What does it really mean for a brand to take risks? Creative Directors are fond of telling their clients to ‘be brave’, but genuine courage only exists in the face of genuine threat. If you’re not scared, you can’t be brave.  

So what is the real threat to fear? Much as we might like to think advertising has a major impact on the wider world, it doesn’t. Every one of us in this industry should have the words “Real people don’t care” written in six foot high letters on our office wall. But rather than be despondent, consumer apathy should be creatively liberating. 

While we can all think of brands that have got caught up in some negative press - usually fuelled by a slow news day – only a handful have suffered any long term commercial impact from advertising that was “too brave”.  Most ride it out and the chances of reputational damage are reasonably low.  

Our echo chamber will tell us that the reaction to certain ads or brand decisions is seismic, but how often do we stop to ask how real people are viewing the situation? How many people do you know outside the industry who even know about Pepsi’s Kendal Jenner moment in 2017? 

Even looking at the short term impact of that terribly mis-judged campaign, You Gov suggests that brand measures had recovered within a few weeks, and there is little evidence of a collapse in sales of stock price.  

Real reputational damage comes from poor customer experiences and poor business practices, not ‘brave’ advertising gone wrong.  

So perhaps when we say ‘take risks’ or ‘be brave’, what we really mean is ‘do something different to the rest of the category’. Novelty feels inherently risky to the human brain – that’s why real people gravitate to the familiarity of brands in the first place. Innovation in any form, whether product, service or communication, by definition carries a risk of failure. In fact, every business decision is a bet. We can’t perfectly predict the impact of advertising because humans are unpredictable and irrational, and advertising works, as Bob Hoffman said, ‘probabilistically’ -  ”there are no black or white, true or false, yes or no answers". 

There have been several explorations into the issues of attention, engagement and, essentially, boring advertising in the past few years. The 2023 whitepaper The Extraordinary Cost of Dull from System1, Uncensored and eatbigfish, was a brilliant examination of what being boring really costs. It claimed that dullness was the biggest threat facing our industry, pointing out that the impact of a dull ad isn’t damage but waste, saying “it costs more…to get the same business impact with a dull ad as with an interesting one”. 

Our industry has been making dull ads for decades. We look back with rose-tinted glasses at enduring classics, forgetting that for every ‘Guinness Surfer’ there were hundreds of instantly forgettable insurance ads.  But now we have the power to make dull happen on an industrial scale. Much has been debated about whether AI can be truly creative or have original thoughts. That is less important than something unarguable – it makes it much easier and cheaper to produce mountains of bland slop.   

Let’s stop overestimating how much time or energy anyone gives to thinking about the products they buy, and start having a bit more fun with our campaigns. Because when attention and engagement is absolutely critical to survival, as it is for challengers, if you fail to stand out you may as well pack up and go home. 

The only thing riskier than big, bold ads is playing it safe and being completely invisible. Then you really have got a crisis on your hands.