on each channel. Nine times out of ten, the answer is: roughly the same post, resized.
Authentic. The most ironic word in marketing. Every brand that declares its own authenticity sounds immediately fake. Authenticity cannot be announced — it can only be demonstrated. One honest post about a product problem will do more for your brand than twenty posts about your "authentic journey." If you're writing "authentic" in your brief, delete it and describe the actual feeling you want customers to have instead.
Data-driven. Everything is data-driven in 2026. The phrase has been so emptied of meaning that it now mostly signals: "we have a dashboard." The question is never whether you use data. It's which data, what you do when the numbers contradict your assumptions, and whether you're honest enough to report the bad weeks alongside the good ones.
Disrupting. If you are actually disrupting an industry, the industry will tell you — loudly, usually through nervous press releases and legal letters. If you're writing "disrupting the skincare space" in a deck about a brand from Pune that makes good face wash, you're not disrupting anything. You're making good face wash. That's worth saying plainly.
Curate. A museum word pressed into digital marketing to describe putting three links in a newsletter. You're not curating content. You're sending a newsletter. "Curate" sits alongside "craft" (used to justify a 20% price premium) and "artisanal" (meaningless in a digital context) in the hall of borrowed prestige words.
Alignment. "We need alignment across stakeholders before we proceed." Translation: "We need everyone to agree before we do anything, and we're going to call several meetings to achieve this." Meetings are fine. Calling them "alignment sessions" adds nothing except the impression that something more sophisticated than a meeting is happening.
Why this language exists in the first place
Agency jargon isn't accidental. It serves two purposes, and both are about protection.
First: vague language cannot be held to account. "We'll leverage your brand equity to drive holistic synergy across the influencer ecosystem" cannot be measured, and therefore cannot fail. A specific promise — "we'll get you 200 inbound DMs from potential customers by the end of March" — can. Most agencies prefer not to make specific promises, because specific promises can be checked against specific results.
Second: jargon signals tribal membership. If you use the same words as other marketers, you sound like a marketer. The problem is that your client is not a marketer. They're a founder managing twelve things at once, or a growth lead who just inherited the brand brief. They don't want membership in the tribe. They want to know what you're going to do this month, by when, and how you'll know if it worked.
We've been on both sides of this table. Jargon peaks when the agency doesn't yet know what they're doing. When the plan is solid, the language gets shorter. When the plan is shaky, the slides get more numerous and the font gets bolder.
A thirty-slide deck where every third slide has circles and arrows and a framework with a made-up name is almost always a sign that something at the centre of the strategy hasn't been settled. A ten-slide deck where each slide says one clear thing is almost always from a team that actually has a plan.
The Indian version of this problem
There's a specific jargon inflation problem in Indian marketing. Much of what gets said in agency decks in Delhi and Mumbai is adapted from US frameworks — built for markets, audiences, and platforms that don't map cleanly onto tier-2 India or the Indian D2C Instagram buyer.
"Brand equity" made sense in the context it was developed in. But when you're talking to a founder running a ₹3 Cr cosmetics brand on Instagram, "we need to protect your brand equity" is the wrong frame. The right frame is: "let's not post anything that makes your most loyal customers feel like they're being sold to." Same underlying idea. But one of them produces a plan and the other produces a slide.
We're not the first people to say any of this. But we're probably one of the few agencies that starts every engagement with a banned-words slide, because every other piece of work gets easier once you've agreed that a sentence is supposed to say something.
A few plain-English translations
"We'll leverage your existing equity to drive holistic synergy across the influencer ecosystem."
What it means: We'll work with creators who already have the audience you want, and coordinate their posts so they go up in the same two-week window instead of spread across three months.
"We'll take a data-driven, omnichannel approach to audience journey optimisation."
What it means: We'll look at where customers drop off — your website, your emails, your social DMs — and fix the worst one first. Then check the numbers again.
"We'll curate authentic thought leadership content to position you as a disruptor."
What it means: We'll help you write one genuinely useful piece per month from your actual experience. That's it.
The jargon versions aren't wrong. They're just useless at the moment that matters most: when a founder is deciding whether to trust you with their budget and their brand.
Clarity is the only brand voice that compounds. Everything else depreciates.