Ramsey Naja is chief creative officer at JWT MEA
‘Less is more’ is a lovely little expression – or a piece of advice, if you want – that sits at the heart of the design business and, well, Scandinavia. You see, unlike our Arab tradition of over-wrought, complex, multi-faceted, multi-coloured, multi-everything approach to all things decorative, our northern friends tend to lean towards the minimalist. This might be a reflection of the view, up there in the glacial wilderness, but it so happens that those guys have been identified as the happiest on the planet.
Personally, I believe that it is no coincidence. Simplicity and happiness are the kind of couple that has ‘and they lived happily ever after’ written all over them. They are the George and Amal of this world, the yin and yang and the burger and fries. But it all hinges on Mr Simplicity, because that’s where it starts. And nowhere is this truer than in our industry: it is the heart and soul of any great piece of work, because it is the biggest prerequisite of a great idea.
It’s therefore odd, when you take all this into consideration, that the way we are structured remains closer to the Arab boudoir than the Scandinavian living room. Here is an increasingly complex business, made even more complicated by the onset of a perfect storm of consumer unpredictability, moving goalposts and corporate fear; a business where happiness is either ephemeral or a thing of the distant, Mad Men era past. So it is baffling that, despite all warnings, doomsday scenarios and the deafening litany of change merchants, we seem to have done everything except simplification.
Wherever you look, you see lumbering ad leviathans stuck in the old factory mindset, dragging behind them wagons of overheads, hunched under additional layers and stumbling over obstacles of their own making. We acquire agile businesses and slow them down instead of adopting their agility. We add guidelines when we should be throwing away the rule book and we draw intricate timelines instead of short-circuiting them. At a time when we should be restructuring with elasticity as our guiding principle, ‘more is better’ seems to be our raison d’être.