We are inundated with advertising messages from the time we wake to the time we go to bed. Some of these messages are welcomed and some are a source of irritation. The difference between noise and communication boils down to relevance, and relevance is a function of how advertisers deliver three basic ingredients: substance, style, and technique.

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Big companies care about brands, small companies don’t, and that is a shame because any company that has aspirations of ever getting big, better figure out how to build and manage their brand. You can get sucked into all the hype about the latest social networking fad and waste all your time and money following this week’s Internet wunderkind or you can get your head out of your digital butt and build a business from the brand up.

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More money is wasted on advertising then any other business function. That is not to say businesses shouldn’t advertise but rather people should understand how advertising works. There are many ways to characterize ads but for our purposes let’s make it simple and separate advertising into two distinct approaches: saturation and emotional.

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Sometimes business people make things harder than they have to be, take marketing for instance. Marketing is pretty simple when you get right down to it: discover the emotional value inherent in what you sell and present it in a memorable manner that differentiates you from the competition. What can be so hard? Of course we all know the devil is in the details, and implementation is the sharp end of his pitchfork.

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Here’s a question for you? What do you need to be successful? What will it take for you to climb out of that deep, dark, dungeon of despair and mediocrity? What are you willing to do to be the best you can be?

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Many years ago I had a professor whose favorite saying was, “It’s the simple things that elude people.” It’s not a new idea of course, but it is an important one, often associated with 14th century English logician William of Ockham. Occam’s razor as it is commonly referred to states that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” which in pop culture terms has been interpreted as meaning ‘the simplest solution is most often the best.’ It is also pretty clear that old Ockham would have been a big believer in what we now call the ‘Paradox of Choice’ as coined by Barry Schwartz in his book by the same name. The Paradox of Choice basically describes how customers intent on buying from you, don’t, because they are confused with too many options; to paraphrase Ockham, features or options must not be multiplied beyond what it takes to get an order.’ In fact, it is pretty well understood by those of us who actually study how to communicate a marketing message that a focus on an emotional benefit is what works, not another new feature.

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You’ve got this hot new product that you’re sure will take the market by storm, all you have to do is get the word out, and you know the best way to make the biggest, most memorable impact is with a knock-your-socks-off viral video campaign published on your website and repurposed on YouTube.

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If you were to put together a list of irritating and annoying everyday occurrences, those dinnertime phone calls about getting your ducts cleaned or your windows and doors replaced would be high on the list, followed closely by email spam, and television commercials that seem to be twice as loud as the program and repeated ‘ad infinitum.’

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Now that just about everybody is a believer in Web video, it’s time to figure out just how to use it effectively as a marketing communication tool. Oh sure, there are a few diehard holdouts filling their sites with thousands of words of densely congealed text in a vain attempt to attract ‘Mr. GoodSearch;’ and let’s all encourage them to continue, especially our competitors, because as they stick to yesterday’s marketing tactics, we can capture market share by communicating using techniques that actually lead to more audience engagement, more memory retention, and more sales leads.

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Before I decided on the title for this article I wrote down a list of options: how to engage an audience, how to affect change, and how to alter perceptions and change attitudes. All of which are valid, and all of which are important to you as a business owner or marketing manager.

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