The Airplane movies bombarded the audience with jokes and sight gags of varying quality on the assumption that if one didn’t reach a viewer, the next one might...or the one after that. That approach may work in a movie, but it doesn’t work well in technology marketing. Nevertheless, some marketers still use it.

They pack an ad, brochure, or whitepaper with selling points, hoping that if one doesn’t reach the reader some of the others might. When the subject is a high-tech product, that can be a lot of material. The reason it works in a movie is that audience members have paid their admission and have cleared their calendars for the next couple of hours. They can wait a few minutes for the next laugh.

Readers of marketing materials can put them down any time their attention wanders. Or they may skim. Either way, they are deleting some of your material, and it may not be the piece you’d be most willing to give up. If there’s cutting to be done, you (or your writer) should be the one to do it. It strengthens the piece and helps give it structure. If you take the time to identify the purpose of the piece and how it will fit into your sales process, you shouldn’t have much trouble identifying the most important points.