On the Campaign couch with JB [alternate version]

My initials are J.B. and for no other reason I've decide to answer the questions set to Jeremy Bullmore in this weeks Campaign. All very tongue in cheek you understand – in reality my ego is the size of a gnat's cock. I'll save you from the recreation of Jeremy's head shot. My god awful face resting on interlocking hands'd most probably be vomit inducing.

Right...

What's your favorite cliché or piece of advertising and marketing jargon?
Something our CD always uses is 'the it'. Hard to describe what 'the it' is. I don't really know. It's a term he uses to encourage you to distil an entire campaign idea into one main, well, thing. Inspecific, yet I vaguely follow the logic. "That's nice lads... but what's 'the IT'?".

Our Head of Art insisted on re-proofing our work for entry to awards - things like making the headlines bigger, body copy shorter, logos smaller, and deleting legal flyshit. My Art Director went along with it, but I'm worried in case we win an award and the clients spot the difference - will they?
I'd say to do that is a bit sneaky. I see both sides of this one, obviously there is a need to get the best out of a good idea. Based soley on my own experience I'm aware it's fairly hard to voice such concerns as it seems the HoA and your AD think it'll help your chances, so by default you're going against that, but surely it's gotta be entered how it ran.
So in short, I agree with the main JB.
Only thing is if you do enter yours 'as is' you'll no doubt lose to a re-proofed ad!

Recently, the Institute of Sales Promotion renamed itself as the Institute of Promotional Marketing, which made me wonder. is the latter tautological when the former is not?
Ok, so I had to Google 'tautological', I'm clearly a simpleton. But now that I understand the question I'd have to say it's highly amusing when a whole, often muli-million pound, rebranding/naming process culminates in an completely negligable difference. If you're gonna do it go whole hog - do a Marathon to Snikers, Opal Fruits to Starburst, Prince to that symbol thing.

Our agency is very hot on social media and we employ a lot of freelancers so when I go for a walk about the office I see lots of people with headphones on staring at Facebook, LinkedIn and other similar websites. How do I know whether or not they're doing any work?
Whoah. If you work under a similar stuffy type boss strolling about and peering over your shoulder there's loads of sites that re-skin the unmistakable designs of Facebook, Twitter et cetera. My boss recently moved office to one right behind my desk, with his desk looking directly over my shoulder. At first I was a bit concerned he'd finally realise I only do roughly 37 minutes work each day but I still dwell on the aforementioned sites. It did make me quell the amount of time I spent on Zootube though.

Right, there you go. Next week I'll probably rip off Campaign's 'Water-cooloer monitor'.