August 5th, 2025
With sharp wit and no patience for buzzwords, Jared Blank shows how strong positioning and human copy can cut through noise and make people care
Is your marketing copy clear, or just gobbledy? Jared Blank thinks it might be the latter.
In this no-fluff, high-impact talk, marketing leader Jared Blank breaks down one of the biggest problems in B2B marketing today: meaningless jargon that says nothing and sells even less. From confusing tech-speak to the dreaded “tentacle diagrams” of SaaS websites, he calls out the language and visuals that clog up marketing—and shows us what to do instead. The fix?
Positioning. Clear, confident, audience-first positioning. Jared explains how brands like Warby Parker, Oatly, Ivory, and even Allstate use strong positioning to cut through noise and make their message stick. He reminds us that great copy isn’t just about clever words—it’s about clarity, focus, and knowing your audience.
TL;DR:
If you’re tired of marketing that sounds smart but says nothing, this talk will help you write—and think—more clearly.
Jared Blank: All right, here are a few things I wanted to discuss today. I want to talk about gobbled—what that means, or at least what I think it means when I use the term. We'll also cover positioning and look at some copy ideas you can steal—things you can actually take back to your workplace. As Mike mentioned, I’ve worked for software companies.
I ran marketing for a handful of them. One thing that always struck me—if you’ve ever tried to buy software, you know what I mean—you go to a company’s website and think, I have no idea what this company actually does. That is gobbledy. That’s what I mean by it. It’s this shortcut language.
Here’s an example. This is from SAP Hybris, an e-commerce platform that "redefines e-commerce by simplifying the lives of buyers and sellers." You're like, Oh, tell me more... And they do: They “deliver personalized commerce everywhere through hyper-relevant”—not just relevant, because relevant isn’t good enough—"omnichannel commerce." Whatever that means.
It’s supposedly "an experience that converts more customers more often at higher value, turning engagement into a personal, shoppable moment."
Nobody is visiting this website looking for a “hyper-relevant, personal, shoppable moment software platform.” But it took a whole group of people, working over months, to take someone’s good idea and ruin it, turning it into this.
This is also gobbled. I don’t know what NetScout is, and neither will you. They promise “unstoppable visibility for your unstoppable enterprise.” You think, Tell me more... And here it is: they serve communication service providers, healthcare networks, governments, and federal branches, which, to me, are already part of government, but for some reason, they broke it out separately. “The world’s organizations”—literally every organization on Earth—are “testing the limits of what’s possible.” Then you get: “Continuous digital transformation is a must.” And that it “requires new levels of visibility capable of unlocking performance and security.” If anyone can tell me what NetScout actually does, please let me know.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s a consumer-facing brand that gets it right:“We help all people get jobs.” Yes. Why isn’t it always like that? There are a lot of reasons. I work with companies to help them do more of this and less of that.
And look—it all comes from a good place. You’ve probably been in meetings like this: someone suggests, “Oh, we should say this.” Then someone in sales chimes in, “Yeah, but what about people who want this other thing?” “Good point, let’s add that.”
Then someone in client success says, “I have a customer in Uzbekistan who uses our product this way—you need to include that.” “Okay, sure.” And you end up with this bloated mess.
My idea is that the root of this problem is positioning. Nobody starts with clear positioning.
So you end up with everyone’s input lumped together—because there wasn’t an initial conversation about who we are, who we’re talking to, or how we differentiate ourselves.
Gobbled isn’t just about language either—it can be visual. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gartner, the research company. They publish a lot of this kind of thing.
All I know is there are several types of humans—there’s a key thing here on the left—employees and customers are both humans. And somehow, when you start with that, and you put it into the "thingy-ding," it comes out as... entitlement management.
This is the goal of an "I am a Sam, I am" program. It’s identity for security. And I imagine someone like me would get up at a conference and present this, and it would all sound super clear. I don’t see how that’s possible, but they produce so much of this. It’s quite incredible.
You might see this kind of thing on some websites. It’s what I often see on software sites.
I don’t have an example in this deck, but you might come across something like this: You’ll see many marketing technology companies that say, “We’ll take your data from email, social media, and stores…” What the hell is that?
