Every awards season, the marketing industry rediscovers the same word: bravery. Jury citations praise it. Keynote speakers demand it. Agency decks promise it. And yet, according to the 2025 State of Creativity report from Cannes Lions’ parent company, only 13% of marketers describe their own organizations as risk-friendly, while 29% call themselves highly risk-averse — a gap between rhetoric and behavior that has been widening, not closing, even as the same report’s data shows risk-taking brands posting four times higher profit margins.
That paradox is the subject of this piece. If courage is genuinely correlated with better business outcomes, why does the industry keep talking about bravery instead of building the structures that make risk survivable? The uncomfortable answer is that “be brave” was never a strategy. It is a mood, dressed up as advice, aimed at people who have neither the budget authority, the tenure, nor the measurement systems to act on it. What marketers actually need is not encouragement — it is a discipline: a specific, defensible framework for how much risk to take, where, and for how long before it pays off.
This article traces where the bravery mandate came from, what the effectiveness data actually says about risk-taking, why the incentive structure around most marketing leaders makes bravery nearly impossible to execute responsibly, and what a more useful vocabulary — one built on measurement rather than exhortation — looks like in practice.
Why is telling marketers to “be brave” bad advice? Telling marketers to “be brave” offers no operational guidance — it names a feeling, not a lever. Effectiveness research points instead to a specific budget ratio (roughly 60% long-term brand building, 40% short-term activation), tenure long enough to let results compound, and insight-backed risk-taking — not a slogan urging boldness without the structure to support it.
How “Bravery” Became Marketing’s Favorite Empty Word
Cannes Lions has used the language of courage in award citations and stage programming for well over a decade, and it is not hard to see why: creativity festivals are, by design, in the business of celebrating the unusual. Over time, “bravery” migrated from a description applied after the fact to a small number of standout campaigns into a generic instruction handed down in advance to marketing teams who had none of the same conditions those campaigns enjoyed — deep customer insight, senior sponsorship, and a tolerance for a slow payoff.
The distinction matters. A campaign is not brave because someone decided to be bold; it is brave because a specific set of enabling conditions existed first. Conflating the label with the cause is exactly what turns a case study into a slogan. LIONS Advisory’s own 2025 research names the enabling conditions directly: more than half of respondents (51%) said their customer insight is too weak to support bold creative work, and 57% said they cannot react quickly enough to cultural moments to make risk-taking pay off. Bravery, in other words, is downstream of infrastructure — insight, speed, and sponsorship — not a personality trait marketers are failing to summon.
This is also a story about incentives, which is where the analysis needs to go next.
The Data Behind the Bravery Myth
The Profit Case for Risk Is Real — But Incomplete
The headline numbers are genuinely striking. LIONS’ research cites its sister brand WARC’s finding that risk-taking brands generate roughly four times higher profit margins, and separate analysis from Deloitte found that brands with a strong appetite for creative risk are 33% more likely to see long-term revenue growth. These figures are frequently used to justify exactly the kind of “be brave” messaging this article is arguing against — which is the core irony. The data supports risk-taking as a structural choice, not an emotional one, yet it keeps getting deployed as a pep talk rather than a planning input.
The Budget Reality Is Moving the Opposite Direction
While bravery rhetoric has intensified, actual marketing budgets have moved toward the exact opposite of what the effectiveness literature recommends. WARC’s 2024 data recorded that 68.8% of marketing budgets flowed to short-term performance tactics, up from 59.9% the year before, while brand-building’s share fell to just 31.2%. That shift runs directly against the framework built by effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field, whose analysis of nearly 1,000 case studies in the IPA Databank — spanning roughly 700 brands across 83 sectors and more than 30 years — found that brands achieve their best long-run results, including higher market share and stronger pricing power, when they hold close to a 60:40 split between long-term brand building and short-term activation. Over-invest in activation, and returns diminish as acquisition costs climb and price sensitivity rises. Over-invest in brand building alone, and a company fails to capture the demand it has created.
