Simon Veksner: Our debate about ‘risky’ versus ‘safe’ advertising is embarrassingly amateur
The 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…
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A useful adjunct to the discussion might be to dig out a copy of ‘Risk & Responsibility’ that grainy old 16mm film featuring Jeremy Bullmore et al illustrating the risks of being responsible with David Ogilvy’s ‘The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,’
A similar discussion on DDB’s classic ‘Think Small’ print ad is archived somewhere I’d guess Simon.
“A low risk campaign can never earn a high return.”
Sadly, you CAN do low-risk, client friendly, intellectually dull work and still gain a return.
The more truthful interpretation of the risk you refer to is, will the client risk doing work that WE think is cool but MAY have absolutely nothing to do with the lives of people who enjoy watching gogglebox?
Down, down, prices are down, anyone?
Simon, when I worked at Saatchi & Saatchi London they had the portfolio approach available to clients and staffed the creative department accordingly; clients who wanted boring got it from the hacks, clients who wanted highly creative got it from the stars, and everything in between. Fortunately with an agency of 600 people, including 40 creative teams, the shop window was large enough to give the appearance that everything the agency did was brilliant.