Un-Complicationizationability.

I read something just now in The Wall Street Journal which was as "zaggy" as BBH's Black Sheep for Levi's. 

It's why I read the Journal, in fact. Despite their oligarchic proclivities--as often as not, the Journal gives you a point of view that you don't find anywhere else. 

I read one of those just now--from a WSJ newsletter I read called "WSJ Pro Sustainable Business reports." In it, I read about Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit, director of engineering at Facebook and the founder of a reforestation company called Terraformation.

In trying to combat the fact of catastrophic climate change, many companies are turning to tech. Tech is where we usually turn when we have a problem. But Yong is looking at our climate problem differently.

He points out, "Silicon Valley is great at marketing, and they make it sound like new tech is awesome, but really no one hates technology more than a technologist because in the lab when it is half formed it breaks all the time. So you want a very low-tech, reliable solution,” he said.

My goodness. 

Substitute Madison Avenue for Silicon Valley, I thunk to myself, and you might have yourself a blog post.

Wong continues, "I’ve worked on a lot of large-scale tech and there’s this subtle rule you learn: To solve a big problem, you want as little tech as possible. When it comes to fixing the climate, you want to keep it simple."

In other words, Wong recommends not some Quantum-derived, AI-powered pixelized miracle. He wants to defeat climate change by planting, around the world, one-trillion trees.

Again, a simple, easy-to-understand solution to a complex problem.

To my cataracted-eyes, it seems that many in the advertising business follow those leaders in the tech industry. 

Every problem must have a technology solution.

Every problem must have a technology solution.

The more dire the problem, the more wired the solution.

So, if people stop looking at your ads, buy another data company. Find another way to infiltrate messaging into a viewer's neural network, use sonic technology and algorithms that find the optimal language to break through to viewers who no longer look up. Primarily because our industry has spend 75 years boring the dirndls off of people.

I suppose from a shareholder-value POV, it's a lot easier to rationalize the purchase of another data company, or tracking company, or something company than it is to assert something like "people like to laugh. So, we're recommending doing funny ads that people like to watch." Or telling people something they don't already know. Or expressing genuine empathy. Or giving people useful information that helps their lives. Or saying what it is you sell and why it's different. Or apologizing when you screw up.

There's nothing high-tech about those actions that will bump the stock-price. And, after all, we know every problem must have a technology solution. It just must. 

Tech solutions return on investment. Kindness, treating people with respect and as if they're important, doesn't. Worse, they're old-fashion and tech might win you an award.

Planting trees to combat climate change is about as low tech as it gets. My guess is that 12,000 years ago turning the dawn of agriculture people often planted a tree if they cut one down. It's as logical as a Clovis point.

But, still, tech is so much sexier.

So much more attracting-investor-y.

So much more "let's go to Davos and create three-d models about the future."

Same as in advertising.

Using data is so much more au courant than using your heart and your brain.

Why do something that works--that's always worked--when you can do something ornate and press-release-y?

By the way, Terraformation marked its fifth anniversary as a company. It has just launched a new project in the Congo Basin, Cameroon, with plans to restore almost 20,000 football-fields of degraded rainforest, removing more than 4 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. 

That's equivalent to NOT burning 4 billion tons of coal, to not using half a billion gallons of gasoline, to not heating 500,000 homes, or not charging 340-billion cellphones.

It's not enough to stop what humankind started. We need more.

Just as one funny spot won't get people to watch TV again and pay some attention to commercials. We need more.

But it's something.