Listen to a Ted Talk, or a Ned Talk, or a Dead Talk, and someone somewhere will tell you that we are producing a Library of Congress's worth of content with every bat of the eye. YouTubinistas will tell you things like there are a billion hours of video uploaded every second. The world positively drips with stuff. Even on my short trip to work there are half-a-dozen "newsies" hawking papers free and otherwise, all stuffed to the gills with analog pixels.
Likewise, it doesn't take a lot of detective work to discover what my "friends" have had for dinner or to see their snapshots of the Empire State Building or a 737 stuck at LaGuardia. Further when you have a conversation with any consumer of popular culture they will reel off a dozen and a half TV shows that simply cannot be missed.
It's possible that being 55 my brain doesn't function the same way the brain of someone younger does. I simply cannot make room for all the stuff that is out there. I can't care. So, I carry around with me methodologies to handle the exaflood.
For instance, try as I might, I can't really follow the political stances of the various people who have been running to become the next mayor of New York. I rely on "The New York Times," a brand I trust to tell me who to vote for. I can't make sense of the economy, so I rely on Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman to unravel its complexity.
This is an editorial process that to my mind separates the wheat from the chaff. Editing makes manageable an unmanageable world.
And editing is what's missing from most marketing communications from most brands. Their au courant story-lines are baroque, noisy and many-tongued.
Our job is to sort, sift, glean, prune, simplify.
It's not to add.