First, Mr. Tobin, you are not over-simplifying things. Unfortunately, you are more right (no political pun intended) than you or millions of other Americans have noticed, apparently. How else to explain the fact that George Bush served two terms, and President Obama is having to deal with the economic consequences of letting the invisible hand work its magic over the past decade or three? I'll drag up the 'megagtrend' that started with Proposition 13 in California in the 1978 election, which foretold the election of Reagan and has mutated in the most bizarre ways during the disastrous National Congresses between 1995-?, later. Although Congress has no money to spend, there is always enough for a Congressional raise or a new toy for the DoD. There just doesn't seem to be enough money to spend on what the country needs most, a better educated population. And I don't mean more money for the public schools, although they could certainly use it, but more money for public libraries. Yes, public libraries. If it weren't for public libraries, I would be working in a supermarket somewhere in the usa and trying to figure out how to pay for my wife's minor surgery and get little Jimmy a new bicycle for Christmas, as well. Or, I might just be thankful I had a job. But we had a pretty good public library where I grew up, and when I wasn't out committing misdemeanors and other acts of juvenile delinquency, I was in there reading anything that sparked my interest. It was great. I learned so much from the books and magazines and newspapers in that library, that if I were a civic-minded individual, I'd send them a donation. But I'm not, so I won't.
Now, why didn't you tell me something I don't already know? Tell me something new. Simplicity in advertising has been around the entire span of my 49 years, and all I can see that it has done over the years is to make it possible for people with average intelligence and very little knowledge to assume positions of great importance, for which they are wholly unqualified (I'm not referring to President Obama, since he has been in office less than a year, and it's much too early to make a judgment about his tenure in the federal government's highest position, and he's obviously very intelligent). This simplification 'megatrend' that you've identified and mislabeled is very useful knowledge for advertising people and others who manipulate symbols for a living. But it seems the long-term result of this trend has been to render a significant percentage of the population in the usa incapable of finding useful information about matters of great importance, such as who to vote for, how to invest your money, what career to pursue, or a number of other situations that require important decisions be made, yet people don't have the sense, or the time, to get valid and useful information that will help them make good decisions.
The result then is an uncritical mass of consumers, whether the product is popcorn or politicians, who make a decision based on image, feeling, and brand association. Substantive ideas seem to be missing. Decisions based on qualitative factors of taste or quantitative factors of size or appearance have replaced the rigorous thought that is needed to absorb as much information as possible about an important matter and then comparing it with alternatives according to the factors that you value most. Such a comparison requires one to use critical thinking skills because it's so easy and simple to choose something based on our taste or its size or appearance without considering the consequences such a decision might have in 5 years or 10 years.
It appears that the 'simplification' of reasoning has permeated public discourse at all levels, as well. Not just the selection of a leader, but the creation and formation of policy, public and private, governments and corporations. This is really scary because I had assumed that people writing pieces and comments on BNet are fairly intelligent people (and this doesn't refer to your years of formal education; I've got 24 years of formal education, but the skills I learned during that time were how to manipulate people, kiss ass, and spin, none of which were part of the curriculum of my chosen field; I've known how to think critically since I was 13 years old, which often got me in trouble, and why learning the other three skills was so important).
But based on the comments I've read in the BNet section devoted to advertising, I'd say that critical thinking skills don't seem to be such a great priority, although I read a lot of op-ed pieces a few years ago about how important it was for people to have them. Interestingly, I don't remember reading so much about that cognitive technique during the first decade of the 21st century. Hmmm.
So, marketing gurus have figured out that ads, as well as well as public discourse of complex matters, can be reduced to sloganeering. That is very old news. This has been occurring throughout my entire life. But you're writing about business, so what does politics have to do with it? Everything. You don't have one without the other in an advanced civilization, or even in traditional cultures in the Amazon Rain Forest. There is a field of knowledge called political economy that could help explain why the 'megatrend' of simplification is not limited to advertising, or business, or even just the economy, but in fact reaches nearly every public sphere of behavior and is even embedded in our social institutions of politics (to be distinguished from government or law), religion, education, the arts, popular entertainment, among others, at least for consumers of these 'products (however, there is an opposite trend in health care, legal services, financial services, oops, for reasons that are fairly obvious to me).
That's not to say that the usa doesn't still produce some of the finest innovations in commercial and industrial activity in the world and also has an economy that provides greater opportunity for the would-be entrepreneur than any other advanced economy, but at the same time there is a definite lack of critical reasoning (or its analogue as netwealthguy says, 'a dumbing down') among the general population of the US. It's just an indirect assessment, certainly open to debate, since I have no data and haven't even lived in the usa for the past 12 years.