It’ll list all these places where they pull your data in, and there’ll be tentacles. And then it’ll say, “We’re marketing.io.” Over here, you’ll see even more tentacles, and it spits everything out to different places. I call it the octopus, because there are always like four things it takes in—some “thingy-ding”— and four things it spits out. That’s also gobbledy.
You don’t see this kind of thing in B2C.
This, to me, is the Cheerios version of gobbledy. It's for breakfast success. Humans.
It “redefines hunger management solutions through hyper-round whole grain consumables,
delivered in a concave environment with 99.3 nines of deliciousness.” When “augmented with a bovine-based liquid company,” man, talk to sales.
This is actually a fun exercise, by the way—take any consumer product and turn it into SaaS. The problem here is a lack of positioning, and I feel like positioning is the most neglected, confusing—I don’t know—area of marketing.
I don’t know if any of you studied marketing in school, but I feel like it was the thing you probably skipped over to get to the “fun” stuff, like How do I make emails and ads and stuff?
But everything starts with positioning. Everything you do every day is downstream of positioning. So, what is positioning?
That’s a fair question, since that’s what I’m talking about. It’s three things:
There’s no way to tie what you're saying back to your positioning. But excellent positioning solves all of that. So, David Ogilvy—kind of the father of modern advertising—once said: “Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created.”
He made this great ad around 1970 called How to Create Advertising That Sells. It was an ad for his agency, but it’s also a fantastic guide. You can still find it online. Just Google it. Or Bing it. Whatever. The ad is packed—50 different blurbs, very dense. But the first one redefined how I thought about marketing:"The most important decision we’ve learned is that the effect your advertising has on sales depends more on this decision than any other: How should you position your product?" That opened it all up for me.
Should you position Schweppes Ginger Ale as a soft drink? Or as a mixer? Is Dove soap a product for dry skin? Or a soap that gets your hands clean? Campaign results would depend less on the ad itself than on how the product is positioned. Is Schweppes a ginger ale that your children should drink? Or something you add to your cocktail at the bar?
Everything about your marketing is different depending on where you position yourself. So—you must choose a position. Everything else will flow from that. Whenever you see marketing that’s garbage, I promise you—look upstream: they didn’t do the positioning work.
I want to talk about Warby Parker for a second, because I think they’ve done as good a job as any consumer brand with positioning. I saw a Warby Parker across the street when I walked in today. When they first came out, people talked about how amazing it was: “You can buy glasses for $95! What a deal! And online!” But that wasn’t even the best part.
Warby did two brilliant things.
First, the positioning was incredibly clear. In every interview, the founders talked about how Luxottica owns 90% of the eyewear market. And designer glasses cost $500. That was the story: Everyone else sells $500 glasses—we sell ours for $95. Now, the crazy part? These weren’t $5 glasses. They were still way more expensive than the cheapest pair out there. But they positioned themselves as the better version. Like, “Hey, you’re being ripped off. We won’t do that. They came across as trustworthy.
Like they were exposing a secret: “All those designer glasses you wear? Made by one company. They’re scamming you at $500. We’re not.” That built trust. And yeah, $95 is still expensive compared to what you might find on Amazon, but it feels cheap compared to $500. That was brilliant. And it allowed them to do other things downstream. Like their “Try 5 Frames at Home” program. I think they still do it. You go online, pick five frames—they send them to your house. You try them on, pick one, send all five back, and they ship you the one you want.
It sounds amazing...or like a terrible return policy—you can only choose five, have to send them all back, and then get one sent again. But because of the positioning, they turned that policy into a strength. Like: “Look how customer-friendly we are!” That’s the power of positioning. Okay—that’s positioning. Now let’s look at some copy ideas. Take O’Keeffe’s Working Hands. There was an old British ad for Ronseal wood stain: “Fast-acting wood stain. Dries in 30 minutes.” Tagline: It does what it says on the tin.
Because it literally is a fast-acting wood stain that dries in 30 minutes. That’s effective copy.
Same with O’Keeffe’s Working Hands. There are a lot of hand creams out there. But they looked at the market and said, “We’re going to serve people who work with their hands—people who get dry hands. We’re going to cure that. And we’re going to call the product Working Hands.” Genius. That’s what great positioning does.
For a while, I got obsessed with insurance marketing.
It’s incredibly regulated. And because of all the restrictions, companies couldn’t differentiate their products. So what did they do? They started using mascots. Lizards. Emus. Whatever works. Because you can’t differentiate the policy, but you can choose an animal that best represents your need to protect your car. I know—it’s absurd. But it works.
