The advertising industry has always been fond of its terminology, which it tends to adopt with the enthusiasm of a convert and then repeat until the original meaning has been buffed away like the nose on a bronze statue in a busy train station.

So it is perhaps useful, from time to time, to ask where these phrases actually came from — a question that Maarten Albarda, a columnist for MediaPost, set out to answer this week after his mind wandered during a meeting. (One suspects this happens more often than presenters would like to know.)

The "paid, earned, owned" framework, which has become as mandatory in media presentations as the agency logo on the final slide, turns out to have originated with Daniel Goodall, a digital marketing planner at Nokia. Mr. Goodall published the framework on his blog on March 2, 2009, and by December of that year, Forrester had formalized it in a report, which is typically how an internal planning tool becomes an industry religion.

The famous lament about wasted advertising dollars — "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" — is attributed variously to John Wanamaker and Lord Leverhulme, depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be standing. Mr. Albarda reports that neither man's archives contain any evidence he actually said it, which may be fitting for an industry that has always been more comfortable with a good story than with documentation.

Perhaps the most revealing phrase belongs to Irwin Gotlieb, the former chairman of GroupM, WPP's media buying operation, who is credited with the observation "In confusion lies margin." Mr. Gotlieb was apparently paraphrasing a 1985 coinage by the venture capitalist Dave Berkus: "Where there's mystery, there's margin."

That the head of the world's largest media buying organization would find this sentiment worth repeating is, one supposes, not the sort of thing that requires a eureka moment to understand.

Original story published in MediaPost: "A Pointless History Of Marketing Terminology"