If You’re Not Taking Risks, “You’re Sunk as a Marketer”

Marketing leaders are drowning in data, but fear of failure still kills bold ideas, even though “pioneering ideas can’t be tested.”

Marketing leader and former Deloitte Digital global CMO Nick Garrett said the value and success of a research process hinges on whether it’s being used to enhance, or de-risk, the work.

“Anything that tests an idea is going to be challenging, and it's probably not going to work, and the most pioneering ideas can't be tested, because consumers can only buy what they understand today,” he said.

“If you have a confident client who uses research as a tool to be smarter, you're laughing. If you've got an unconfident client who's using it as a safety net, you're in trouble.”

Three principles comprise excellent marketing, he noted: strategy, idea, and execution.

“When you separate yourself from the agency world you become quite jarred and think ‘holy fuck, you're blurring all three of them together,’” Nick said.

“[They] don't know what [they’re] testing, don't know what [they’re] buying. Yes, there is blurring between the three, but they’re actually three fundamental steps.

“I don't think we've got the breadth of being open strategically. We think there's one right answer; there's not, there are multiple right answers.

“If I knew what I know now and could go back 10 years, I'd be really aggressive with strategy around propositions – not to post-rationalise the work, but to actually create the best launch pad for the work and get client buy in.”

The panel, ‘The Risk of Not Taking Risks’, was held on Wednesday night and hosted by research platform Ideally and moderated by Telstra CMO Brent Smart.

29% of brands admit they’re actively risk-averse, according to Lion’s 2025 State of Creativity research, and teams are struggling to convert ideas into boardroom buy-in. The panellists dug into why brands default to caution.

Tourism Australia executive GM, strategy and research, Rob Dougan, delivered a wake-up call to marketers.

“Everyone in this room will understand that if you're not in some form of risk or being bold, you’re sunk as a marketer,” Rob said.

Al Crawford, strategist and founder of Shapeshifter Consulting, suggested a key obstacle to managing stakeholders could be the way marketers talk about risk.

“I think reframing things to boldness, which is measured, reasoned and principled, is actually a better way to go,” Al said. “I think boldness, in many ways, is a word that we should be using more, because I suspect that risk makes many organisations crap their pantaloons.”

For Rob, research can be a critical tool for bridging the agency and client gap in risk appetite.

“At Tourism Australia … we're a marketing agency, a government organisation, and we’re also people from the tourism industry who have an enormous understanding of how marketing works,” he explained.

“So whenever we do a campaign, you have to explain to all these [stakeholders] why one part of that organisation thinks a certain way about a risk.

“We did a campaign ‘Ruby the Roo’ with Rose Byrne, and Ruby had a sidekick – a unicorn. The kangaroo explains what it's like to be in Australia. Everyone in this room thinks, ‘great, it's a buddy film, right?’

“But trying to explain that to some of those other organisations is quite hard, right. You get into these conversations where it makes intuitive sense to you, but you're explaining that to audiences or stakeholders that don't necessarily get that. The way we got around that was by doing research, and we did.”

However, that research can be a source of pain for creative agencies, for whom the often bloated, time-consuming process ultimately only limits the output.

Nicole Jauncey, co-founder and creative at ABEL, told the panel she doesn't typically enjoy the research process.

“What I saw during [a recent research] process was a global client who wanted to make the work … and global stakeholders who needed to see research.”

Nicole explained that market differences in the research created two months of additional labour “justifying the work”.

“We ended up in a situation two months later where we were making the exact same work, but we’d lost two months in the production process. For me, research is about the fast, iterative moments of using insights, not about testing the creative idea.”

Jen Beirne, former head of marketing for Adobe and Amazon, also noted that brands can be an obstacle to conducting meaningful research.

Recalling the Australian launch of Amazon Alexa, Jen said the product came with a marketing “playbook” based on research conducted in the US.

“In the first instance, you think ‘maybe I need to listen to the mothership,’” Jen said.

But Jen and her team had a “gut-feel” at the time that Australians wouldn’t want to engage with an Amazon device, seeing it as American and “not built for them”.

“The risk was around pushing back on localisation, and what we really felt would make the product successful,” she said.

“We did our research, crowd-sourced information … [and went on a] journey [to learn] why we felt they couldn't resonate with the brand. Using all that insight, we embarked on a pretty tough project to train our large language model over 60 weeks.”

Spending too much time debating and involving stakeholders, Jen believes, is how ideas “die in the boardroom.”

“You need to be really savvy on who your advocates are, who the naysayers are, and who your sceptics are, because you need to understand how to engage and what you need to present to those individuals in order to get your work across the line.

“In large corporations, we love data. Amazon [had] so much data sometimes I think it made things too complex.

“We absolutely leverage research. But we have to be smart. In countries like Australia, we're small compared to the US, but the US thinks that because it has streams and streams of research, insights, and data, their playbook should work everywhere. A lot of my time was spent educating and influencing back to the mothership.”