There's a peculiar thing that happens in marketing meetings.
Someone presents the evidence. The research is cited, the case studies are compelling, and the logic is airtight. Everyone nods. Everyone agrees. And then someone says, "Yeah, but our brand is different," or "I'm not sure our customers are ready for that," or, my personal favourite, "Let's just make sure it's on-brand first."
I once sat in a room where a client said, “This is amazing. I absolutely love it! But we can’t do it.”
And so, another perfectly adequate, completely forgettable piece of marketing gets made.
I call this the courage gap. It's the distance between what marketers know they should do and what they actually do when the room gets a bit quiet and uncomfortable.
It's not an intelligence problem. The people in these rooms are smart. They've done the courses, read the books, seen the IPA data. They know that creativity is the second most powerful driver of business profit. They know that 84% of advertising isn't correctly remembered the day after people see it. They know that in a sea of sameness, standing out isn't just a nice idea, it's a commercial imperative.
And yet. The gap persists.
Why does this happen?
A few reasons, and I suspect you'll recognise at least one of them.
The first is risk asymmetry. The consequences of doing something bold and having it not land are visible, immediate, and personal. Your name is on it. The consequences of doing something safe and invisible are diffuse, delayed, and easy to explain away. Attribution is murky. The brand "didn't grow as fast as we hoped." No one traces that back to the beige campaign that no one remembers.
So the rational career move, if not the rational business move, is often to keep your head below the parapet.
The second is the committee. Great creative work rarely survives a large committee intact. Every stakeholder sands down another edge. Someone's worried about the tone. Someone else thinks the humour might alienate someone. Legal wants a disclaimer. By the time it reaches the world, the thing that made it interesting has been thoroughly removed in the interests of consensus.
I’m always reminded that you never see a statue of a committee.
Bill Bernbach said it decades ago, and it remains painfully true: "A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something."
The third is measurement. We've built sophisticated systems for measuring what's easy to measure: clicks, impressions, reach, and engagement rate. And because these things are measurable, they often become the goal. But attention, memory, distinctiveness, brand fame? These are harder to capture in a monthly dashboard. So they get underweighted. The work that delivers them gets underfunded and underprotected. It underperforms. And then it doesn’t get funded again.
What the evidence actually says
Let me be direct about the research, because it matters.
Paul Dyson's landmark analysis of advertising effectiveness found that creative quality is the second-largest driver of business profit from advertising, behind only brand size and ahead of targeting, reach, recency, and every other variable we spend enormous amounts of time optimising.
The IPA's EffWorks research has consistently shown that we have an attention crisis. If it isn’t noticed, it isn’t remembered. If it isn’t remembered, it can’t be chosen. The chain is broken at the very first link.
And yet the average marketing team spends far more time debating the media mix than it does fighting for genuinely distinctive creative work.
Courage isn’t a creative virtue. It’s a growth strategy. Safe work rarely builds future demand. And without future demand, you’re simply harvesting what you built yesterday.
Closing the gap
The courage gap won't close on its own. It requires a few things working together.
It requires leaders, marketing directors, CMOs, and business owners who are willing to protect brave work through the approval process, not just commission it. Brave briefs mean nothing if brave work gets neutered before it sees daylight.
It requires a shared understanding that being forgettable is not the safe option. The risk of sameness is real, it just shows up in the P&L later, and it's harder to blame on any one decision.
And it requires a different relationship with discomfort. If a piece of marketing doesn't make someone in the room slightly nervous, it won't make anyone outside the room pay attention. Discomfort is often a signal you're onto something.
I've been lucky enough to work with some great brands and brave marketers over the years; people who understood that the job isn't to make something everyone can live with. The job is to make something people actually notice, remember, and act on.
That distinction is everything.
Remarkable things get remarked upon by their intended audience.
The world is not waiting for more of the same. Neither are your customers.
Next time the room goes quiet, pay attention.
That silence might be the sound of growth.
