Feature-creep in advertising

“Feature creep, creeping featurism or featureitis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software.[1] Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design. Viewed over a longer time period, extra or unnecessary features seem to creep into the system, beyond the initial goals.” via Wikipedia

Let’s assume you’ve got reasonable hand-eye coordination; if I tossed a single tennis ball at you, chances are you would have no trouble catching it. However, if I threw five tennis balls at you at the same time, I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t catch a single one.

And that right there is the trouble with a lot of the advertising we see today. After all the thinking that goes to getting to a single, simple refined idea, we fall into the trap of adding garbage to it.

Stop me if you’ve heard these before:

• “Put the logos of our business partners”
• “Put a starburst; we want the price to stand out”
•  ”Oh, you need to highlight that its only available for a limited time”
•  ”Please make sure you put ALL the product features in bullet points”

And on, and on and on it goes. Until something that used to look like this:

 

 

ends up like this:

 

Go ahead and tell me your ads don’t end up like that unholy mess far too often.

That’s what I’m calling “feature-creep” in advertising. A simple execution gets more and more elaborate for vaguer and vaguer reasons until it’s essentially a specification sheet for the product.

You might as well have just dressed up a few of the powerpoint slides that were shown in the briefing and run those.

And you know why this happens? One, we’re afraid to say no (to clients and bosses) and; two, that thing I wrote about earlier in the week called consensus.

The saddest thing with feature-creep is that trying so hard to be good at so many things inevitably means you end up being crap at everything.

Back to the tennis balls; if your advertising isn’t single-minded (one tennis ball) nobody, but nobody will ever figure out what you were trying to say in the first place.

 

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