Then they spend a billion dollars advertising it.
For example, in the 1970s, Allstate tried to position itself as the life insurance company for young men. It was insurance—life insurance for young men. That was the positioning. So they interviewed a bunch of young men, I assume, and those men said things like, “My biggest fear in life is that, God forbid, if I were no longer on this earth, my child would be screwed.” Because it was 1972. His wife wasn’t working. So—don’t blame the messenger. That’s just how it was. (For the record, my mom did go back to work.) Anyway, they went with a straightforward, “it does what it says on the tin” message. Allstate Life Insurance said: If you die, your baby is still babied. And the baby’s like, “Wait—what? What’d you say?”
That was the whole campaign.
It featured a bunch of 30-year-old dads—or probably, if the kid was two, then 24-year-old dads—with their children. And the message was: If this kid dies, you’ll need some leg. And for five bucks, you could leave them $13,000. Good luck with the rest of your life.
Yeah—it sounds rough, but it was effective. They ran it for years. The message was essentially: We’re not saying something’s going to happen, but… for five bucks, he can get $13,000. It worked. It was so on the nose, you should look it up on YouTube. The commercial’s like, “Whoa.” Not exactly enjoyable, but it worked.
All right, next. I like this idea of selling the brownie, not the recipe. But SaaS companies?
They tend to say things like: “We’re the leading wheat starch–based cocoa treat for purpose-built, hunger-focused humans.” This happens a lot in tech companies because they’re usually founded by a technical or product person. And that person really wants to tell you how amazing their technical solution is. The truth is—most people don’t care. But you end up talking about it anyway.
Like, someone writes, “Brownies are delicious,” and then someone else jumps in and says, “Well, yeah, they’re tasty… but do you understand that when baking soda and salt react, they create a chemical lift that makes the brownies moist and chewy?” And then it’s, “So we need to explain that reaction…” And suddenly, that goes in the copy. But 99% of the time? No one cares how it works. (Although, later, I’ll give you an example where they might.)
In general, just talk about what’s great about it. Tell your founder: “That’s amazing—we’ll talk about that somewhere else.”
Numbers are powerful. They’re effective shorthand. Ivory Soap spent 150 years saying it was “99 and 44/100 percent pure.” I remember that. Why? Because they said it for 100 years. Now, 44/100 can be reduced to 11/25. So, why didn’t they just say that? Maybe math hadn’t been invented in 1872? Fraction reduction wasn’t a thing yet? Is “99.44% pure” even that pure? I don’t know. Probably? But it sounds pure. And that’s what matters. They just kept saying it. Repetition worked. There’s always pressure to reinvent—don’t. If you find a number that represents your position, like Ivory did in 1872, keep using it. It becomes shorthand.
You’ve probably seen this: You’re redoing your website, and someone says, “We need metrics! And suddenly the page reads: 50%. 5x. 14%. 66%. 98%.
No one reads that. 14% sounds good. So does 98%. But they can’t both be meaningful. Also, “5x” what? You end up with nonsense like: “2.0”, “600 million”, “Headless 2.0”
What is that?
Pick one number and own it. You can’t be 2.0 and 600 million. Ivory also did something else smart. They said their soap floated, as a symbol of purity. Here’s the dirty secret: most soap floats. But they owned it. You can take any product feature and turn it into something meaningful. There’s a famous Mad Men scene where Don Draper is pitching Lucky Strike cigarettes. They’re struggling to differentiate. And he says, “Your tobacco is toasted.”
Everyone says, “So what? All tobacco is toasted.” And Don goes: “Exactly. Say it anyway. Own it.” Same with Ivory. Other soaps floated, but Ivory made it a symbol of their positioning around purity. And that’s key: the feature only worked because it aligned with their core position.
Let’s look at some of my favorite copy ideas.
1. Turn a negative into a differentiator.
I love this ad from J Skis. They ran a one-star review as an ad.“No standard graphics. Thoughtfully—who designs these things? They’re way too bright. I’m an intermediate skier. I don’t want my skis to look crazy. Until you make regular skis, I’ll be shopping elsewhere.”
