Break Risk Aversion: Unlock Creativity For Growth
Risk-averse Marketing Inflates Costs; Bold Creativity Compounds Margins.
Why Playing Safe Costs Billions, Bold Ideas Drive Profit
The State of Creativity 2025 report, based on a survey of over 1,000 marketers and creatives globally, delivers a stark warning: creativity is trapped in a comfort zone. While leaders talk about innovation, their organizations retreat into safety. Only 13% of companies describe themselves as risk-friendly, while nearly a third (29%) admit to being actively risk-averse.
This caution is not harmless. The evidence is clear: brands that embrace creative risk outperform their conservative peers on every major business metric. According to WARC (2024), risk-taking brands generate 4x higher profit margins. Deloitte’s global growth analysis adds that risk-positive brands are 33% more likely to see sustained long-term revenue growth.
Yet most companies are still clinging to safe, incremental ideas. The cost of this timidity is staggering: weak creative effectiveness forces billions in wasted media spend. In today’s high-cost attention economy, playing it safe is the riskiest bet of all.
Play Safe, Pay More
The financial drag of “dull” advertising is no longer a creative opinion, it is a measurable economic burden. The “Cost of Dull” study, conducted with consultancy eatbigfish and effectiveness expert Peter Field, which puts hard numbers on the penalty for playing safe.
In the UK, brands relying on uninspired advertising must spend an additional £13 billion annually in media costsjust to equal the effects of more emotional, creatively engaging work.
In the US, the penalty is even more extreme: $189 billion in wasted media expenditure every year.
This is not marginal leakage, it is systemic waste. Dull advertising drains budgets by forcing companies to buy more reach and frequency simply to achieve baseline effectiveness. The problem is not just poor creative, it’s a compounding inefficiency embedded in P&L.
Safe creative, by definition, is invisible. It may clear legal checks and fit brand guidelines, but it fails to leave memory traces in consumers’ minds. Without memory, impressions are squandered. Each additional media dollar delivers diminishing returns because the creative itself lacks the distinctiveness needed to build salience or preference.
This is why CFOs and CEOs cannot treat creativity as discretionary flair. Safe creative is not risk-free, it is financially reckless. Every “dull” campaign represents shareholder capital wasted on impressions that fail to build long-term equity.
As Anselmo Ramos, Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT, explained: “Safe is invisible. Brave is unforgettable. The brands that win aren’t playing the game: they’re rewriting the rules. His point is not just about creative glory, it is about competitive advantage. Brands that embrace bold ideas reduce future media dependency because they build memory structures that last. Brands that avoid risk must keep paying a hidden tax of escalating media spend.
Creative Risk Drives Profitability
There is no doubt that brands that embrace creative risk consistently outperform those that play safe. Risk, in this context, is not reckless, it is bold, unconventional work that challenges norms, sparks conversation, and captures cultural imagination. When grounded in strong insights and executed with confidence, risk becomes the most reliable driver of profitability.
The data is unequivocal. According to WARC’s global analysis, risk-taking brands generate four times higher profit margins than their risk-averse peers. Deloitte’s research reinforces this, showing that brands with a high appetite for creative risk are 33% more likely to achieve long-term revenue growth.
By contrast, brands that cling to convention see diminishing returns, forced to spend more on media just to hold share.
The effectiveness evidence is clear in campaign outcomes:
DoorDash “All The Ads” (Wieden+Kennedy, 2024): In a bold Super Bowl stunt, DoorDash promised to deliver every product advertised during the game. The campaign broke category norms, transforming DoorDash from a delivery service into a cultural talking point. The payoff was huge: earned social mentions beat targets by 150%, generating 11.9 billion impressions and 8 million consumer submissions. Far from a gimmick, the campaign shifted brand perception and reinforced DoorDash’s role as a cultural utility, helping fuel 24% year-on-year revenue growth in 2024.
Pot Noodle “Sorry for Slurping” (adam&eveDDB, 2024): Facing backlash over irritating ad sound effects, Pot Noodle doubled down instead of retreating. By leaning into controversy, apologizing publicly, and releasing 47 cheeky replacement ads, the brand turned criticism into cultural fame. The result: a 25% sales uplift within weeks. Risk converted backlash into brand growth.
These cases illustrate a truth often forgotten in cautious boardrooms: consumers reward brands that break rules and take risks. Safe creative disappears; risky creative lingers in culture, generating conversation and memory that compound over time.
As effectiveness consultant Les Binet explained: “The most effective advertising often feels risky, because it is. It breaks rules, tugs at emotions, and lingers in memory. Playing it safe is the real gamble.”In other words, risk is not just compatible with profitability, it is the engine of it.
The profitability equation is simple:
Safe work = short-lived attention + rising media costs.
Brave work = long-term memory + compounding returns.
Brands that understand this equation don’t treat risk as indulgence. They treat it as the most efficient investment available, a force multiplier that turns creative budgets into structural growth.
The CFO View: Creative Risk as Efficiency
For decades, creativity has been dismissed in many boardrooms as a “soft” marketing lever, a discretionary expense vulnerable to budget cuts. The State of Creativity 2025 challenges this view, showing how finance leaders are increasingly treating bold creative as a driver of structural efficiency.
At Cannes Lions 2024, McDonald’s CFO Ian Borden spelled it out clearly: bold advertising compounds long-term impact, while safe campaigns require escalating levels of investment simply to maintain visibility. In financial terms, safe creative is inefficient capital allocation. It drains budgets without building enduring brand memory or salience.
