Simon Veksner: Our debate about ‘risky’ versus ‘safe’ advertising is embarrassingly amateur

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Risk-Reward.gifThe attitude that we have towards risk in our industry is embarrassingly amateur.

And I’m pointing the finger at both agencies and clients here, who tend to fall into opposite but equally naive traps.

The agency view, most commonly (but not exclusively) heard from creatives, is that “safe advertising is actually more risky than risky advertising.” The theory here is that if advertising is ‘vanilla’ it “won’t cut through” and is therefore likely to be useless. They rail against clients’ “conservatism”, and wish their clients would have ‘more vision’ or, moving further down the body, ‘more balls.’ READ ON…