Use language that's appropriate to your audience
As the new millennium develops, we see that the language our friends in the United States speak bears less and less of a resemblance to, for those that care enough, English. I’m not blaming the Americans for this; they are still a ‘new’ country in the grand scheme of things, and one of their national traits is to push boundaries and be unafraid to experiment. What I do take exception to is elements of the British advertising industry force-feeding this alternative language to us and trying to pass it off as normal.
Granted, the vast majority of the ‘creative’ industry exists in the urban bubble of our Capital – presumably the same in other countries – and therefore output will obviously have an urban slant to it. Clearly then, the adoption of American English must be an urban phenomenon. This is not always appropriate if you want to sell to English people who don’t live in the city. For example, there are 30 possible uses of the word ‘way’ in my well-thumbed and now falling to bits dictionary, and the 30th is an informal use, thus ‘way over there’. Quite how this can morph into ‘way cool’, only the Americans can tell us. Yet it is becoming commonplace. Didn’t we used to say ‘very’? Technology clearly has too many syllables for us and is now simply referred to as ‘tech’.
This may sound as if an old fuddy-duddy is trying, Canute-like, to hold back the tide of inevitability and perhaps ought to ‘get with it’ (1960’s) or ‘go for it’ a bit more (1990’s), but there is a more serious issue here. If you are trying to communicate – or sell to – a demographic who actually cares about their own language, you may well struggle to get their attention if you address them in an unfamiliar tongue.