Stop Testing Ideas to Death, Start Testing for Disruption.
When businesses replace predictive testing with iterative disruption, creativity fuels growth, resilience, and cultural impact.
Why Brands Keep Killing Good Ideas
Advertising sits at the crossroads of finance, culture, and creativity, and that intersection is messy. As Faris Yakob (2025) argues, advertising influences some of the most complex systems in human existence: psychology, sociology, economics, art, and technology. Complexity means outcomes cannot be predicted in advance. Yet modern corporations, run primarily by financially trained leaders, demand prediction before investment.
This tension plays out in the boardroom. Finance executives lean on discounted cash flow models and historic benchmarks. Creativity, on the other hand, creates new value that emerges unpredictably over time. Unsurprisingly, creativity is often treated as a risk rather than a growth multiplier.
Cannes Lions’ Global Marketer Survey (2025, 1,000 respondents worldwide) confirmed this tension. Only 13% of companies described themselves as “creative risk-friendly”, while nearly 30% admitted to being highly risk-averse. But “creative risk” is a misnomer: the real danger lies in dullness. Creativity isn’t optional, it is the only lever brands have to multiply the impact of their spend. When leaders misunderstand this, they smother breakthrough ideas in the lab, strangling growth before it starts.
Rethink Creative Risk
Dull Work Costs More than Bold Work
The industry often frames creative work as risky, but the real risk is in settling for mediocrity. Adam Morgan and Peter Field’s Cost of Dull study (2020, UK multi-brand analysis) showed that brands relying on uninspired, forgettable ads must spend more than twice the media budget to achieve the same commercial outcomes as emotionally engaging campaigns. In other words, dullness carries a hidden tax, a tax most companies continue to pay.
When leaders treat creativity as “alpha”, returns above market averages, they can see its true value. Unlike media, which delivers diminishing returns with each dollar, creative effectiveness compounds, multiplying media’s effect. Creativity is not volatility; it is leverage.
Case in Point
John Lewis (UK, Holiday Campaigns): Year after year, John Lewis invested in emotional storytelling. IPA Effectiveness studies found these ads delivered £8 return for every £1 invested, far exceeding industry averages. Consistent creative investment built brand equity that media alone could not.
Procter & Gamble (Always #LikeAGirl, 2014): Initially considered risky because it confronted gender stereotypes, the campaign lifted brand equity double digits across markets (Ipsos, 2015). What looked like risk turned out to be resilience, positioning Always as a cultural leader.
The lesson: safe advertising is not safe at all. It is the most expensive strategy in the long run.
Stop Testing to Destruction
Why Lab Research Misleads
Alan Hodges warned in Testing to Destruction (1974, updated 1999) that it is impossible to test an ad’s effectiveness in a lab before real-world exposure. Yet the industry persists in trying. Lab research strips away the natural environment: it forces respondents to over-attend to ads, rationalize decisions, and make choices without real consequences. This destroys ecological validity, the extent to which findings hold true in the real world.
Even modern predictive models cannot solve this. System1’s Star Ratings, widely cited in creative research, achieve a correlation of R = 0.48 with outcomes, meaning that more than half of advertising performance remains unexplained. For CEOs and CFOs, this should be unacceptable. Imagine making financial forecasts with 52% of performance left to chance. That is the reality of predictive testing.
Iconic Failures of Testing
Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad: Famously failed both lab testing and experimental validation, but became one of the most iconic campaigns in history. It redefined Apple’s brand and helped sell millions of Macs. Testing said “failure”; the market said “legend.”
Volkswagen’s Think Small (1959): Initially dismissed as unmarketable to Americans accustomed to big cars. Instead, it became AdAge’s Campaign of the Century, proving how disruptive ideas defy pre-tests.
Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner Ad (2017): An example in reverse, passed internal review processes but collapsed in real-world culture, forcing Pepsi into global damage control. Proof that testing doesn’t prevent failure either.
Hodges’ conclusion was blunt: research should guide, not decide. When leaders mistake it for predictive certainty, they kill ideas and misallocate investment.
Test for Disruption Instead
Research = Illumination
The alternative is not to abandon research, but to reframe it. Instead of treating research as a predictive filter, treat it as illumination. Research should highlight blind spots, expose risks, and strengthen creative ideas iteratively, not serve as a pass/fail exam.
As Yakob (2025) puts it, ideas are fragile. They are easily killed when dissected in artificial conditions. When consumers are asked to explain a joke or rationalize emotion, the very thing that makes the idea powerful is destroyed. Testing to destruction kills potential. Testing to disruption amplifies it.
Emerging Approaches
Sundogs: AI-powered diagnostics that track 150+ creative signals, moving beyond surface-level recall into richer insight. This offers a multi-dimensional picture of how ideas resonate.
Bolt: Fully automated qualitative research, gathering fast feedback from real consumers in natural contexts. By reducing cost and speed barriers, brands can test iteratively without suffocating ideas.
In today’s polarized world, campaigns are easily weaponized as fodder for culture wars. Research that only tests for comprehension misses this risk. Brands must test across cultural, political, and demographic divides to anticipate backlash and strengthen resilience. Iterative disruption testing prepares brands to thrive in complexity, rather than retreat to mediocrity.
Brand Case Studies
Apple: 1984 Super Bowl - Failed pre-tests, succeeded spectacularly in market. Proof that predictive testing cannot measure cultural resonance.
Dove: Real Beauty (2004) - Initially seen as risky, but real-world resonance built an enduring platform. Sales grew from $2.5B to $4B in a decade(Unilever Annual Report, 2014).
Heineken: Worlds Apart (2017) - Risked political backlash by pairing strangers of opposing beliefs. Despite controversy, the campaign drove +7% brand affinity in the UK (Kantar Millward Brown, 2017).
Nike: Dream Crazy (2018) - Featuring Colin Kaepernick sparked boycotts. Yet Nike’s stock rose 5% in the week after launch (CNBC, 2018). Disruption created alignment with core audiences and long-term brand strength.
John Lewis: Holiday Ads - Consistent investment in emotional creativity paid back at 8:1 ROI, proving creativity’s compounding effect (IPA Effectiveness Awards).
Always: #LikeAGirl (2014) - Dismissed as risky, it became one of the most awarded and effective campaigns of the decade, revitalizing brand relevance.
Together, these cases prove a single truth: predictive testing fails to forecast breakthrough impact, while disruption research allows fragile ideas to grow strong enough to deliver outsized returns.
CEO-Level Imperatives
Eliminate Predictive Illusions: Stop funding lab-based copy testing. It wastes budget and destroys value.
Reframe Risk At The Board: Demand that CFOs and CMOs quantify the cost of dullness, not just campaign variance.
Fund Iterative Research Cycles: Require that research is embedded throughout creative development, using AI and real-world diagnostics.
Empower Creative Defenders: Ensure that agency and internal creative leaders are empowered to protect fragile ideas until they face the market.
Govern Creativity As Capital: Elevate creativity to board-level governance, measuring it as an ROI multiplier rather than a soft cost.
Bottom Line: Disruption Outperforms Destruction
Brands that stop strangling ideas in sterile labs and start testing them iteratively in the wild unlock disproportionate growth. Creativity is not a risk to be managed, it is a source of alpha, an ROI multiplier, and the foundation of cultural relevance.
CEOs who embrace disruption research will lead brands that thrive not only in markets but also in culture. Those who cling to predictive illusions will pay the high cost of dullness and irrelevance.
