When good ideas die
Picture the scene: a shiny boardroom table in a top-floor office, windows overlooking a business estate built in 2001 with a car park currently filled with BMWs and Teslas as far as the eye can see. The marketing director stands up. He’s got the deck, he’s spent three weeks on this, and he’s straight in with the company’s new campaign. Twenty seconds pass, and he can see it on their faces. The CFO has gone very still. The CEO is tapping her pen. The work is good, and the work is going to die in this room, and he can feel it dying, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
If you’ve ever presented bold creative to a senior stakeholder, you may know this feeling, which feels close to stage fright. It’s the specific dread of watching an idea you believe in get talked out of existence by people who decided in the first thirty seconds that it felt risky. That’s usually the biggest reason for a stonking idea to fall.
An image, a video, or homepage idea simply felt too far out there.
“I just don’t think we’re that kind of brand.”
“Our industry really isn’t all that exciting.”
“We’re not sure what our customers would say about us if we did something like that.”
And so on.
One person’s bold is another person’s risk
This is even more prevalent in B2B, where decisions are made, on the whole, by committees – certainly in procurement – and doing the safe thing, the kind of thing we’ve always done, is far easier an argument to make than doing something controversially bold.
Gartner’s 2025 research found B2B buying groups now range from five to sixteen people across as many as four business functions, and 74% of those buyer teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision-making process. Which means that major decisions involve a lot of people, a lot of opinions, and a lot of time.
At the heart of the issue is that this is rooted in safety for our jobs; that’s a naturally human concern, so I’m not belittling it in the slightest. Inherently these preoccupations mean that we end up not wanting to do anything that stands out, or jars with the status quo. If we get something wrong, radically wrong, our jobs are on the line.
The problem with this introductory, completely made-up presentation scene, is that the room rejected the feeling of risk – and not the idea itself.
So I repeat, for illustrative purposes: the idea was good. The visuals and copy were bang on. There was nothing at all wrong with them. They would do a great job.
The question about selling-in bold creative then really isn’t much at all to do with the creative itself, strictly speaking. It’s about the atmosphere leading up to that meeting, with risk averse people; and that atmosphere can be influenced by a number of variables, all with a solid marketing, brand or business insight underpinning.
Strategy is the safety net
What’s involved in a brand strategy? A ton of things. We follow the 3Cs framework for brand strategy at Hallam, a pleasingly retro but important framework born out of McKinsey’s Tokyo office in the 1980s, examining Company (What you do really well), Customer (What people actually really care about) and Competitors (What they do really well). We’ve referenced the importance of it elsewhere.
It’s built into business courses and marketing degrees as a great route to brand positioning, which is again our primary aim with the 3Cs. But by doing the work up front, the big thinking, the digging, the comparisons for relative differentiation, finding out what customers care about and not what we’d like them to care about, we surface a significant amount of insights. Strong areas of relative differentiation. Behavioural segments. A sprinkling of Category Entry Points.
A good brand strategy and positioning project isn’t making things up – it’s grounded in the real world, internal company insights, customer insights, category insights. Whether the end result is going to be an advertising campaign, a new website, a visual identity – all of those insights stack up together to provide creative with fertile grounds in which big and bold ideas can grow.
It’s also evidence. Evidence you can use to back up your choices down the line. Evidence which can then be surfaced in the meeting room, beforehand, in the deck. Bring people with you.
Because of this insight, we chose that idea.
This isn’t about logic, because ultimately people are irrational creatures and use logic to reinforce the decisions they’ve already made irrationally.
But suddenly confidence now has a seat at the table. Confidence in the route that creative has chosen. The rational building blocks to reinforce that already-irrational, gut-instinct preference, so that anyone in the room can think “I like it, and now I see the thinking behind it too.”
Sometimes the safe choice is the risky one
“Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode.” – Matt Johnson, author and academic
Here’s where many arguments for bold work likely get it wrong. They argue that the bold idea is worth the risk. Worth the gamble. Worth the leap. Which immediately concedes the framing: that bold is risky and safe is, well, safe.
But it isn’t.
The truly risky thing, for most brands, is to spend the marketing budget on work that nobody actually notices. To spend money on a campaign that looks like the three campaigns above it in the LinkedIn feed. Or a website that could swap logos with a competitor’s and nobody would clock the difference.
That’s not a safe outcome – that’s money out the door. No distinctiveness. No memory structures being built. Research from System1 and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that 75% of B2B advertising has no long-term commercial impact. Just one in four ads drives profit gain and market share growth. The rest? Well, that’s simply money out of the door for zero distinctiveness gained.
So how lucky do you feel?
The job of strategy was to make the case in the boardroom before the creative appears on the screen as a position grounded in what you’ve already found out together. The competitors all sound the same. The category has converged on a visual language so tight you could fit it in a matchbox. Words that could have come from the lips of anyone, any time, in any company. Customers can’t tell any brand apart, and the research points out where and how. In that environment, doing the expected thing is an expensive choice that loses the company money and gives the marketing director and CFO an awkward set of conversations for the next financial year.
This is the inversion that changes the mood. The CFO who came in worried about the risk of the bold idea now has a different risk to worry about: the risk of wasting money on invisibility.
Risk is a funny thing. You can also reframe it by showing alternatives. Three routes, two rejected, one survivor – with the reasoning. This is showing people the actual creative process, getting them to see the choices made up to that point.
The meeting room sees that the chosen route survived a real interrogation. It also gives stakeholders a way into the decision rather than a fait accompli to react to.
Perhaps it is also worth naming the risk – that yes, this is different to everyone else – and then explaining why the alternative routes are the more expensive mistakes. This changes to being a position of confidence.
When good ideas survive
So picture the same room we began with. Same boardroom table, same business park, same over-brewed coffee. But before the meeting began, there had been discussions, casual email exchanges, about the importance of creativity as a profit multiplier, and the dangers of being meaningless and not distinctive.
The marketing director stands up once again. This time, though, the deck doesn’t open with the campaign. It opens with the results of what the customers said, from extensive interviews – their real wants and needs, how they experienced the company’s own products. Then an analysis of what the competitors are all doing and saying.
Then a discussion of the possible directions that were considered and reasons some were killed, with the reasoning. So by the time that the big idea actually arrives on the screen, the room can already feel the inevitable before they see it. The team is warm already. The CFO is leaning forward. The CEO has stopped tapping her pen and is nodding.
The work itself hasn’t changed. The marketing director hasn’t suddenly become more eloquent or any braver. What’s changed is everything that happened before he stood up. The pre-meeting conversations, strategy laid down beforehand, evidence assembled, the risk of the safe option made all too clear. The work arrived in the room as the conclusion of an argument that room had already started having.
Bold creative doesn’t need braver clients. It needs better arguments, better understanding, better rationale, better insights – better work. Build those first, and the idea that follows isn’t a risky leap into the unknown.
It’s the obvious and best thing to do.
Looking for an agency to push forward with bold ideas for your own brand’s creative campaigns? Get in touch today.
