Brands are more cautious than they were even a few years ago, just as AI has made safe, acceptable creative cheap and abundant. Risk hasn’t increased — the cost of neutrality has. But the brands still willing to roll the dice on a great idea are pulling ahead, while everyone else fades into the algorithm.

From the moment I started my career, my entire raison d’être has been creativity. Not creativity as decoration, but creativity as conviction. My job was never to make clients comfortable. It was to push ideas far enough that their palms sweat, because if an idea didn’t create a little fear, it probably wasn’t doing anything useful. I certainly didn’t get into marketing to play it safe. And I never believed boring was a defensible strategy.

So I can’t help but notice that marketing has become more risk-averse at the exact moment risk matters most. The market is now a knife fight for attention, trust and distinctiveness while most brands are optimizing for “inoffensive” work that disappears on contact.

What’s changed is not that risk got riskier. It’s that safe got less effective. The same approvals, the same brand-safety reflexes, the same “let’s not upset anyone” instincts now collide with three realities: culture moves faster than committees, AI makes sameness cheap and abundant, and consumers punish generic messaging with the same criticism that used to be reserved for bad customer service.

A behavior shift

I’m not arguing that brands were ever fearless. They weren’t. It has always taken an unusually insightful and courageous client champion to shepherd a great creative idea all the way to the finish line without watching it get watered down, softened and negotiated into something unrecognizable and benign. That tension between ambition and approval has been part of this business forever.

What has changed is not the existence of fear, but its dominance. Brands are measurably more cautious today than they were even three to five years ago.  Cannes Lions and WARC research from 2024–2025 shows that only about 13 percent of brands now describe themselves as risk-friendly, a sharp decline from the pre-pandemic years when “brave creativity” was still something companies actively claimed to reward. The same research points to a steady increase in approval layers and brand-safety “gating”, even as cultural cycles have accelerated, and media has fractured into faster, messier channels that punish hesitation.

At the same time, Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer shows a global rise in grievance and suspicion. Faced with that data, many brands have drawn the safest possible conclusion: reduce exposure rather than increase clarity; avoid interpretation rather than sharpen intent.

The result is not that creativity has suddenly become worse. It’s that risk tolerance has declined systemically, embedded into processes, governance and default behaviors, long before an idea ever evolves into a campaign.

What safety looks like today

Modern brand safety is no longer primarily about preventing harm. It is about avoiding interpretation. That distinction matters, because harm is contextual and rare, while interpretation is constant and unavoidable. The result is a form of marketing that is technically correct, legally defensible and increasingly empty.

You can see this shift clearly in the work itself. Language has become broader and vaguer, designed to mean just enough to pass review without meaning enough to provoke reaction. According to Kantar’s Global Creative Effectiveness update in 2024, ads that rely on generic messaging underperform distinctive creative by more than 50 percent on brand recall, yet the proportion of campaigns described as “brand safe” or “low risk” continues to rise across global categories. Brands are choosing reassurance over memorability even as the data shows memorability is what drives growth.

Creative half-lives have also shortened. Campaigns are launched, tested and quietly retired at the first sign of friction. This isn’t agility; it’s fragility. WARC’s 2024 analysis of global campaign duration shows a continued decline in long-running creative platforms, replaced by short bursts of interchangeable content optimized for platforms rather than people. When work is designed to offend no one, it is unlikely to impress anyone, so it rarely earns the right to live longer than a few weeks.

Pullbacks now happen faster, too. The threshold for “risk” has dropped from genuine harm to perceived discomfort. Brands routinely pause or revise campaigns within hours of online criticism, even when there is no evidence of commercial impact. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer helps explain why: with grievance and suspicion rising globally, many organizations have decided that the safest move is to minimize exposure altogether. The interpretation is blunt but common: if people are angry, shelter in place.

To compensate for the resulting lack of impact, brands lean harder on media weight. Spend replaces distinctiveness. Reach replaces resonance. This is visible in global FMCG and financial services, where Kantar reports rising media investment alongside flat or declining creative effectiveness scores. The work doesn’t work harder, so the money does. This is hardly a new phenomenon, and one that frustrates me more than somewhat.

