Wile growing up, I could always relate to Pokemon’s Ash Ketchum so well because I grew up in a small town too. Ash is a simple boy with aspirations of winning the Pokémon league, who does stupid stuff along the way. I could always identify with that. I like people who have obvious flaws, because it gives personality. And I like simple things: books that are easy to read, wine that is easy to appreciate, and ideas that don’t need five graphics and two academic theories to be explained.

I never went to university, so maybe the twenty-something me is just too dumb to understand. But I’m annoyed by people in advertising who make things more complicated than they are.

Sure, many inventions were the result of complicated theories, such as transistors, vaccines and the Gutenberg press. But communication itself is really simple. Here’s Dave Trott’s three-step explanation: impact, communicate, persuasion, while adding: “This may feel uncomfortably simple for you.” That is not to say advertising isn’t hard hard, as Lucian Trestler points out, or as Andy Whitlock says: “It’s easy to deliver a business strategy in 300 slides. It’s really hard to make a 3-slide version, but that should be valued more.”

I’m a simple guy and I like simple things. And I don’t mean mint-flavoured parking tickets or digital billboards that spot aircrafts flying overhead. Those are just contrived pieces of fake creativity that solve nothing and answer only to the question “How can we win an advertising award?”