Why do we make simplicity so difficult?

What is the objective of marketing communications?
It’s to sell more of your product, service, or process to your target market. That’s the bottom-line: sell more, profit more. There really is no other purpose. How do you accomplish this? First, you must interrupt your audience (without frustrating them), then tell your story. To keep their attention, and to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, you craft a story that is clear, engaging, and persuasive. If your story is wisely written, and it reaches your target at the right time and in the right place, sales can be made. It's certainly not easy. There are myriad details involved, but at least we know the process required for success. It seems a simple enough equation that we should have it down fairly well by now. After all, this is the 21st century.

My question: How did the state-of-the-art get to its current level of ineffectiveness and chaos?
Why are there so many commercials on television that make us laugh, but afterwards we can’t remember who was selling what? Why do they employ so many high-tech camera tricks that they leave the viewer strained and with a nervous tic? Too much television advertising has no discernable message at all--especially when it’s flying past you at a hundred miles an hour.

Print advertising is seldom any better.
Ads use irrelevant photos and graphics that do nothing to move your story forward. Layouts are hard to follow, and the type is hard to read. If the reader does struggle through a poorly conceived advertisement, the message is often obscure, and response options are missing. (In many cases magazine design has even become a fragmented visual landfill.)

Websites?
I won’t even go there, except to say that a lot of people are spending a lot of money to get an outcome that can only be described as confusing, un-navigable, extravagant, and devoid of useful content.

Marketers should be a lot wiser at this stage of the game.
Our advertising, PR, and other communications should be a lot more effective than they are. We have powerful technological tools, but often employ techno bells and whistles to make noise (visual and audible), not to advance our purpose. Some folks think “creativity” is synonymous with crazy, kitschy, and chaotic--it’s not. Sometimes we think a concept to death, and turn simplicity into something no one understands. We’ve been told by those-in-the-know that today’s consumer is smart, he can’t be fooled, he wants the information necessary to make an intelligent buying decision. Why aren’t we giving it to him? Why do we over-complicate, obfuscate, and play jokes with our marketing dollars? We’re trying way too hard! Creating messages that matter is difficult, but the difficulty is in the simplicity. And simplicity is a hard sell in business, and an even harder sell in marketing.