Seductive Simplicity
Complexity is common, simplicity is rare.
Complexity is facile, simplicity takes energy.
Complexity is, oddly enough, the often easier path. Simplicity takes hard work.
When Mark Twain, or maybe it was Churchill, Franklin, Shaw or Blaise Pascal, famously penned an apology for not “having the time to write a shorter letter,” he, she, or they made a damned good point.
One that directly applies to the marketing world which, if you’re reading this, we likely share.
We accept complexity as an unavoidable condition that, by necessity, hangs out like a malignant cloud of confusion at the intersection of customers, brands, markets, data, channels of communication, and technology. And, because we accept it as inevitable, we pay a steep price.
Fun fact: the same advertising spend that would have given you the equivalent of 100% of the TV viewing audience in 1990 would have netted you a whoopie-cushion 5% last year. All thanks to the fragmented convolution of the contemporary media environment.
Oh yeah, and that’s pre-pandemic. Both Nielsen and McKinsey glowingly note that we’ve managed to leap a decade’s worth of digital tall buildings since the last time you felt safe pulling up a bar stool munching on the free peanuts.
Lucky us because the result is, you guessed it, even more of a Gordian Knot of communications complexity to parse, navigate, and predict.
Every year the Visual Capitalist updates a charmer of an infographic that details “what happens in an internet minute” (www.visualcapitalist.com/every-minute-internet-2020/). A quick skim not only gives you a mind-numbing wealth of data-driven trivia—in 2020, Netflix users streamed 404,444 hours of video every 60 seconds, yikes!—but, taken at the “forest, not trees” level, gives you a sense of how complex our world has become.
But what if there were a different road to follow, one that leveraged the seductive value of simplicity in cutting through the clutter, appealing to attention-deficit audiences, building brands, and boosting sales?
What if we paid closer attention to Einstein’s eloquent point that “if you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough”?
That’s what this blog is about. And unlike some other great marketing and advertising commentaries that we follow—AdAged (http://adaged.blogspot.com), Round 17 (http://roundseventeen.blogspot.com) the Ad Contrarian (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com), and Mike Palma’s always interesting insights into the world of creative advertising (https://mikepalma.wordpress.com) —that’s going to be our sole focus.
If you’re interested in always practical and sometimes pungent conversation that focuses on the value of simplicity in the persuasive arts, then please follow and subscribe.
Simple, no?