Your Competitive Advantage Might Just Be Having a Spine

There’s a familiar sentence in marketing.

“We need stronger creative.”

Okay.

So we make stronger creative.

Something sharper.

Funnier.

Stranger.

More distinctive.

The kind of idea that might actually interrupt someone’s day.

We present it.

Silence.

Then:

“Could we see something a little safer?”

Right.

We make that.

“Love it.”

Three months later:

“We need stronger creative.”

Ah.

I think we’ve found the problem.

Your Creative Team Probably Has Better Ideas

This might be uncomfortable.

But if you employ good creative people, there is a fairly strong chance they already have ideas more interesting than the work you're currently publishing.

They just don't show them to you anymore.

Because they've learned.

They know which ideas survive.

They know which jokes will get removed.

Which creators Brand won't approve.

Which concepts will make Legal sweat.

Which executions will trigger seven rounds of feedback.

Which idea the CEO will call “a little out there.”

So eventually they stop wasting everyone’s time.

They start presenting ideas they think you'll buy.

Not necessarily the best ideas.

The most approvable ideas.

Congratulations.

Your approval process has successfully trained your creative department.

“We Want You to Push Us”

Beautiful.

Agencies hear this a lot.

“We want you to challenge us.”

Love it.

“We need a partner who pushes our thinking.”

Absolutely.

“Don't just give us what we ask for.”

Couldn't agree more.

So we push.

“No.”

We challenge.

“Not like that.”

We bring something nobody expected.

“Could we see an option closer to the brief?”

Sure.

Three rounds later, we've arrived precisely where everyone started.

Then comes the feedback:

“We just don't feel like the agency is pushing us enough.”

At this point, somebody deserves a small lie-down.

Creativity Is Not the Scarce Resource

Everyone talks about creativity like it's some mystical substance we're running out of.

We need more ideas.

More innovation.

More originality.

More creative thinking.

Maybe.

But ideas are fucking everywhere.

Your creative team has ideas.

Your social team has ideas.

Your junior staff have ideas.

Your creators have ideas.

Your customers are accidentally giving you ideas in the comments every day.

AI can now generate 400 ideas before your first coffee.

Generating possibilities is becoming cheaper by the minute.

Choosing one?

Backing it?

Protecting it?

Putting money behind it?

Letting it out into the world before everyone has made it completely harmless?

That’s the scarce bit.

Creativity Without Courage Is Just a Deck

You can have the greatest idea in the world.

If nobody approves it, it doesn't exist.

It's a slide.

A JPEG.

A story your agency tells in the pub six months later.

“You should've seen the first route.”

Great.

Did customers see it?

No.

Then it wasn't marketing.

It was a concept.

Creativity gets all the glory because it's visible.

The line.

The film.

The stunt.

The creator.

The idea.

But behind almost every interesting piece of work is another ingredient nobody puts on the awards entry:

Someone said yes.

Someone inside the organisation decided the idea was worth protecting.

That's not admin.

That's part of the creative process.

Courage Has Been Designed Out of the Job

This is where marketing structures get interesting.

What are managers rewarded for?

Predictability.

Control.

Alignment.

Hitting deadlines.

Managing budgets.

Managing stakeholders.

Avoiding disasters.

Making sure everyone has been consulted.

Getting things approved.

These are important skills.

But notice what's missing.

Make something nobody has seen before.

That's a very different skill.

Something genuinely original creates uncertainty.

There isn't a benchmark.

There isn't a case study.

There isn't last year's campaign to point at.

And the person approving it has to put their name against something that might not work.

So what does the system naturally produce?

Things we already understand.

Things we can justify.

Things that resemble successful things.

Things nobody is likely to complain about.

The organisation isn't designed to make interesting marketing.

It's designed to make approvable marketing.

“Can You Prove It’ll Work?”

No.

We can give you reasons.

Strategy.

Data.

Audience behaviour.

Past performance.

Platform insights.

Research.

Experience.

Taste.

We can reduce uncertainty.

But if the idea is genuinely new, we cannot give you a spreadsheet proving exactly what will happen when millions of unpredictable humans encounter it.

If we could, we'd stop running an agency and start trading stocks from a yacht.

This is the deal.

New things contain uncertainty.

If you require certainty before doing anything new, you have quietly made originality impossible.

You don't have a creative problem.

You have an uncertainty tolerance problem.

Data Should Give You Courage

This doesn't mean closing your eyes and screaming:

“TRUST THE CREATIVE!”

That's not particularly useful either.

Modern marketers have more evidence than ever.

Your last 11 months of social data can tell you which hooks hold attention.

Which creators perform.

Which formats get watched.

Which ideas people share.

Which language drives action.

Which things repeatedly die.

Good.

Use it.

Not to make exactly the same thing again.

Use it to make a bigger informed bet.

If humour consistently works, perhaps we can make the campaign funnier.

If a creator consistently outperforms, perhaps they should star in the TVC.

If ugly, native-looking content consistently beats polished brand content, maybe stop demanding everything looks like a perfume commercial.

Data should help you understand where you can push.

Not give you 47 new reasons to stay exactly where you are.

