The Irony: The Over-complication of Communications
Here’s a statement that seems really obvious to me: in order to communicate effectively, you need to be clear about what you’re saying.
If we want potential customers to know what it is that we’re offering them, or what we’d like them to do, they first and foremost need to understand what it is that we’re saying to them.
Simplicity, clarity and succinctness are important, and for a few reasons. Firstly, our audience aren’t going to give us their attention for more than a few seconds - so it has to be something that they can grasp and understand immediately. Secondly, the language needs to be accessible to everybody - we want to appeal to the most potential customers that we can.
Introducing the ironic part…
This is the hypocrisy of the ad industry, especially within the four walls of the office. Marketing lingo is rife, and it it used as a cloak to hide behind. To make the industry feel more intelligent than it is, it’s created a whole language of its own. Great examples of this from when I was entrenched in this everyday is the following - which, yes, is a whole load of letters.
‘EE BB SME B2B DOOH PCA’ - (The title of one of my presentations when I worked on the launch of Everything Everywhere - which provides a handy clue)
= Everything Everywhere BlackBerry Small to Medium Enterprise Business to Business Digital out of Home Post Campaign Analysis.
Some of the phrases that have been hanging around for the last few decades are also fantastically non-sensical. One of my personal favourites; ‘surprise & delight’, always made me think of the customer being really quite shocked by something, but somehow that made them happy. It means something and nothing at the same time. Amazingly, millions of £s and 100s of pages of presentations were dedicated to surprising and delighting our client’s customers.
This has been going on for decades and decades
And there are 100s more of these examples. In fact, my Dad, a marketing expert in his own right - wrote all these down in the best selling The Bullshit-Free Book, which is hilarious, fascinating, and strangely alarming. I guess I have inherited the need to ban this type of crap and reclaim our language.
Hiding behind complicated language isn’t unique to the marketing and ad industry. But, of all the industries, it’s our job to have clarity in our comms. The industry houses some incredibly smart people - there is no doubt about that - but there is also huge intelligence in simplicity. Being able to explain something complicated in laymen’s terms is a very hard thing to do. It takes time and energy to decipher complexity and summarise it into something sharp, simple and unique.
And this is why one of my key values is simplicity.
Simplicity in language, and how to go about getting there. We want as many people to understand us as possible, respecting the fact their their time is precious, and they aren’t going to spend long trying to understand you when there are hundreds of others vying for their attention.
