There is a familiar ritual in campaign work. The team develops six routes. Three are safe, two are middling, one is the idea everybody actually believes in. All six go into the deck, because showing range demonstrates effort and gives the client a sense of control.

What happens next is predictable. The brave route is admired and set aside. A safe route is chosen. Elements of the brave one are grafted onto it. The result is a campaign nobody would have chosen if it had been presented on its own.

Range is not the same as rigour

Six routes look like six times the thinking. In reality the effort is divided six ways. Each route gets a fraction of the interrogation it needs, so none of them are pressure-tested, and the decision falls to whichever one feels least risky in a forty-minute meeting.

Two routes, each taken seriously and built far enough to be judged fairly, produce a better decision than six sketches. The client is not buying options. They are buying a recommendation.

Safe work is not low risk

The safe route feels like risk management, but the risk it manages is internal: the risk of an uncomfortable conversation, of a stakeholder disagreeing, of having to defend a position. It does nothing about the actual commercial risk, which is that the work is ignored.

A campaign that offends nobody and is remembered by nobody has consumed the entire budget and returned very little. That is the expensive outcome, and it rarely gets labelled as a failure because nothing visibly went wrong. There is no post-mortem for work that was merely ignored.

This is worth naming explicitly at the start of a project, before anyone is emotionally attached to a route. Agreeing in advance that forgettable counts as a failure changes how the final decision gets made, because it puts a cost on the option that otherwise looks free.

Make the brave option easy to say yes to

Bravery in this context is not recklessness, and it is not the job of the client to supply the courage. The work is to remove the reasons for a no. That means showing the idea in situ rather than on a white slide. It means having answered the obvious objections before they are raised, and being honest about where the idea is weak.

Most ideas are rejected because they are underexplained, not because they are too bold. The gap between a sketch and a convincing artefact is where good ideas die.

What this asks of both sides

It asks the agency to have a position and stake something on it. It asks the client to buy judgement rather than a menu. That is a less comfortable relationship than the ritual, and a considerably more productive one.

Fewer ideas, held to a higher standard, defended properly. Everything else is theatre with a production cost.