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BRAVE OR STUPID?

Creative agencies often ask their clients to ‘be brave’: to take a risk or embrace uncertainty or feel the fear and do it anyway.
I can understand why they might want to argue this. Genuinely new ideas are, by their very nature, new – you can’t point to success that other people have had with the idea, because the idea hasn’t been done before.
But I can also understand why the agency argument doesn’t always work”.  We are risk-averse creatures: a campaign that is likely to work quite well might seem a better bet than one that might go off like a firework – but might fizzle out into nothing.
But perhaps we’ve got it all wrong. The biggest risk for most advertising isn’t that it won’t convince everyone who sees it, but that it won’t get noticed at all. Online, only 22% of the ads that people could see actually get seen – 78% get ignored.
In that context, it’s brave indeed to do boring or run-of-the-mill creative work. Actually, it’s not brave to waste that much of your budget: it’s stupid. Richard Shotton writes a compelling piece about just this in Marketing Week (quoting Lumen data, of course).
You can have the best of both worlds by derisking your creative decisions by doing a quick and painless pre-test to see if people really are noticing your ads. Have a look at some of our work in partnership with Ipsos to learn more, or click here to get in touch.
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