Will creative risks solve the challenges of audience attention deficits and declining marketing budgets? They could if you go beyond the hype of an innovative idea. Here’s some expert help to do just that.
Creative risks keep brands alive, keeping them visible and stretching what they can do.
The right ideas can lead to new opportunities and reenergize the team. The wrong ones can trigger public backlash, internal fallout, or confusion about your organization.
The pressure to take those swings has never been higher. Despite the exponential increase in content, attention hasn’t grown in a decade, according to McKinsey. And Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend survey [registration required] shows marketing budgets remain at 7.7% of total revenue, well below pre-pandemic levels.
Marketing leaders are asked to move faster and do more with less. How do you manage creative risks so that bold ideas move the brand forward without setting off alarms inside the company or losing trust outside it?
I spoke with marketing and strategy leaders and reviewed real-world examples and responses to define what effective risk-taking looks like, and how teams can build systems that make experimentation safer and more rewarding.
Related:How To Get Real Creativity in Your Content Marketing
Understand creative risk
Most brands say they want to take risks. Few define what that means.
In marketing, creative risks challenge the norm. They reframe how people see the brand, or they reach audiences in an unfamiliar way. The risk lies in uncertainty. The brand tries something without knowing how it will land.
Isabel North, vice president and managing director at Pace, points to her agency’s recent work with Verizon. “Our client was looking for a conversation they could own that wasn’t directly tied to their products and services,” she says.
The Pace team saw an opportunity in the topic of digital and online safety for the brand that sells smartwatches for kids. It supported Verizon in developing a content hub on parenting in a digital world that features livestreams and expert features.
“The idea was that, over time, those parents would see Verizon as their solution for these kinds of products and services,” Isabel says. “But at its core was really this help-first mentality. That was a big risk.”
The bet paid off. Verizon saw a 10% surge in B2C sales influenced by the new content, a 30% year-over-year increase in web traffic, doubled engagement rates, and a 33% download rate on gated product content.
Unfortunately, most organizations never take creative risks that far. As Jenny Magic, founder and CEO of Build Better Change, puts it, “You have to be either willing to do so much research that it can’t fail or you have to be willing for it to be an experiment that might fail. And what I’m seeing is there’s no budget for the former, and there’s no stomach for the latter.”
Related:Why Marketing Needs To Take Creative Risks, Even if They Fail
That tension between needing certainty and craving change is where many brands get stuck.
Know the dangers of avoiding or mismanaging risk
The cost of avoiding risks is as high as not taking them. Brianna Doe, founder and CEO of Verbatim, an influencer marketing agency, sees that problem often.
“The more you try to hold on and really maintain control of every single piece of that campaign, the less effective the results will be,” she says. “[By] seeing [influencers] less as an ad channel that you can turn on and off and more as a marketing partner will make that experimentation a lot more effective.”
Carla Johnson, founder of RE:Think Labs, says comfort can be dangerous. “When everything is working just fine, it falls into the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ category. That complacency can really quickly turn into the danger zone,” she says.
Of course, unmanaged risks can cause damage, too. Build Better Change’s Unworkable Work report finds that organizations in constant flux face burnout, dips in morale, and losses of confidence.
The pressure to reinvent without structure drains teams fast. Leaders must navigate between innovation and preservation. Push too far and exhaust people or fracture alignment. Hold back and slide into irrelevance. The best leaders acknowledge that tension and build systems that strike a balance.
Related:Visionary Content May Not Be Popular (Yet), But It’s Your Secret Edge
Build the foundation for beneficial innovation
Bold ideas come with a burst of energy that can cloud judgment. Everyone’s excited and ready to move, but creative risks need more than enthusiasm to thrive. They require coordination, shared priorities, and contingency plans. The teams that invest early in structure often reap the rewards later.
1. Set a stage for risk-ready creativity
Creative teams love new ideas. That’s the easy part. What’s harder is creating an environment to test, challenge, and refine those ideas without fear of failure or friction.
Build trust before ideas
Jenny encourages leaders to create what she calls “confidential inquiries.” These safe spaces allow people to voice concerns before a campaign goes live.
“Sometimes you only have a gut instinct,” she says. “Leaders need to align protecting the company with protecting the team, whether that’s incentives for speaking up or for experiments that go right.”
Risk-ready teams also ensure the right people are in the room from the start — what Brianna calls “diverse representation from different walks of life.”
“If you don’t have folks in the room that are pushing back, that are questioning, that are playing devil’s advocate and calling out potential risks, you’re really gonna miss out,” she says.
