The NYT has a piece about title-mania and what it might mean:

“group idea management director”? / “chief transformation officer” / “marketing evangelist” / “chief consumer officer” / “vice president for stakeholder relations” (...) Experts say the unconventional titles are intended to signal a realization by an advertiser or agency that in a rapidly changing marketing and media landscape, the time for the tried and true has come and gone. The titles serve the same purpose, in other words, as an agency announcing that it is opening a division specializing in e-mail marketing, getting into the field of branded entertainment or starting a blog. “The agency is saying: ‘We are contemporary. We get it,’ ” said Susan Friedman (...) The dot-com bust deflated some of the zest for nontraditional titles, but the ferment in the new-media field in the last year or two seems to have revived it.

The title trend is gaining popularity at the same time as the practice of giving agencies unusual names, to let potential clients know they take an unconventional approach to advertising. Some examples include Amalgamated, Anomaly, Droga5, Mother, Naked, Nitro, StrawberryFrog, Taxi and Zig.

“It’s a screening device,”

Why do I blog this? I am not that into unconventional titles (even thought I don't what can be my title judging my fuzzy hats) but I find the trend intriguing; it might reveal some more serious phenomenon.