Underneath all of this is a quieter but more consequential change: a shift from judgment to checklists. Decisions that once relied on senior marketing instinct are now filtered through brand-safety frameworks, legal matrices and reputational risk scoring. None of these tools are wrong on their own. The problem is that they are rarely balanced by an equally rigorous framework for growth, differentiation or cultural impact. Legal teams have veto power; creativity does not.

This is not restraint as strategy. It is defensive marketing as default. And now that AI can generate perfectly acceptable creative at scale, “acceptable” has quietly become the most expensive position a brand can take.

Why this shift happened now (and not earlier)

The reason this shift is happening now, and not ten years ago, is not cultural fragility or a sudden loss of nerve. It’s structural. Three forces converged in the past few years and collectively rewired how risk is perceived, escalated and approved inside organizations.

First, backlash visibility exploded. Social amplification compresses reaction time and exaggerates scale. A handful of critical posts can look like a global uprising inside a boardroom, even when there is no evidence of commercial impact. According to a 2024 YouGov global study on brand crises, fewer than 10 percent of social media controversies translate into measurable sales decline, yet more than 60 percent of senior marketers said they would pause or pull a campaign based on early online backlash alone. Perception now outruns consequence. Brands are having a kneejerk reaction to the appearance of risk, not the reality of it.

You can see this in how quickly campaigns are withdrawn. In 2024 and 2025, multiple global brands paused or edited work within hours of online criticism, long before any data on consumer behavior or revenue impact existed. The reflex is speed, not judgment. The lesson brands have internalized is not “be more thoughtful,” but “don’t give people anything to interpret.”

Second, AI flattened baseline quality. Generative tools have made acceptable creative cheap, fast and abundant. According to SurveyMonkey’s 2025 global marketer study, nearly 90 percent of marketing teams now use AI in day-to-day content production. The upside is efficiency. The downside is (as I have said repeatedly) sameness. When everyone can produce work that clears a basic quality bar, the natural pressure to take creative risk disappears. You no longer need conviction to get something out the door. You just need a prompt.

WARC’s 2024 analysis of global creative effectiveness shows the gap widening between distinctive campaigns and the growing volume of low-impact, AI-assisted content. Average ad recall and emotional response scores declined year-on-year even as content output increased. In other words, brands are producing more work that feels fine and lands nowhere. AI didn’t make brands cautious. It made caution easier to justify.

Third, governance creep filled the vacuum. Over the past few years, legal, compliance and reputation teams have gained expanded veto power, often without any corresponding accountability for growth, pricing power or differentiation. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a rational response to increased scrutiny, regulation and public visibility. But it has consequences. Decisions that were once made through senior marketing judgment are now filtered through risk matrices and brand-safety frameworks designed to prevent downside, not create upside.

McKinsey’s 2024 global marketing governance report noted a significant increase in cross-functional approval requirements for major campaigns, particularly in regulated industries and global brands operating across multiple cultural contexts. More stakeholders. More sign-offs. More opportunities for dilution. What disappears in that process is not recklessness. It’s edge.

Together, these forces didn’t make brands wiser. They made them procedural. Marketing decisions are now optimized for defensibility rather than distinctiveness, for process rather than point of view. And once caution is embedded into systems, not just people, it becomes the default setting long before an idea ever reaches the work.

That’s the shift. And it explains why so much marketing today feels safe, polished and strangely absent — even as the market becomes louder, faster and less forgiving of anything that doesn’t leave a mark.

Brands that continue to take risk stand out more than before

Risk hasn’t become smarter. It has become rarer, which is exactly what increases its impact.

You can see this most clearly in categories where caution has become the default. As brands collectively soften their tone, narrow their claims and optimize for reassurance, the few that refuse to neutralize themselves now stand out more than they did even five years ago.

Ryanair is an obvious example. While most airlines moved toward softer, more empathetic messaging in the post-pandemic period, Ryanair doubled down on its abrasive, self-aware tone. In a category converging on politeness and apology, the contrast created disproportionate cultural presence relative to spend and helped sustain commercial performance. The risk wasn’t new. What changed was how alone they were in taking it.

