If you’ve worked in advertising for any amount of time, you’ll know the language. Nobody has ideas, they “ideate”. Nobody talks later, they “circle back offline”. And a simple “let’s brainstorm” somehow turns into “we need to leverage synergistic solutions for optimal customer engagement.”
So I built a silly little tool to make fun of it: the Ad Agency Jargon Translator. You type in plain English, and it gives you back proper agency speak. The kind that makes everyone in the room nod along, while nobody is quite sure what was just said.
How does it work?
You type in a sentence, and it gets sent to an AI model (Mistral, through OpenRouter) with a prompt telling it to go as over the top as it possibly can. Here are a few of my favourites so far:
- “Let’s think of some new ideas” becomes “Moving forward, we should leverage disruptive ideation to optimise our value proposition”
- “We need to discuss the budget” becomes “At the end of the day, we need to deep-dive into investment allocation for scalable growth potential”
- “The client didn’t like it” becomes “The stakeholder feedback indicates we need to pivot our creative execution to better align with their brand vision”
Writing the prompt was the fun bit
I didn’t want it to just sprinkle in a few buzzwords. I wanted it to go all in. So the prompt tells the model to:
- Use as much jargon as it can, without losing the meaning
- Throw in classics like “moving forward”, “at the end of the day” and “circle back”
- Turn simple words into long, complicated ones
- Keep the original message, but make it sound far more important than it is
Claude Code did the design
I built the whole thing with Claude Code. I gave it a few reference images from Pinterest (clean, modern, soft gradients, professional but a bit playful) and asked it to bring in some Google Fonts. It turned that little mood board into a design that actually hangs together. Type, spacing, colours, the lot. I was genuinely surprised.
There are also some example phrases to get you started, and a disclaimer at the bottom: “Prolonged exposure to agency jargon may cause involuntary eye-rolling and the urge to ‘circle back offline.’”
What’s it built with?
- Next.js 15
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS v4
- OpenRouter, with a free Mistral model
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting
It took a couple of hours to build and get live, and it costs me nothing to run. Cloudflare Pages is free, and so is the Mistral model on OpenRouter. There’s some basic rate limiting so nobody can hammer the API, but for normal use it’s free and unlimited.
Give it a go
Try it out at ad-jargon.pages.dev. The code is on GitHub, so feel free to fork it and make one for your own industry.
Tweet me @hashir with the worst translation you get. And remember, if you need to ideate around any optimisation opportunities, let’s circle back offline.