But the fallout from the passage of Proposition 13 in the 1978 California election started a 'megatrend' toward reducing taxes at every level of government (not including the 'social security tax' which continued to rise for those making under 50 or 60K a year). In 1974, for cosmetic purposes, the Business Roundtable was created to put a 'human face' on big business in the usa, and/or to try to figure out how to improve their profits and share prices. Around that same time, 'Conservative' think tanks were created and/or funded, by Richard Mellon Scaife among others, to produce studies that would empirically show the superiority of the private sector in relation to the public sector. Studies conducted in different spheres of human activity, economic or otherwise, were done since the fellows at those think tanks could reduce nearly every form of human interaction to that of a market transaction, in which decisions about the transaction were assumed to be based on complete information about the item of exchange, at least in theory. I wonder if the Libertarians, neo-Liberals, and neo-Conservatives who were employed by those institutions back then imagined that in a little over 20 years prison services and anti-insurgency operations in distant countries would be privatized? Probably didn't matter since they already knew that 'the market' was the superior forum for human interaction, even for public sector activities that had little connection to commerce or industry, as those terms are commonly understood.
Market behavior is much easier to quantify and produce 'empirical evidence' to support one's position, whatever that position happens to be, compared to a study in which humans are thought capable of making decisions based on factors other than economic ones. So, as the commenter above who assumes that a 'sophisticated' audience (why can't he just say 'wealthy' since that's obviously what he means: you never hear anyone say, 'if you're rich, why aren't you smart?' but its opposite is commonly heard, thus my assumption he's referring to one's bank balance and not intelligence quotient) prefers simplified advertising because they are too busy reaping the rewards of selling CDOs to suckers, I would suggest that they spend a little more time outside of their specialized field of knowledge. They might be able to broaden their knowledge and and perhaps avoid disastrous decisions, from the individual level up to the national level, if one were so inclined. Of course, this could put some people in situations where a conflict of interest is involved, in which case they may benefit from such a catastrophe and remain a 'sophisticated' audience, after all. How's that for econimicus reductio ad infinitum?
So, your article is actually very good and very true. And that's what's so sad. Media types have known for years about the power of simplicity when presenting X for a market (an excellent source for a political version of this phenomenon is The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss). So, this isn't even anything new when advertising a person as a product, much less goods and services. One need only scan through Taschen Publishing's The Golden Age of Advertising - The 60s - 'Sears has gone wild!' 'The Private World of Thunderbird' (the car, not the fortified wine), 'Cinzano imported, of course' 'Folk Rock Is A Drag' (Hagstrom Guitars with a photo of Frank Zappa), 'What's got into Tang?' and the list goes on, in which the ads are paragons of simplicity. But one difference I've noticed between then and now. Some of the ads from the 60s actually have fine print taking up about an eighth of the ad space in which information is supplied, voluntarily, and in tiny print, so one can waste more time if desired. And it's written in English rather than industry jargon. In other words, there was at least a little respect shown for those who were literate, but not specialists, and didn't mind reading some copywriter's spin about a new product or service. Those hacks were actual writers rather than bureaucratic technicians whose jobs involve providing words about a product or service because the government says they must do so (please see the reference to health care, legal, and financial services above).
During my infrequent trips to the usa to visit, I had the misfortune of watching a TV commercial for a pharmaceutical product. Besides the hilarity of imagining someone actually reading and understanding all those words at the bottom of the screen, a strange sense of deja vu overcame me. And it was the fact that the physical design of those TV commercials that must put information about their product in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen approximate the physical design of the ads from the 1960s. Most of an ad is filled with the visual message in which the product is shown to attract consumers who might buy the product, while at the same time they provide content for those who might have nothing else to do and decide to read it. And if they had magnifying glasses, they could have read it because it is print. It is not going away in 15 seconds so some celebrity in need of a paycheck can come back on the screen and do whatever it is that must be done to earn that paycheck.
The tiny print is long gone, and unless you have a computer and Internet connection you might not get the chance to read tiny fonts until they are shown again and you happen to be watching TV at that time and also have your magnifying glass in your hand so if it does come back on and you can move your aching body quick enough, you just might be able to read half of it if you're an honor graduate of the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Course. And listening to the voice reading those words, is like hearing the Chipmunks sing Christmas carols after doing a bit too much methamphetamine. It's funny, but it might as well be nonsense, since no one could possibly comprehend what all those words mean when spoken at that speed.
So, life in the usa hasn't gotten any more complex than when I was a kid in the 1960s. But the number of tasks one is expected to complete in X amount of time has increased greatly. Which in effect, makes it feel like life in the usa is more complex, when in reality, you've simply taken the goal of efficiency to its ultimate extreme in most areas of human behavior resulting in a very complex world, not due to increased difficulty of the tasks, but due to the greater number of tasks one is expected to complete in X amount of time. And why do you have to do that? So, you can earn more money, of course, but even more importantly, so you can make a greater contribution to the profitability of your employer. I love the market, don't you? I'm retiring at 49 years old. What a great system.
And thank you Mr. Tobak for the confirmation of my own suspicions about this phenomenon of simplification in today's complex world. But next time, please tell me why people allow this to happen to them because it's a mystery to me. I've done what I wanted to do and when I wanted to do it, starting with nothing after getting a BA in 1981 and an MA in 1990. I never even worked in business. And now I can retire in India, where I've always wanted to live, just because I kept all my savings in Japanese yen over the past 12 years. Now that's simple.
It’s a hot trend and it’s here to stay. Retail marketers at Starbucks, Kraft, and Campbell have discovered that “simple” sells. Products that stress fewer ingredients - food, drinks, cosmetics, even pet food - are outselling rivals, as this USA Today story explains.
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