Tag Archives: Stroppy award

Stroppy 2021

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It’s been a tough choosing a winner of this year’s Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle.

Mondelēz’s brands!

We thought it would probably go to ex-President Trump, but a careful examination of his speeches and tweets persuaded us that we’d have to look elsewhere. The Donald makes liberal use of untruths, half-truths, lavish insults, unfinished sentences and non-sequiturs, but he doesn’t deal in meaningless twaddle. He’d be less dangerous if he did.

Instead, the much-discussed and coveted award goes to a major global food conglomerate: Mondelēz. They own… well, look at the logos – even Toblerone! Even Cadbury, for heaven’s sake!! So it’s no surprise that they turn over US$26 billion per year and have a market capitalization of US$79 billion.

Therefore they must know what they’re doing, right? And when they adopt a radical new approach to marketing, we should also take notice, right? Especially if it’s called “humaning” and disdains caution and anything so mundane as data. So how about this…

“Humaning is a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that creates real, human connections with purpose, moving Mondelēz International beyond cautious, data-driven tactics, and uncovering what unites us all.”

I don’t know much about marketing (my book sales bear witness to this) but I do know that these 28 words are the collective winners of this year’s Stroppy. Congratulations, Mondelēz!

PS  It’s 1 February. When I was a boy in London and then the north of England there was a superstitious belief that if the first thing you said on the first day of every month throughout the year was “white rabbits” you would have good luck.  But I never remembered to say it every month. Did you grow up with the same belief?

Nomination for the Next Stroppy

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Here in the State of South Australia the Labour government (recently replaced) introduced radical reforms in the health sector. These reforms were labelled Transforming Health, and according to the letters to the local newspaper about it, they were deeply unpopular. SA Health, the responsible government agency, commissioned a study by an organisation glorying in the name ‘SA Academic Health Science and Translation Centre’.

The study’s findings generally supported the views of the letter-writers, but the report was criticised for omitting important aspects of the reforms and for such passages as this:

“What we can deduce from our work is that it is possible to generate a narrative around the experience of multiple stakeholders, going through a large-scale system change, in ways that both acknowledge the limitations of the data but support the emerging themes from the data, and from other (realist) literature reviews.”

I am indebted to Brad Crouch, the Advertiser’s Medical Reporter, for drawing this to my attention. I am treating it as a nomination for the next Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Drivel (popularly known as the Stroppy).

There’s no relevant picture to go with this story, so I’m reproducing a totally unrelated but amusing graphic that my old friend Ron Allan forwarded to me.

Stroppy 2019

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With nine months to run, we have our first a nomination for the Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Drivel 2019.  Sorry for the slightly fuzzy reproduction:

It’s a strong contender, but what a pity they didn’t work in a reference to ‘empowerment’ and the words ‘going forward’! Without those simple improvements MYP cannot be considered a shoo-in for the coveted award.

You can make your own nomination at any time. Just email me at johnstandingford@hotmail.com

 

Award Time Again

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Yes, it’s time to submit your nomination for the annual Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle – known in the popular press as ‘The Stroppy’. Last year’s Stroppy went to a firm called Palladium for this superb piece of twaddle, devoid of any meaning and garnished with a split infinitive to make the judges wince:

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The same firm has already received a nomination, but let’s make it a fair fight. Come on now – there must be equally meaningless bits of twaddle out there somewhere! Deadline for nominations: Sunday 21 January (midnight GMT).

The First ‘Stroppy’

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Yes, that’s what some people have been calling the new Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle. There have been some strong contenders, especially from the USA, but the winner is… Palladium! Their advertisement for a so-called summit on “reshaping the future through positive impact” was the very first nomination:

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No other nomination surpassed in either meaninglessness or twaddledom.