Depending on which source you distrust least, right now anywhere between 13% (Kaiser Family Foundation) and 22% (CBS News Poll) of US adults are “no, never” on getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Based on the epidemiologists’ estimate that we need between 75% and 85% of our neighbors inoculated to achieve community immunity, we’re either right on the bubble of beating this thing, or entirely screwed for another winter surge cycle.

Somehow, you knew it would come to this. I mean, how could someone who prides his own damn self on a reasonable grasp of decomplexification (hey, spellcheck says it’s a real word) not cast a green-eyed glance at William of Ockham—the 12th century Franciscan friar credited with the observation that the simplest solution to any problem is usually the right one.

Lately, The Reductionist has been getting a fair amount of worried inquiries from clients—aka, the sources of all known heat and light in the universe—about impending changes in precision digital marketing. In particular, there seems to be a high degree of angst about Google’s widely bruited intent to crumble cookies, implode pixels, and otherwise obliteratively assassinate the most common ways we use to data-stalk consumers across every platform and screen. Oh, sorry. Meant to say, “target.”

Let’s face it: we human beings are entirely addicted to the simplicity of cause and effect; probably too much so for our own good.

Personally, I tend to think it’s an evolutionary hangover that began as a survival strategy — “if toothy predator, then loss of limb.” One that’s evolved over eons to provoke everything from the world’s grand cosmologies, to Bach’s recursively eloquent cantatas, to advertising’s current one-sided and ill-fated love affair with “predictive” data. 

If we’re anywhere in the same less-than-blissful pandemic pod, you’ve been seeing a big uptick in your LinkedIn connection requests of late. Call it the “social two-step” or, maybe better, the “LI lure,” but the general grift includes an initial invitation followed by a humble and heartwarming solicitation to begin a highly profitable “partnership.”

Here’s the number to fix in your mind with all the sticking power of a Gorilla Glue hairdo: 231,994,000.

As you, brilliantly perceptive reader, will have brilliantly perceived, that figure represents about 70 percent of 331+ million—the current US population. Epidemiologically speaking, it’s also the number of our fellow country persons who need to be made COVID-safe for RTN‚ the return to normal.

While advertising tactics that influence people without their conscious awareness (NAKED PEOPLE IN THE ICE CUBES!) have been illegal in the US and Europe since 1958, you’d never know it from the internet. In fact, kick around even the harmless and non-controversial corners of the web, like Quora (BROWSE WITH GOOGLE CHROME!), and you’ll believe subliminal is alive, well, and making you buy stuff you don’t want (SHOP AMAZON PRIME!) every nanosecond of the day.

In The Ghost Writer, his brilliantly wry had-the-Pulitzer-only-to-have-it-cruelly-yanked-away novel, Phillip Roth evokes the Sisyphean writer’s burden in its most elegiac terms. Speaking through the lips of a fictional literary lion, reportedly modeled after either Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, the then-younger Mr. Roth recounts his shpilkes thusly:

It’s a snow globe day here in Manhattan. Magic is drifting from the sky, coating Columbus Circle with white frosting and it’s 100% pure Currier & Ives in Central Park. Looking out the window it could as easily be a century past, the world roaring back from a previous pandemic; or a century hence. Squint your eyes through the flakes and time blurs.

After a busy week of post Lombardi Trophy commentary, the world isn’t exactly thirsting for more opinions. Perfect, say we, for two updates:

How can marketers utilize simplicity? This advice is not like descending from Mt. Reductionist armed with stone tablets full of “thou shalt and shalt nots.” In fact, giving this topic any kind of convoluted canonical spin would be dead wrong since the first rule of any decent how-to—exception made for every home assembly guide ever written—is clarity.

Lately, those of us who hang our boots on the fence at the OK-To-Peel-The-Onion Corral have been waxing on and on about the essential value of less versus more in marketing and advertising. To which you might think, “I’ll get right on that, just as soon as I untangle the double-triple-overhand-hitch-half-full-Gordian-knot that’s item 1 of the 200 on today’s to-do list…Maybe tomorrow.”

If 2020 was, at its oozing, ill-mannered, and sulphureous heart, way too complicated, we’re voting with both words and deeds for a 2021 that’s gets its simplicity act together. To that end, our new-as-of-last-Wednesday-New-Year’s resolution is to make as many contributions to the cause of clarity as we can.

As part of our ongoing public service campaign to ensure that 2021 is nothing like the Year-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named,