Getting featuristic

ADVERTISING: Advertainment is the new catch phrase that is hooking viewers to the small screen. And admen insist the formula works.

A laptop ad that talks about how your face can be your password. A car ad which says that the wipers would start working automatically as soon as water is splashed across the windscreen.

A cell phone ad that harps on about how the phone is meant more for music than for communicating. The common thread that binds these ads is the fact that they talk more about the features rather than the product. Has advertising become more feature-led?

"Yes, to a certain extent," says Pratap Suthan, national creative director, Grey, "but it depends on the product category."

For instance, when a cell phone company comes out with an ad these days, it is more or less targeted at people who seek to upgrade their phones.

"So if Nokia is talking about music phones then it will have to entice customers through special features and can't simply say that you can store 200 messages in your phone," says Suthan.

In product driven advertising, however, you tend to see that features are being propped up even more. Says Sagar Mahabaleshwar, group creative head, Ogilvy & Mather, "The Hutch ad with the dog and the kid is a classic example of a story woven well into a feature-based ad."

The ad talks about the network facility of Hutch and still tells the story of how the dog and the kid are inseparable.

Agrees Gullu Sen, vice chairman, Dentsu India, "A car like Skoda cannot talk about the product because its target audience knows what the car is all about. So the ad must communicate on the features plank."

But does feature-driven advertising have any drawbacks? "It all depends on how an ad is handled. One must not forget that at the end of the day, advertising is successful if it leads to increase in sales," adds Mahabaleshwar.

A possible drawback is that sometimes features driven advertising lacks a storyline, as has been a case with some cell phone ads. But then again, it is not to say that all cell phones don't have a story idea in them.

For instance, the Moto Flip ad has the parents of a young lad wondering where he got the money to buy the phone. That conveyed the message "" and pretty effectively!

Coming back to Saif Ali Khan's Lenovo ad, which has him coming home after a long time looking like a yeti. "The ad has a storyline but is totally feature driven and has worked," says Sen.

As Suthan puts it, "Advertising per se is slowly moving towards 'advertainment' and has to be more entertaining rather than product oriented. With technology driving our lives to a major extent, feature driven advertising is here to stay." Any doubts?