Katie Reid, Creative Director at Miami-based Founders Agency, spent years watching the same pattern repeat itself. Young talent would join agencies, get bombarded with jargon in their first week, and spend months quietly Googling terms they were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know. Terms like “hero asset,” “key visual,” “treatment,” “deck”—words that veterans toss around without thinking, but leave newcomers feeling lost.
So Reid did what any good creative would do: she solved the problem herself. The Dictionary of Advertising Terms started as a personal project in 2021, built on nights and weekends with help from industry friends. Today, it holds 800+ definitions, all crowd-sourced, all free, all designed to make advertising less intimidating for people just starting.
The site launched quietly but found its audience fast. Students, junior creatives and career-switchers started using it as a reference tool. Reid keeps adding terms, refining definitions, and ensuring the resource stays current. No ads. No paywalls. Just straight answers to the questions people are afraid to ask out loud.
From confusion to crowd-sourced clarity
The problem became impossible to ignore during Reid’s time as a full-time Senior Copywriter, before she moved into her Creative Director role. She’d watch talented people stumble not because they lacked skill, but because they didn’t yet speak the language.
“I would see really smart people come into the industry and just be completely overwhelmed,” Reid explains. The industry loves its shorthand—PPM, GRP, sizzle reel, animatic—and expects everyone to keep up. Reid wanted to build something that made keeping up easier.
Building it the hard way (and the right way)
Reid taught herself to code specifically to build the dictionary. No dev team. No budget. Just late nights learning HTML, CSS and enough backend work to make the site function. She pulled definitions from industry veterans, refined them for clarity and organized everything alphabetically.
The crowd-sourced approach matters because advertising terminology shifts constantly. New platforms create new terms. Old terms get repurposed. Reid keeps the dictionary current by tapping her network for updates and corrections.
What makes a good definition
Reid’s standard for definitions is simple: if someone with zero advertising experience can read it and understand it, it works. No circular definitions. No assuming prior knowledge. Every entry explains the term clearly enough that a student could use it correctly in their next meeting.
Some terms required multiple revisions to get right. Industry veterans often define words in their own jargon, which defeats the purpose. Reid pushes for plain language that strips away the mystique without losing the meaning.
Why it matters beyond the dictionary
The dictionary started as a tool for students, but Reid sees it serving a larger purpose. Advertising has an accessibility problem. The industry skews toward people who can afford unpaid internships, who have connections and who already understand the cultural shorthand. A free resource that demystifies the language levels the playing field, even if just slightly.
Reid keeps the site ad-free and publicly accessible. She updates it regularly, adds new terms as the industry evolves, and responds to user requests. It’s become a side project that feels increasingly essential.
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Dictionary of Advertising Terms
Katie Reid LinkedIn
Founders Agency
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