Most complex things aren't genuinely complicated — they're just badly translated. The jargon is someone else's shorthand. The data is someone else's spreadsheet. The legal clause is someone else's protection. The product is solving a problem people didn't know they had. The fix isn't simplification. It's finding the one frame, the one analogy, the one gesture that makes the audience think: I already understood that.
Here are seven creative tactics from the Creative Tactics Engine that make the complicated feel completely obvious.
- Translate the jargon into human language
- Make the data feel like something real
- Turn the education into entertainment
- Use a single object to dramatise the contrast
- Use cultural insight to unlock simplicity
- Let the product prove it by doing it
- Tackle the complexity nobody wants to name
1. Translate the Jargon Into Human Language
Take the language that excludes people — and convert it into something they already understand.
The Contract Translator — Reclame Aqui, Grey Brazil, 2022
Reclame Aqui is Brazil's biggest consumer complaints platform. Their audience's core problem: dense legal contracts loaded with hidden risks that most people sign without understanding. Grey Brazil built an AI-powered app using neural networks trained on over 500,000 legal terms — capable of converting contract small print into plain language and flagging hidden risks in real time. The tool rolled out to 800,000 users, with a high satisfaction rate on launch. The brand didn't explain consumer protection. It demonstrated it in the most literal possible way: by doing the translation live, in the user's hands.
mycar Tyre & Auto's Auto-Translate (TBWA, 2023) built a real-time online tool that converted mechanic-speak into plain, often funny human analogies — drawing on Google search data to identify the most confusing automotive terms. CoinFlip's "Normal People Use Crypto" (Quality Meats, 2023) used humour and relatable everyday personas to reframe cryptocurrency from elite-tech territory to something normal people could use on the Olliv platform, successfully repositioning the brand from intimidating to accessible.
