Built by committee

“Have I ever explained the saying…” my boss begins the conversation in his Southern drawl.

It’s a very typical start to a conversation, for us, honestly. He’s always throwing around metaphors or sayings and I have rarely heard of any of them.

“…a camel is a horse built by committee?”

I immediately laugh, not because I understand it yet, but because this is one of his more absurd sounding ones.

“You have not,” I respond.

“Wow,” he says. “I am shocked. I feel like I reference this one often. Maybe I’ve called things camels before and you’ve just had no idea why.”

(This reality is very, very probable.)

“Anyways. It’s the idea that a camel started off as a horse. And then one person said okay well what if it could walk really far. And the other person said let’s make it even more efficient. And then the other person said what if it could carry an insane amount of weight. And all of a sudden… you’ve got a camel. It does the job, but man, is it ugly.”

“Are camels really ugly?”

“Yes.” Is his answer. Zero hesitation.

In our context, we were talking about a piece of client work that started out really nice, and slowly has been morphing into something unrecognizable. They can’t pick a visual priority. Which, in advertising, is dangerous territory. We have an image. A headline. A CTA driving them to the conference booth. A sub-headline. A url that they keep wanting to make ‘a little bigger’. A logo. A block of our references and definitions. We’ve pushed back a little, but there are only so many times that you can say ‘are you sure’ to the hand that feeds you.

I don’t know if I think camels are super ugly… but this ad certainly used to be prettier. That’s often what happens when something is built by committee.