Stop pretending safe work is a safe investment.
Why the Safest Idea Is Often the Most Expensive
I recently listened to a panel discussion on the value of brand and reputation with Lucy Jameson, CEO and co-founder of Uncommon; Julian Payne, CEO of Edelman EMEA; and Aisling Ryan, SVP International Marketing at Celsius. The conversation covered brand valuation, reputation, trust, AI and the familiar struggle to prove commercial impact to people who want certainty from something that doesn’t always fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
But the point that stayed with me was the one organisations still seem most reluctant to confront: the cost of dull.
As Lucy Jameson put it, “If you can get disproportionate fame, it does lead to disproportionate returns.” Yet businesses continue to invest large sums in work designed not to provoke a strong reaction from anyone.
We subject bold ideas to endless scrutiny because their risks are visible. We can imagine the difficult stakeholder conversation, the critical comment or the person who might not like it. What we rarely calculate is the opportunity cost of the safer alternative, even though bland, forgettable communications are far more common than creative catastrophes.
Most campaigns don’t fail because they’re too brave. They fail because they’ve been approved into irrelevance.
The idea is briefed with ambition, then gradually stripped of everything that made it interesting. The language becomes more familiar, the design more conventional, and the point of view less defined, until the work finally reaches its audience having successfully offended nobody and interested nobody either.
Internally, that can look like success. The work was delivered on time, every stakeholder was consulted, and every objection was resolved. Externally, it barely existed.
As Aisling Ryan said during the discussion, “You can waste a lot of money with very little impact if you’re not standing out.” That should be written at the top of every creative brief, because it gets to the heart of an uncomfortable truth: work can be well managed, beautifully produced and completely ineffective.
Safe work doesn’t look expensive until later
The damage caused by underinvesting in brand, or compromising the creative work meant to build it, is rarely immediate. Lucy Jameson pointed out that the consequences might not appear in the first quarter, but “by year two or three” the decline in consideration and sales becomes visible.
The same is true of creative compromise. The damage builds through hundreds of apparently sensible decisions: choosing the safer word, the more predictable image, or the idea that feels comfortably similar to something the organisation has already done.
Eventually, the business wonders why audiences aren’t paying attention, employees aren’t engaged or customers can’t see a meaningful difference between it and its competitors. The response is often to produce more, but higher volumes of forgettable work don’t solve an attention problem. They make it more expensive.
Distinctiveness should feel uncomfortable
Lucy Jameson referenced stage designer Es Devlin and her observation that “if you are not pushing right to the edge of what is possible, then it will have been done before. It will be familiar, and it will be forgettable.”
That doesn’t mean manufacturing controversy or chasing attention at any cost. It means recognising that unfamiliarity creates discomfort, and if an idea feels instantly acceptable to everyone in the room, there’s a reasonable chance it won’t feel particularly interesting to anyone outside it.
Julian Payne made the distinction clearly: organisations should be “brave, but not foolish”. Organisations should consider the risks and understand the potential reaction, but leadership also needs to be prepared for the moment when a distinctive idea creates some heat.
Too often, organisations approve bravery in principle but abandon it as soon as it starts to feel like bravery in practice. They want the attention without the discomfort, the fame without the exposure and the distinctiveness without making a distinctive choice. That version of creativity doesn’t exist.
AI makes distinctiveness more valuable
AI is making average content quicker and cheaper to produce, which means we’re heading towards more copy, imagery, films and campaigns competing for the same finite attention.
Technology can make content abundant. It can’t make attention abundant.
The question isn’t whether organisations can produce more, but whether anything they produce will be worth remembering. If the strategy is to use new technology to create higher volumes of the same familiar work, we’ll simply become more efficient at producing things nobody needs.
We need to redefine creative risk
Creative risk shouldn’t only describe the possibility that someone might dislike the work. It should also describe the possibility that nobody will notice, remember or act on it.
Because the greatest waste in communications isn’t always the brave idea that fails. A bold idea can generate a reaction, create learning and, when it works, deliver disproportionate returns. A safe idea can absorb the same budget, time and talent before disappearing without leaving any meaningful trace.
So, the next time someone asks, “Is this idea too risky?”, we should answer the question, but we should also ask another one: