Steal These Ideas!: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 9

LESS IS MORE—NOW MORE THAN EVER

Americans for the most part are overcommunicated at every turn. Every company wants consumers to see their TV ads, spend time on their web site, and look at and open an endless stream of e-mails or mobile alerts. And fellow consumers are messaging and texting and on-the-go calling each other billions of times a day. Information overload used to be an academic term college professors used to describe the future. We are living in that future.

A long time ago in an ad agency that knew what it was doing, there was a resident genius who said every human who has lived cannot compute more than three features at one time. The agency was Ted Bates, and the “genius” was Rosser Reeves. Even perhaps God got it wrong ...