Certainty.
The ad•diction killing creativity
One of the greatest ironies of working in advertising today is this: we are paid to imagine, yet our industry’s decision-makers increasingly demand guarantees before an idea even gets off the ground. Pre-tests, focus groups, data modeling—tools meant to guide creativity—have somehow become the gatekeepers that stifle it.
It’s not entirely their fault. Money people know money. They know spreadsheets, trendlines, and proven formulas. But what they don’t know—what they simply can’t see—is the yet-to-be-invented. The untested. The unproven. And if I’m being honest, we in the creative industry have made this worse by packaging even our first ideas like they’ve already been pre-approved, polished to perfection before they’ve had a chance to breathe.
But here’s what I believe: if you demand certainty, you’ll never get innovation.
This fear of risk is what’s creating a bigger problem—a creativity problem. We’re not just afraid of failing; we’re afraid of dreaming. And what’s worse, pre-testing doesn’t just filter out bold ideas—it limits the ones we even allow ourselves to imagine. We know what gets through the system, so we play it safe. We strip originality down to something polished, predictable, and easy to approve.
The result? Mediocrity disguised as market research.
So, how do we break free? By remembering what creativity is supposed to do. It’s not about making people comfortable; it’s about making them feel. It’s about surprise, inspiration, and, yes, sometimes discomfort. Creativity needs risk. It needs the freedom to fail, to take leaps into the unknown, knowing that not every jump will land.
If we want to change the game, we need to protect the space for raw, untested ideas—the kind that don’t come pre-packaged for approval. And most importantly, we need to stop letting pre-tests and data decide what’s worth fighting for.
Because, let’s face it: safe ideas might get approved faster, but they’ll never change the world.