The Weirdest Thing About Risk

Businesses are very good at seeing the risk in an interesting idea.

What if someone doesn't like it?

What if it doesn't perform?

What if the creator says something wrong?

What if management doesn't understand it?

What if people talk about it?

Fair questions.

Then the safe idea arrives.

Nobody asks:

What if nobody notices?

What if nobody remembers?

What if we spend $500,000 putting this in front of people and they feel absolutely nothing?

What if our competitors become culturally relevant while we spend six weeks aligning on a caption?

What if our best creative people get bored and leave?

What if we make safe work for five years and slowly turn the brand into wallpaper?

Those are risks too.

They’re just quieter.

And quiet risk is incredibly popular in corporate environments because nobody gets called into a meeting when nothing happens.

Failure Has Terrible Branding

We need to fix this.

Because everyone says they want experimentation.

“Test and learn.”

Lovely phrase.

Sounds fantastic in a strategy deck.

But testing requires the possibility of failure.

Otherwise you're not testing.

You're confirming.

If every experiment needs a 95% chance of success before approval, congratulations.

You have invented:

Doing the thing we already know works.

Some creative should fail.

Not because failure is inherently noble.

Failure can be expensive and annoying.

But because if you're genuinely exploring new territory, you will occasionally be wrong.

The question is whether you learn quickly enough to make being wrong useful.

Make.

Learn.

Adjust.

Go again.

That's courage with a feedback loop.

Much more sensible than courage with a blindfold.

Approval Is a Creative Act

We don't talk about this enough.

The Marketing Manager who protects the strange idea is contributing creatively.

The CMO who tells the CEO why the campaign shouldn't be watered down is contributing creatively.

The Brand Manager who says:

“I personally don't love it, but the audience data tells us something different”

is contributing creatively.

The Legal team who says:

“Here's how you can do it safely”

instead of simply:

“No”

is contributing creatively.

Because great creative isn't only made in the creative department.

It survives through the organisation.

And survival requires people with taste and enough conviction to use it.

You Need Taste Before You Need Courage

This is important.

Courage without taste is terrifying.

Nobody wants a Marketing Manager confidently approving absolute dogshit because they read a blog telling them to be brave.

You need to know what good looks like.

Consume culture.

Use the platforms.

Watch advertising.

Study what works.

Understand your audience.

Listen to younger people.

Listen to older people.

Listen to creators.

Look at the data.

Develop a point of view.

Taste is what helps you decide which hill is worth dying on.

Then courage lets you climb the bastard.

Stop Asking Creative People to Be Brave on Your Behalf

This is perhaps the biggest contradiction.

Brands ask agencies:

“Bring us brave work.”

But bravery isn't something the agency can deliver in a PDF.

We can bring you the opportunity.

We can make the case.

We can show you the idea.

We can tell you why we believe in it.

But eventually the risk crosses the table.

Now it's yours.

Your budget.

Your brand.

Your internal meeting.

Your boss.

Your decision.

That's where bravery actually happens.

It's very easy for the agency to say:

“Fuck it, let's go.”

We're not the one explaining it to the board on Monday.

Which is why the best marketing relationships require courage on both sides.

Creative people willing to push.

Clients willing to protect.

Maybe Stop Asking for More Ideas

Sometimes the answer isn't another round.

It isn't:

“Can we see three more options?”

Maybe you already saw the good one.

It was Route Two.

Everyone laughed.

Everyone talked about it.

Then somebody got nervous and we moved on.

Go back.

Look again.

What exactly are we afraid of?

Is it a real risk?

Can we solve it without killing the idea?

Does the upside justify it?

What does the audience data tell us?

What happens if we do the safe thing instead?

Then decide.

Not everyone needs to agree.

Someone needs to decide.

Your Competitive Advantage Might Just Be Having a Spine

Because here's the good news.

Most brands are dealing with exactly the same problem.

They have talented people.

Good agencies.

Data.

Technology.

Creators.

AI.

Research.

Media.

They can all generate ideas.

But then those ideas enter organisations designed to minimise variance.

Everything unusual gets questioned.

Everything familiar gets approved.

So perhaps the advantage isn't having access to some magical source of creativity your competitors don't.

Maybe it's being the company that can actually approve the interesting thing.

Faster.

With fewer people.

For better reasons.

And without sanding every sharp edge off before the customer gets to see it.

You Probably Don't Need Another Brainstorm

You need somebody who can say yes.

Somebody who understands the strategy.

Understands the audience.

Understands the risk.

Has enough taste to recognise when something is good.

And enough courage to protect it when the room gets uncomfortable.

Because creativity isn't particularly useful trapped inside a deck.

Ideas don't build brands.

Ideas that get made do.

So the next time someone says:

“We need stronger creative.”

Maybe don't immediately book another brainstorm.

Look at the last ten interesting ideas you killed.

Look at why you killed them.

Look at who made the decision.

Look at whether the risk was real.

Then ask the slightly more uncomfortable question:

Do we actually have a creative problem?

Or do we keep hiring creative people to generate brave ideas for an organisation designed to approve safe ones?

Because eventually someone has to put their hand up.

Own the decision.

And say:

“Fuck it. Let’s go.”