This recognition reframes creativity from art to arithmetic. A creatively strong campaign generates outsized returns relative to its media spend. By contrast, “dull” advertising imposes a hidden tax on growth, forcing companies to over-invest in impressions and placements just to achieve the same market effect. Research by Peter Field and eatbigfish quantified this inefficiency: UK brands relying on dull creative must spend an extra £13 billion annually, while US brands face an additional $189 billion burden.
From a CFO’s perspective, this is unsustainable. As margins tighten and shareholder pressure increases, finance leaders demand efficiency across every lever of investment. Creativity, when bold, provides precisely that: more profit per media dollar, lower cost per recall, and longer brand memory per unit of spend.
This is why leading brands are aligning their creative decisions with financial governance. They treat creative risk not as indulgence, but as capital efficiency in action. A brave campaign is not simply a branding play, it is a lever that reduces future media dependency by embedding the brand deeper into consumer memory.
As effectiveness expert Les Binet argues, “The most effective advertising often feels risky, because it is. Playing it safe is the real gamble.” For CFOs, the gamble is not about whether an idea will “work,” but whether safe campaigns can justify the mounting inefficiency they create.
The implication is clear: finance leaders must now demand creative risk as a condition of efficiency. Safe creative wastes shareholder capital; bold creative compounds it.
Two Confidence Killers
The State of Creativity 2025 report identifies two systemic barriers that consistently erode creative confidence and weaken business results: the Insight Famine and Cultural Lag. Both strip away the foundation on which bold creative risk depends. Without insight, ideas lack depth. Without agility, brands miss their cultural moment. The result is a cycle of safe, shallow work that fails to move markets.
1- The Insight Famine: Shallow Inputs, Shallow Creative
The first barrier is the collapse of diagnostic capability across brands. According to the survey, 51% of companies rate their ability. Worse, brands and agencies don’t even agree: while 26% of brands think they’re strong at insight generation, just 10% of agencies concur.
This gap creates weak creative foundations. When insights are little more than surface-level observations, campaigns default to category clichés. As strategist Matt Klein bluntly warned: “The biggest lie in marketing today is that data equals insight.”.
The Specsavers “Misheard Version” campaign proves what happens when teams go deeper. Instead of simply observing that consumers avoid hearing tests, the team uncovered a hidden stigma: people associated hearing loss with death. By reframing the issue as “mishearing”, a relatable, even humorous social truth, Specsavers created a breakthrough campaign that drove hearing test bookings up by 1,220% above target and won the 2024 Grand Prix in Audio & Radio Lions.
This is the difference between shallow and revelatory insights: one produces safe creative; the other unlocks bold, culture-shaping ideas.
2- Cultural Lag: Missing the Moment, Losing the Market
The second barrier is cultural inertia. The survey found that 57% of brands admit they struggle to react quickly to cultural moments, and only 12% rate their ability as excellent.The main blockers are bureaucratic approval processes (40%), limited resources (32%), and difficulty aligning brand insights with cultural trends (10%).
This lag is costly. Audiences move at the speed of culture, not corporate committees. When brands take weeks to respond, the moment has already passed, and competitors reap the rewards.
By contrast, culturally agile brands capitalize fast. In 2023, baseball star Shohei Ohtani accidentally smashed a Coors Light ad with a foul ball. Within six days, Coors Brewing immortalized the mishap on limited-edition cans, which sold out instantly and even expanded distribution to Japan to meet demand. Speed, not bureaucracy, created a commercial win.
Heinz offers another masterclass. When Taylor Swift was spotted eating “seemingly ranch” with Heinz Ketchup at a football game, Kraft Heinz rebranded its underperforming Kranch sauce within 48 hours. The move generated headlines, cultural buzz, and a 320% sales spike, while reinforcing Heinz’s identity as a playful, culturally relevant brand.
These examples show that cultural agility is not about chasing every trend. It’s about having streamlined structures that allow swift, brand-authentic responses.
Why These Killers Matter
Together, weak insights and slow cultural response form a vicious cycle. Without sharp insights, teams don’t trust creative risks. Without cultural agility, even strong ideas can’t seize momentum. The result: leadership loses confidence, brands default to safe bets, and billions are wasted on underperforming advertising.
As Harjot Singh, Global Chief Strategy Officer at McCann Worldgroup, put it: “Clients grapple with uncertainty and pressure to deliver immediate results. I advise fostering a culture of radical honesty where risks are calculated and failure is seen as a learning opportunity, not a liability.”
Confidence in creativity requires both deep diagnosis and fast cultural execution. Break either link, and the system collapses.
Recommendations: CEO-Level Imperatives
Eliminate Safe Bets: Audit campaigns for creative risk. Cancel work that plays to category norms without distinction.
Quantify the Cost of Safety: Require marketing to calculate the “Cost of Dull” in media inefficiency annually.
Hardwire Risk into Governance: Set a baseline: every brand must deliver at least one high-risk, high-reward creative annually.
Make CFOs Creative Allies: Present bold creative as structural efficiency, not discretionary expense.
Train for Insight and Culture: Invest in building organizational skills to diagnose insights and react to culture in real time.
Bottom Line Playing It Safe Is Financially Reckless
Risk-averse advertising imposes a multi-billion-dollar “dull tax.” Bold creativity, by contrast, multiplies margins and compounds growth.
