George Orwell famously said “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” A suitably simple quote on simplicity.
The heart of Orwell’s statement is a guiding principle in early client engagements at Bear Video. We regularly steer firms away from overcomplicating their video marketing — particularly in regulated industries, where the temptation to over-explain is strong.
Whether in methodology, messaging, or medium, there’s a persistent drift toward unnecessary complexity that makes the work harder than it needs to be.
Simplicity is Hard
Billy Broas’s book Simple Marketing for Smart People explores how subject matter experts create unnecessary complexity simply because they can. He illustrates this through the beer industry: a novice orders “a beer,” while an expert navigates thousands of categories — IPAs, Stouts, Pilsners, and beyond.
Bear Video works with precisely these kinds of professionals. Highly knowledgeable people in healthcare, veterinary care, finance, and technology who naturally gravitate toward detailed analysis. But as Broas notes, the expertise mindset differs substantially from effective marketing thinking — especially when video’s creative possibilities are involved.
The Paradox
Our diagnostic and prescriptive phases involve significant work helping clients maintain simplicity. Avoiding over-production. Resisting the temptation to communicate everything simultaneously.
The paradox, though, is that genuine simplicity demands comprehensive understanding of the underlying complexity before you can distil it into basic form. You can’t simplify what you haven’t first fully grasped.
Steve Jobs put it well: “Simple can be harder than complex… it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
What This Means in Practice
We start with complexity. Our diagnostic process means we thoroughly understand a client’s products, services, and regulatory context before a camera rolls. The subsequent goal is reducing concepts to their simplest, sharpest expression.
The result is video content that is easier to understand, faster to approve, and more effective in the market — not despite the complexity of the subject matter, but because we went through it properly first.