My wife showed me a diagram the other night.
It was a simplified diagram of how programmatic ad placement works—the steps between buyer and publisher. It included a term—“DSP”—that I’ve heard my wife utter innumerable times on work calls over the past few years.
If pressed, I might have been able to break out the abbreviation into “Demand Side Platform.” (But probably not.)
The problem with unfamiliar jargon is that it means nothing to you, even if the words are all familiar. On their own, demand, side, and platform present no comprehension issues.
But together? No idea.
Even worse, though, is that my brain made no effort to parse the individual words, as early readers are all taught to do. I didn’t look closer at the three-word string—I just brushed the whole chunk off as nonsense.
Which is a shame—because if I’d made even the slightest effort, I would have wondered:
Demand for what?
And the answer to that question lay partly in the existence of another piece of ad-tech jargon:
SSP. Supply Side Platform.
With only a little extra pondering, I could have connected the dots. Supply and demand, of course. Logic appears, and questions follow more easily, each dissolving jargon to make the language clear in whole as in part.
Some jargon—Latin names, for instance—is too opaque to brave this way. But plenty jargon is like DSP: all it takes is a little questioning (and maybe a patient spouse?) to understand.
Taylor Coe 