Which phrases in the PR lexicon are the most tired and overused? Using research provided by PRFilter and design by Landor, we present the most commonly used buzzwords in press releases

PRFilter aggregates press releases from ten wire services and distribution services and pulls them in directly from more than 60 technology and media companies. So it seemed a good place to start when seeking the most common words and terms in the modern press release.

Adam Parker, chief executive of RealWire, the company behind PRFilter, pulled the top 25 overused terms in PR and run them through PRFilter to see which were used most in a 24-hour period. The findings are drawn from over 3,000 press releases published on 23 March 2011.

We then asked branding design agency Landor to present the results in infographic form.

 Carl Halksworth & Joshua Leigh, Landor

“Effective information graphics should be measured, not as a prettification of data, but as a powerful tool for communicating the essence of what is being presented, for making data understandable.

The output of this survey provokes us to draw conclusions (Is this good? Is this bad?) but doesn’t provide us with context. (How does this compare with other types of writing? How does this compare with data from 2001?) To provide a valuable point of view, what we needed was an angle.

The data suggests (the emergence of) a generic language. Words like ‘uniqueness’ are perceived to be valuable – but the act of being unique (in the use of language) is evidently not. Differentiation (with relevance) is one of the key mantras of our industry…

By overlaying the words in the survey in the numbers provided, we’ve generated a ‘white noise effect’ (pictured right). The more generic the language, the less it emerges, the less it penetrates, the more work it asks of us (if we can be bothered to do that work). We’ve provided an information graphic not as a clever dissection of the data but as a cautionary tale.”