Brilliant. For people who do want bold skis, it says: “You’re not this person. You’re in the club.” That’s the power of owning what others might see as negative. It becomes shorthand for your tribe.
2. Own the flaw—Barney Frank edition.
When Barney Frank ran for state rep in the 1970s, people said: “He’s a slob.” He embraced it. His campaign slogan? “Neatness isn’t everything.” The implication? He’s working so hard for you; he doesn’t have time to clean up. And then he went on to serve in Congress for 40 years. It works.
3. Oatly’s bold position.
Oatly had lots of angles: Dairy’s bad. Cows are mistreated. Health. Sustainability. Instead, they said: “You know what? This is oat milk. And it tastes like oats.” Their ad read: “This tastes like shit. Blah blah.”
It’s an actual quote from someone who didn’t like it. And their response was: “Some people just don’t like it. They think it tastes like oats—because it does. If you don’t like oats, that’s okay. Taste is personal. We won’t take it personally.” That’s downstream of positioning. They’re not trying to win everyone. They’re saying: “If you like oats, we’re your people. If not—no hard feelings.” That’s powerful.
4. Listerine: Lean into the pain.
Listerine tastes terrible. For years, their campaign was: “I hate it. But I love it.”
The logic: If it tastes that bad, it must work. They didn’t say, “It tastes bad because it has XYZ ingredients.” They said, “Why else would we sell something this awful… unless it worked?” Genius.
5. Specificity sells—IBM typewriters.
IBM once sold typewriters. They ran ads that specifically spoke to secretaries. It may make us uncomfortable now, but back then, the boss bought the typewriter, not the secretary.
Still, the ad was smart. It listed things like:
Those aren’t flashy features. But to a secretary in the 1960s? That was real pain. Specificity resonates. Don’t say: “Stop wasting time with your HR system.” Say: “Stop manually counting characters to align columns.” That’s where the power is.
6. Wang: Three kinds of companies.
Wang—an early word processor company—had a smart approach. Instead of struggling to narrow down their audience, they just said:“Three kinds of companies need our product:
Simple.Clear. Effective.
7. Volkswagen: Total clarity.
VW had some of the best ads of the ‘60s and ‘70s. One of my favorites? A VW Beetle with the headline: “Lemon.” Underneath, it said: “This car looks great—but we found 65 imperfections. You may not see them. We do. And we fixed them.”
That ad screamed quality and care. They also once ran a full-page spread. Left side: a blank box where you could make your own VW ad.Right side: instructions on how to write one.
“Look at the car. Look harder. Find its advantages. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t shout. Call a spade a spade. Speak to the reader.” That’s still how great marketing gets written.
8. The VW Bus: Know your buyer.
In focus groups, VW learned two things:
Also—let’s be honest—the bus wasn’t pretty. So they leaned in: “Do you have the right kind of wife for it?”
Evocative, personal, quirky. They weren’t trying to sell to everyone. Just the right someone.
9. Branding can happen anywhere.
Every email is an opportunity to express your brand. Example: VI Authority sends a shipping confirmation that says: “Listen up, people—we’ve got an order from our new friend Stephanie!” Thunderous applause, tears of joy, lead packer Zach smiles—and Zach never smiles. “Don’t Stop Believin’” plays from the speakers. That’s a shipping confirmation email. But it’s branding. This is for you—email folks. Every email you send is an order. Excuse me, an order confirmation from the VI Authority. Every email you send should represent your brand. I love this.
I’ll leave you with the last thing Sylvia Plath said: I’m skeptical of people whose God is testing.” And a story from Avis in a 1960s focus group. The idea was two things. First: Do we just say we’re better than Hertz, who was the leader? Or do we say, “Hey, you know what? We’re number two. And when you’re number two, you just try harder.”
And the focus groups hated this. They said, “Why would we rent from number two?”
But the ad agency—back when people listened to ad agencies—said, “You know what? I don’t care. We’re going with this.” And they did. And it stuck. To this day, it’s still around.
And my point for all of you email folks is this: Email marketing and copywriting are as much about belief as they are about testing. There’s a place for testing, of course. But there’s also a place for creativity, for beauty, for excellent writing.
And in a world where we’re all wondering what’s going to happen with generative AI, let me tell you, it couldn’t have come up with any of this. This kind of work will always have a place when it’s rooted in great positioning. That’s it. That’s my email.
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