Duolingo followed a similar path in tech. As platforms “grew up” their voice, professionalized their messaging and leaned into neutral UX-led communication, Duolingo refused to mature in the expected way. Its chaotic, polarizing personality became more distinctive precisely because competitors retreated into safe, feature-driven language. Subscriber growth and downloads continued, not in spite of the tone, but because it was now so clearly differentiated.

Huda Beauty shows the same dynamic in a different category. At a moment when many beauty brands shifted toward “clean,” minimalist positioning and carefully scrubbed messaging, Huda Beauty leaned harder into founder voice, spectacle and cultural visibility. The work wasn’t subtle, but that was the point. The contrast drove faster direct-to-consumer velocity and stronger launch impact because it cut through a category increasingly optimized to offend no one.These brands are not reckless. They are intentionally non-neutral in a neutralized market. And that is the difference. 

Brands that became safer slowed growth

Safety doesn’t kill brands. It caps upside. And the evidence for that has become much clearer over the past two years, because several global brands have now said the quiet part out loud: growth stalled not because the product failed, but because the brand stopped creating desire.

Nike is the most explicit case. Between 2023 and 2024, Nike, the “Just Do It” brand leaned heavily into performance marketing, efficiency and DTC optimization while pulling back on culturally bold, emotionally charged brand storytelling. The result wasn’t a sudden crash, but a visible loss of momentum: slowing revenue growth, declining foot traffic and market share pressure in key categories. What makes Nike different is that leadership acknowledged the mistake. Executives publicly stated that the brand had lost heat, over-optimized for short-term performance and underinvested in brand-led storytelling. Nike’s subsequent pivot back toward sport, emotion and cultural relevance wasn’t cosmetic. It was corrective.

Burberry tells a similar story in a different category. After a period of creative resurgence, Burberry drifted into safer, quieter luxury signaling. The work became polished, restrained and easier to approve — and less distinctive. In 2024, the brand issued profit warnings and leadership openly acknowledged a loss of relevance and clarity. The problem wasn’t execution. It was a lack of emotional tension. In luxury, when a brand stops taking creative risks, demand softens long before consumers consciously articulate why.

Starbucks shows how this plays out at scale. Over time, Starbucks standardized its messaging, leaned into operational consistency and relied more heavily on promotions and pricing to drive traffic. Same-store sales pressure and declining relevance with younger consumers followed. In 2024, Starbucks leadership acknowledged that the brand had become too transactional and needed to rebuild emotional connection, not just optimize throughput. Again, the issue wasn’t visibility. It was meaning.

None of these brands failed. They’re still large, powerful businesses. But in each case, growth slowed when marketing shifted from creating desire to managing risk. The common thread isn’t bad leadership or weak products. It’s what happens when safety becomes the default posture and brand conviction gives way to process.

This is the danger moment. When brands stop taking risks, they don’t disappear. They become quieter, slower and easier to replace. And in a market where AI can produce perfectly acceptable work on demand, “acceptable” is no longer a neutral choice. It’s a ceiling.

For large brands, hitting that ceiling looks like a slowdown. Scale, distribution and awareness soften the impact. Safety behaves like a speed bump — growth continues, just without momentum.

For smaller brands, the same behavior has a very different outcome. They don’t have the luxury of legacy, footprint or habitual demand to carry them through periods of indistinct marketing.

This is where the real mistake happens. When smaller brands play it safe and start acting like big brands, they voluntarily give up one of the few advantages they actually have. They trade nimbleness for process. Provocation for permission. Speed for approval. In trying to look credible, they abandon the ability to be memorable.

When smaller brands adopt the same safety reflexes — the same vague language, neutral tone and fear of interpretation — they don’t stabilize growth. They stall it entirely. Without risk, there is no shortcut to relevance, no reason to choose them and no second act to fall back on.

Why safety is now more dangerous than it used to be

For years, brands could afford to play it safe because baseline competence still required effort. That’s no longer true. AI has erased the advantage of being merely “good enough.” Acceptable creative is now instant, abundant and indistinguishable. When everyone can clear the same quality bar, clearing it stops meaning anything.

At the same time, performance media has become less efficient. CPMs are higher, attention is more fragmented and returns decay faster. WARC and Kantar both show a widening gap between spend and effectiveness, particularly for brands without strong memory structures. You can still buy reach, but you can’t buy resonance. And without resonance, brands are forced to spend more just to stand still.