Pair culture with structure
Jenny sees the same pattern inside high-performing organizations. Teams that can handle creative experimentation well score high on psychological safety, characterized by open conversation, inclusiveness, a willingness to help, and a healthy attitude toward risk and failure.
Still, culture isn’t enough. Safe risk-taking needs structure. Jenny recommends developing a “change philosophy” — a clear framework for testing ideas, making decisions, and evaluating progress.
She describes it as a spectrum. On the low-risk end, a company might say, “We prioritize stability, but we will consider change that has a strong likelihood of significantly improving employee or customer satisfaction or profitability.”
A high-risk change philosophy may sound like: “Change is a constant in our industry. We commit to proactive, employee-driven evolution, prioritizing experimentation, learning as we go, and iterative improvement.”
Most organizations want both the security of stability and the breakthroughs that can only come from innovation, but Jenny says that’s not realistic. Leaders have to decide where they stand and build processes that match that position.
Keep ideas flowing
Even with structure, communication can break down. Leaders say the team doesn’t bring enough ideas. The team says the leaders shut them down. Jenny suggests a simple shift: Frame feedback around what worked and what could evolve. It separates the idea from the person and helps morale survive the pivot.
2. Align stakeholders
Leaders earn trust by slowing down and letting the team shape the change. “Resistance is information. Treat it as data, not defiance,” Jenny explains. When teams feel their concerns are heard, they’re more likely to support new ideas.
Buy-in starts with participation
From an agency perspective, Isabel says building buy-in starts with showing that you can match a client’s pace. Many organizations operate with an agile, “build the plane while flying it” mentality. They don’t always wait for a perfect plan or long approval cycles. Demonstrating how you think and adapt in real-time, even without a long track record or polished case studies, gives those stakeholders confidence that you can keep up and problem-solve alongside them.
Share the messy middle
Creative risk often unravels when communication skips straight from concept to decision. Yet, leaders may prefer to wait until plans are finalized to share them, which Jenny says can fuel confusion and pushback. Sharing ideas earlier as they take shape gives people time to weigh in and builds faith in the outcome.
Measure what matters and define it early
Metrics work best when they reflect the intent behind the work. Brianna says every team should agree on what success looks like before the creative risk launches (i.e., short-term proof versus long-term impact).
Isabel points to Verizon’s content hub as an example. The primary key performance indicator isn’t direct sales but intent to convert. A win happens when a parent reads an article on digital safety and clicks to a product page. That clarity keeps everyone aligned on what the campaign is meant to achieve.
Carla sums up the measurement challenge well: “Fuzzy directions deliver fuzzy outcomes.”
3. Implement risk mitigation protocols
A framework that provides a structure for microexperimentation, thoughtful reviews, and focused recalibration helps give teams a safety net. It minimizes fear of failure by turning every tested idea into an opportunity for future improvement.
Start small and stay transparent
A well-designed experiment makes tests small, clear, and reversible, Jenny says.
Isabel adds that transparency builds confidence. When her team took on a larger-than-usual project for a client, they were clear about what they’d done before and how they planned to scale it. That honesty helped the client feel more prepared to take on the risk.
Plan for things going sideways
Even strong ideas that make it out of committee don’t always land the way you hope. Once a campaign is live, you can’t pull it back into the room. However, you can study what happened and use it to identify weak points sooner, as well as determine which risks are worth taking next time.
This is where the debrief matters. Look at the data, talk through what happened, and identify the signals you overlooked. Then update your processes so the insights don’t fade after the post-mortem.
“Even if a campaign wasn’t a success, if it was a flop, you can still learn from that,” Brianna says. “You’ll probably learn more than if it went well. Don’t just throw it away or turn it off if it didn’t go well.”
Lead at the edge of creativity
Innovation without structure burns teams out. Structure without innovation makes them disappear. The brands that survive creative risk-taking learn to work at the edge. They’re bold enough to take chances but disciplined enough to manage the fallout.
As Brianna puts it, “Don’t be afraid to trust your gut, but challenge yourself to pair that with data or at least develop a hypothesis you can prove or disprove.”
Jenny encourages leaders to make experimentation a regular habit. Small, low-stakes tests help teams learn more quickly and remain open to new ideas.
Isabel says leaders should listen closely for consistent client signals and take responsible risks to meet those needs before competitors do.
For Carla, risk-taking starts with giving creativity room to breathe. Set aside time to think. Step away from the screen. Let ideas stretch before they shrink under pressure.
As AI and automation take over routine tasks, what remains distinctly human is the ability to question, imagine, and take smart risks. The leaders who treat it as a practice, not a fleeting moment of inspiration, will define what great marketing looks like.
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