Clients are becoming more and more adept at deconstructing this new digital jargon and working out whether theirs is an agency full of digital hotshots or simply hot air. Take the recent research into adland's digital credentials, conducted by the Haystack Group. If Haystack's findings are anything to go by, agencies might boast about their "micro-targeting models" and understanding "avatar economics", but advertisers have them sussed.

Only 4 per cent of clients are convinced that, beneath the jargon, their advertising agencies are really on top of digital marketing. That's a pretty damning statistic when you consider that more than two-thirds of those same clients also said that digital communications are increasingly playing a key role in their marketing activity.

The agencies that know what they're doing in this space will get on and let their work speak for itself. The rest will carry on fiddling with their corporate mantras and spending more effort on looking the business than doing the business. And clients, as Haystack suggests, will keep polishing their bullshit detectors.