Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities must emerge

Recently I wrote about the winner of this year’s Marketing Society Brave Brand of the Year prize, The Guardian, and the bravery they showed in stripping out complexity stifling the business, and consolidating around a more singular strategic focus. In having allowed complexity to inhibit growth, they are far from alone. Parallels can be seen in many industries, not least the rapidly converging TV and digital video market.

In this sector, despite continued concerns over brand safety, fake news, and transparency, one reason cited for the continuing success of the big walled gardens is the single-point simplicity they provide advertisers. Scaled, connected marketing platforms deploying data at scale, across all media formats, with paid actions ‘measureable’ and housed inside within a single sales proposition.

Despite their well-publicised woes, advertisers find this simplicity irresistible and continue to commit spend here as a result. The recent reports of Amazon’s plans to build an ad-funded TV model are likely to yield yet another beautifully verticalised and admirably simple loop linking ad exposure across the platform to transaction and vice versa, all activated via a single Amazon-centric customer view.

To be clear, these are intensely complicated organisations. All have countless operations, staff spanning many areas, and deploy huge levels of complexity to solve intricate problems.

But their real success lies in boiling all that down to a user experience and benefit that is as simple for advertisers as it is for their billions of users.

Much like car owners don’t care much for how their car works, advertisers similarly care little for how the algorithms work; just that they do and they conform to exacting industry standards.

The accelerating rush to a multi-screen world is creating intense new levels of complexity for TV/video advertisers and their agencies to grapple with, which is being communicated via increasing amounts of new jargon and three-letter acronyms. Moreover, pre-existent challenges around common measurement are being intensified by the rapid scaling of advanced TV.

This prospect of television combining with the accuracy and control of online video should be an exciting one for all advertisers.

But instead, we as an industry are sleepwalking towards adding to the intense complexity endemic across other parts of our industry.

Complexity which will stifle growth, and if we’re not careful, kill the golden goose. This challenge is the flag around which we must rally. Creating simple, unified, and functional customer access for the management of multiple, complex systems will allow everyone to benefit from this nascent new age of television, but we cannot get here alone. 

Churchill was first to call on the need to derive intense simplicities from intense complexities.

Across our industry we need to heed his lesson, and from brands like The Guardian who are enjoying success by streamlining structures, breaking siloes, and in the case of Amazon, simplifying planning and execution for advertisers.

By Jayesh Rajdev, VP brand solution, Videology