Bravery is the wrong word

You will hear it a lot over the next few weeks. What we need is brave creative work. Which, roughly translated, means: we do not really have a strategy, so let’s compensate with something attention-grabbing, disruptive, or failing that a branded barge on the Thames...

If you have ever sat in a briefing with a CMO or CCO asking you to be brave, you are not alone. The industry has been having a long conversation with itself about creative bravery, courage and confidence. Marketing Week has run it as a recurring theme through 2025. The Marketing Society has built an entire agenda around it. Cannes Lions, in a few weeks’ time, will return to it again. No doubt with a focus on the impact of AI on creative and emerging talent. Regardless, the shared diagnosis is that the industry has lost its nerve or direction.

I have been watching this conversation for many years. The industry is right that the work needs to be bolder, more creative, more distinctive. The conversation never quite resolves because bravery is being asked to do the work of something else.

Bravery is what you ask of people when you haven’t done the strategic work.

It is the exhortation that fills the space where rigour and inspiration should be. Bold creative will always require courage from the people who put their name to it. That is the nature of the work. But when bravery is doing the heavy lifting at the point of decision, it is usually because the upstream work was never properly done.

A capability problem, not a creative one

This is not a creative problem. It is a capability problem, and it has a structural cause.

The senior strategic layer in communications has been thinning for several years, and the pace has accelerated. Marketing Week's 2025 Career and Salary Survey found that 23.8% of more than 3,500 marketers said their business had cut senior marketing leaders and not replaced them, most often to save on wages. The same survey found that nearly three quarters of CMOs believe marketing strategy is undervalued in their organisation. On the agency side, the cuts have fallen hardest at the junior end, thinning the pipeline that produces the senior strategists of the future.

What gets lost in that thinning is not titles. It is judgement. Specifically, the judgement that can sit in a room with a brief and a piece of work-in-progress and say, with authority, here is what we can afford to risk, and here is what we cannot. When that person is not in the building, the work that arrives on the CMO’s or CCO’s desk has not had that conversation. The bravery is then asked to do the conversation’s job, at the moment of approval. It usually cannot.

Are You Chris?

A moment from my career sits cleanly inside this argument. In 2017, I was the strategic lead on Are You Chris?, a disease awareness platform for Gilead Sciences working on hepatitis C. Developed for global rollout and piloted in Germany, the category convention was the standard one: clinical messaging, sober tone, hope people self-identify. The strategy we developed went somewhere different. It treated stigma, not awareness, as the primary barrier; built a branded campaign of a kind the pharma industry had not previously attempted in disease awareness; and ran a measurement framework rigorous enough to isolate impacts from awareness through to people visiting health providers and into uptake of treatment.

When the creative platform was presented to the client communications lead, her response was the one you want. It’s very bold. But based on that strategy, it couldn’t be anything else, could it.

She was right. The boldness was a consequence of the strategy, not a choice imposed on it. But the strategy on the page was only ever half the work. The other half was hers: securing buy-in across commercial, digital, clinical and regulatory, and securing the funding for a fully integrated campaign. The measurement framework was the document that did that work for her. What looked like courage from the outside was, in the room, informed confidence drawn from a strategy she could defend.

The campaign won Communiqué and SABRE recognition. A wider rollout did not follow; commercial conditions ultimately intervened. The point is not the awards or the rollout that did not come. It is what made the courage possible: rigour, inspiration and accountability, working together rather than separately.

Approaching earned and integrated campaigns properly requires an approach that can optimise the opportunities and manage the risks posed by the various stakeholders and communities the brief touches. That means understanding the value the work should deliver, and at the same time, the risks and vulnerabilities it carries. Two questions, mapped together, before the creative is briefed.

The bravery conversation, in three frames

So why does the bravery conversation keep coming back? Because each of the dominant framings names something real. They just stop short.

Be braver. The exhortation is right that something has gone missing from communications, marketing and creative work, and that recovering it matters. Where it stops short is in the diagnosis. Bravery is a personal trait being asked to do structural work. The exhortation puts the weight of bold decisions onto individuals at the moment of approval, when the upstream conditions that would have made those decisions easier were never built. It is the wrong ask of the wrong person at the wrong moment.

None of this is to dismiss bravery altogether. Even with strategic rigour underneath, bold work still asks something of the people who put their name to it. On Are You Chris?, the strategy gave us conviction. The work still felt brave. What rigour does is not remove the courage. It focuses it on the right thing.

Take calculated risks. The framing is right that risk is the territory and that some sort of method should be applied to it. Where it stops short is in the word calculated. Calculated by whom, against what, with what frame? Without those answers, the language sits in for the work rather than naming it, and in practice it tends to license the safest option dressed up as the considered one.

Effectiveness data proves bold creative works. The Field and Binet body of work is foundational and the case it makes is correct. Where it stops short is that effectiveness data tells the story in the past tense. It explains what worked, often beautifully. It does not help the CMO sitting in front of work-in-progress on a Wednesday afternoon decide whether to approve it. In many years of watching this conversation, the cause has not changed: it is short-termism, dressed up in a series of new clothes. The data answers the retrospective question. The Wednesday afternoon question still needs a tool of its own.

Rigour and inspiration

The honest version of the conversation is simpler than the bravery one. The reason the industry keeps asking for bravery is that it wants work that is creative, distinctive and effective - work that cuts through, lasts, and earns its place. That want is right. The exhortation is the wrong route to it.

Bold creative work is not produced by people who are unusually courageous. It is produced by people who have done the upstream work properly, by cultures that value strategic rigour as much as creative execution, and by clients who have the standing to defend that work inside their own organisations.

Rigour and inspiration belong together. Rigour is the upstream work. Inspiration is what becomes possible because of it. Bravery is what is left to do once both are in the room.

The framework I use to hold this in one place is the subject of the next piece.