Advomiteration

So, shall we see if we can guess what annoyed me most about this advert?

Could it possibly be the use of the word “innovalue”, being as it is a completely made-up word???

I now know, having googled it, that it is the name of a management partner, at least three consultancy firms, an electronic technology company, and a company offering ‘strategic innovation’ whose website is so funny I don’t know if it’s actually a big piss-take. Evidently those clever guys at Taiwan Excellence aren’t the first to come up with the idea of combining the words ‘innovation’ and ‘value’.

Nevertheless, it is still a completely made-up word.

But no, that isn’t the thing that annoyed me the most. Nor are the self-defeating quotation marks around the word in which the advertisers acknowledge the made-upness of their made-up word in a way that is presumably meant to look knowing but actually makes them look clueless, like they were searching for a better word but had to settle for a crap one that isn’t really a word at all.

No, the thing that annoys me the most (and if you can’t tell I’m already pretty darn annoyed by the above, so I must find this other thing extraordinarily annoying) is that, having used this made-up word and openly acknowledged it as just that, they then condescendingly explain what the made-up word means, thus showing how utterly useless their made-up word is.

If they ever thought that this might turn out to be a useful word, a time-saving truncation that one day Taiwan Excellence might take the credit for – and goodness knows, I can work out which words the term ‘innovalue’ takes its inspiration from – why the hell didn’t they just leave it without the explanation?!!

As it is, I feel like I’m simultaneously being treated like a thicky and having my mother tongue shat all over by some advertisers. Not to mention the fact that my lasting impression of Taiwan Excellence is of a company who will use thirteen clunky syllables when four made-up ones will suffice – which is the very opposite of innovalue.

“Notinnovalue”, as I like to call it.