Attention itself has also become more fragile. Cultural cycles move faster, campaigns live shorter lives and audiences forget quicker. Long-running platforms have given way to bursts of interchangeable content optimized for feeds rather than memory. The result is a paradox: brands are communicating more and being remembered less.

In that environment, neutral brands don’t feel safe. They feel invisible. They disappear faster than controversial ones because they leave no trace. A brand that provokes a reaction at least creates memory. A brand that carefully avoids interpretation often creates none.

This is where many brands are making the wrong call. The mistake isn’t choosing restraint. Restraint can be strategic. The mistake is choosing it by default, without asking what it actually costs.

What does safety cost us in memorability when everything else looks and sounds the same? What does neutrality do to pricing power when there’s no emotional reason to prefer us? What signal does silence send internally, to teams looking for conviction, and externally, to customers deciding what matters?

Large brands can absorb those costs for a while. Scale, distribution and habit act as shock absorbers. Safety slows them down, but it rarely stops them outright. Smaller brands don’t get that grace period. When they default to the same safety posture — the same vague language, neutral tone and fear of interpretation — they give up the one advantage they actually have: the ability to be fast, opinionated and provocative. In trying to behave like big brands, they surrender the very traits that allow them to compete.

And in a market shaped by AI, declining media efficiency and vanishing attention, fear doesn’t just protect downside. It quietly guarantees irrelevance.

The decision framework winning brands are using

The brands winning right now aren’t braver. They’re smarter.

They don’t debate risk as a creative preference or a personality trait. They treat it as a strategic allocation decision. Risk isn’t something you sprinkle across campaigns or outsource to an agency brainstorm. It’s something you deliberately place, the same way you place budget, talent or leadership attention.

Where risk creates memory: Winning brands understand that not every message needs edge, but some absolutely do. They take risk where memorability matters most: brand launches, platform-defining campaigns, moments where they need to be remembered a week later, not just clicked today. They accept that mild discomfort is often the price of recall and that ideas no one objects to are rarely the ones anyone remembers.

Where restraint protects trust: They are equally deliberate about where restraint protects trust. Not everything benefits from provocation. Regulated communications, moments of genuine vulnerability or categories built on reassurance demand discipline, not drama. The difference is intent. Restraint is chosen because it serves the brand, not because it’s the path of least resistance. Trust is protected without draining the brand of personality everywhere else.

Where silence is strategic: They also recognize that silence can be strategic. In a culture that rewards constant reaction, sometimes the strongest signal is refusing to participate. Winning brands don’t feel compelled to comment on every trend, controversy or cultural flashpoint. They understand that speaking less, but with clarity and conviction, often builds more authority than filling feeds with cautious noise.

Where safety is just habit: Most importantly, they know how to spot where safety has become habit. This is the hard part. It requires asking uncomfortable questions inside the organization: Are we avoiding this idea because it’s wrong, or because it’s unfamiliar? Are we protecting the brand, or protecting ourselves? Is this decision grounded in insight, or in fear dressed up as process? When safety can’t clearly justify itself in terms of growth, memory or trust, it stops being strategy and starts being inertia.

This is the blueprint. Not more risk everywhere. Not reckless provocation. But conscious placement. Risk is no longer a creative choice. It’s a strategic allocation decision.

Risk is more valuable than ever

What’s actually changed isn’t that risk suddenly became smarter, more sophisticated or more virtuous. Risk became scarce. And in markets driven by attention, memory and meaning, scarcity creates value whether brands like it or not.

That’s why the work that still makes people uncomfortable now travels further than the work designed to make everyone comfortable. It’s not louder. It’s not more outrageous. It’s just rarer. In a world where AI can generate perfectly acceptable creative in seconds, the only thing left that still signals intent is the willingness to commit — to a point of view, a tone or an idea that someone might argue with.

Which brings me back to where I started. I didn’t spend a career pushing ideas until clients’ palms sweat because I enjoyed discomfort for its own sake. I did it because that tension was usually the tell. It meant the work was doing something. It meant it had edges. And edges are where memory lives. Risk-aversion isn’t killing marketing. But unthinking safety never propels brands forward.