• by Jac Mansour , 5 hours ago

Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed the death of a lot of great pitches. Usually, the culprit is an imaginary Karen: the single most offendable person in America, who has never bought the product, never will buy the product, and exists solely to write a strongly worded letter. Yet somehow, this fictional objector manages to have veto power over more advertising than any client, lawyer or regulator.

The math everyone gets wrong. The old model of advertising risk is basically an actuarial table for getting yelled at. Before an idea even gets out the door, everyone starts counting the hypothetical casualties. Who might object, who might post an angry caption, who might call the CEO, (the list goes on). By this logic, the safest idea is the one that elicits no reaction. But there’s just one problem with that math. While it measures the cost of offending someone, it assigns zero value to being ignored.

The price of playing it safe. An ad that is technically and universally unobjectionable may sound great, but it’s likely commercially invisible. Conversely, there’s the more interesting ad that generates a complaint, a Slack thread, or possibly even… a headline. But a spot that irritates three (even 300) people but gets remembered by three million isn’t risky.

Fear dressed up as strategy. One client I had pulled a Christmas spot featuring an interracial couple after receiving two or three complaints during a national media buy. Around the same time, that client banned visible tattoos from casting, despite that roughly a third of American adults are inked up in at least once spot. It’s like treating the possibility of a complaint as a business metric while treating the certainty of being forgotten as an acceptable outcome. And that’s the central accounting error in modern advertising: We’ve become much better at measuring the risk of saying something than the risk of saying nothing.

When customers smell a committee/ This may be especially dangerous with younger audiences. Since Gen Z has been marketed to since before they could read, they’ve developed an almost supernatural ability to detect “would we be comfortable with this?” consensus. To them, “inoffensive” doesn’t necessarily mean safe, but corporate -- which may ultimately translate to fake.

And this is where AI enters the story. Not as the job-stealing villain, but as the world’s most efficient supplier of perfectly acceptable advertising. AI can brilliantly research and produce copy in seconds and provide work that is grammatical, on-brand and remarkably difficult to object to. All of this sounds wonderful, until you realize that inoffensive is not the same as compelling.

The real human advantage is the willingness to make a choice. To say the funny thing instead of the safe thing To make something specific enough that somebody might actually have an opinion about it. The machine can give you 10,000 words before lunch, but the creative job is still to look at them and say, “Great. We only need six.”

The only risk that matters. This isn’t an argument for never changing. Ford and Coca-Cola have tweaked their logos repeatedly without most customers noticing. Smart evolution is deliberate and incremental. But I’d like to officially propose that we retire calling something a “risky idea.” The bold idea isn’t risky because people remember it; in fact, that’s its job.

The risky idea? That’s the one nobody notices.