Jargon jingle

London – This Christmas, design agency Pentagram is making a plea: plain English please.

• The agency has created a rap video dismissing corporate jargon
• It follows last year’s Christmas card that did the same thing in poem form

Tired of hearing clients use terms such as ‘mission critical’ and acronyms such as COB (close of business), Pentagram extended its campaign against corporate jargon with the rap video Gamechanger. 

Pentagram worked with Los Angeles-based director Drew Beirut on the C-suite rap featuring rapper Ngozi Y’ileese and beatboxer Leum Kerzic, as they rattle through the tired words that are often heard in board rooms across the globe.

‘We originally published Gamechanger as an epic poem, a kind of anti-jargon The Odyssey or The Aeneid, a seven-verse entreaty to all agencies and executives who habitually assault the English language with their business buzzwords,’ says Naresh Ramchandani, the partner at Pentagram behind the original Christmas card and its latest rap iteration. ‘But when it came to making a video, we realised that epic poems are so two millennia ago and that maybe a bit of HOVA would work better than a bit of Homer. And so our rap video was born. Will people like it? No idea. Does an over-jargonised world need it? Hell, yes.’