Everyone’s encouraged to be a content producer these days. It’s not marketing, it’s content! Sometimes the tell-tale signs are obvious. The author feels obliged to lapse into unrestrained hyperbole in the first paragraph, proclaiming unprecedented greatness for some unproven new feature or technology that represents a “total revolution” in the way you tackle a certain technological problem.

Other times though, marketing content is written with more restraint. If you can’t read the subtler signs, it becomes harder to tell if you’re being truly educated or just unwittingly lured by the siren call of the marketing content producer.

Where will it all lead? Already, some of our political leaders have swallowed marketing technobabble wholesale, with talk of building a country “powered by the internet of things and big data to develop cyber physical systems and smart factories.” Who is to say that others are immune? I, for one, start to worry that technical people will begin to take marketing content seriously.

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Developer Phil: So, Ed, how are you getting on with that little T-SQL data migration script? You’ve been on it a while.

Developer Ed: (sighing wearily): To be honest, Phil, I’ve been distracted by vaster game-changing revolutions in effective analytical solutions. The internet of things is generating huge volumes of data, massive quantities, at an incredibly fast velocity. Unless we start to leverage business intelligence insights, quickly, this organization will drown in the tidal wave of data and lose its competitive edge!

Phil: Yes, dreadful – and while we’re all still reeling from the shock of finding out that our company suffers from 5 of the 7 signs that our cloud-based storage strategy is failing us. Still, never mind.

Ed: It’s seems hopeless, Phil…(banging fist on table)…We have to start thinking much more holistically about Big Data’s ROI! How else will we make the right investments in Big Data tools and frameworks to manage the real-time data workload?! The third platform is here, Phil, and we’re not even at the right station!

Phil: Thinking holistically about that little T-SQL script might be a good start?

Ed: And don’t even get me started on the parlous state of our Big Data analytics pipeline. It’s shocking. We need Hadoop clusters for scalable, resilient processing, Spark data streaming, a cloud-based data sink for message queuing, data analytics and visualization tools. I could go on!

Phil: Yes, and maybe if we can add a sprinkling of the pixie dust of machine learning, we can finally start to exploit the unreasonable effectiveness of ACID intelligence. Surely, that’s our best hope of being at the forefront of the new digital transformation?

Ed: Steady on, Phil. Even I’m not buying that one.

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Help us thwart this danger! Send in your most egregious examples of technomarketing talk, so others can learn to spot the warning signs.