Read together, these two data sets describe an industry moving further from its own evidence base while getting louder about courage. That is not a coincidence — it is a symptom of who actually holds the budget lever, and how long they get to hold it.
Why “Be Brave” Fails as Actionable Advice
Claim: Bravery Names a Feeling, Not a Decision Rule
An instruction is only useful if it tells someone what to do differently on a Tuesday afternoon. “Be brave” does not specify a budget split, a testing protocol, a sign-off threshold, or a time horizon. Binet and Field’s 60:40 ratio does all four: it gives a marketer a number to defend in a budget meeting, a category-adjusted range to depart from, and a rationale — compounding brand equity versus a short, sharp sales bump — for why the ratio matters at all. That is the difference between a directive and a mood.
Evidence: Positioning Work Backs This Up
The same logic applies one level up, at the positioning layer. Effective brand positioning is less about staking out a dramatic claim and more about disciplined alignment between how a brand wants to be perceived and how it is actually perceived by the market — the kind of gap-closing work covered in this analysis of brand positioning effectiveness, which treats positioning as a measurable process rather than a matter of nerve. Bravery, applied to positioning without that discipline, tends to produce distinctiveness for its own sake — memorable, perhaps, but disconnected from the preference-building work a brand actually needs.
Interpretation and Counterpoint
None of this means boldness in creative execution is worthless — the profit data above says otherwise. The counterpoint worth taking seriously is that some celebrated “brave” campaigns did work, and worked precisely because of the design behind them, not because someone in a room decided to take a leap. Cannes Lions’ own festival commentary on its most awarded 2025 work highlighted a campaign built around verifying user-generated product hacks instead of pushing a traditional brand message — a reversal of the usual brand-to-consumer dynamic that succeeded because it was built on genuine listening infrastructure, not on courage as an input. The lesson is not “don’t take risks.” It is that risk-taking that works is preceded by insight work that bravery-as-a-mandate skips entirely.
The Incentive Problem: Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Be Brave
Tenure Is Shrinking Faster Than Brand Equity Compounds
Even if a marketing leader accepts the 60:40 logic, they face a structural obstacle: time. According to Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study, average tenure among chief marketing officers at S&P 500 companies fell to 4.1 years in 2025, the lowest figure the study has recorded in more than a decade. Binet and Field’s own research describes brand-building effects as slow-accumulating and compounding — the opposite of the fast, attributable wins that a CMO with a shrinking runway needs to show early. Sixty-two percent of departing CMOs in the Spencer Stuart study moved into equal or larger roles elsewhere, which suggests the market rewards visible short-term performance over patient equity-building, regardless of which one the effectiveness data favors.
Boards Reward What They Can Measure Quickly
This tenure pressure interacts with a measurement problem. Long-term brand equity is harder to quantify in a quarterly board deck than a performance-marketing conversion rate, which is part of why frameworks for measuring brand equity against loyalty and profitability matter as much as the creative work itself — a marketer who cannot show the board a defensible number for brand-building’s return is negotiating from a position of pure faith, and faith loses budget arguments. Forrester’s Predictions 2026 report makes the resulting posture explicit, forecasting that CMOs navigating 2026’s volatility will favor “a surgical approach to growth — prioritizing smaller, short-term wins,” succeeding through “adaptability and precision, not sweeping initiatives or careless risks.” That is not cowardice. It is a rational response to being measured on a shorter clock than the effect they are being asked to produce.
From Bravery to Risk Management: A Better Vocabulary
The most useful development in this conversation did not come from a think piece — it came from Cannes Lions itself. Commentary on the 2025 festival, summarized by WARC, noted a shift away from the industry’s long-standing call for “bravery” toward a more grounded discussion of risk as something to be structured and managed rather than summoned on command. That reframing treats marketing the way a capital allocator treats an investment: not as an act of nerve, but as a discipline that converts calculated exposure into durable, measurable growth.
A useful real-world illustration of that discipline sits outside the advertising-awards world entirely. The recovery of Restaurant Week programs after the pandemic, examined in this review of stakeholder-management research in post-pandemic recovery, succeeded not because organizers were told to be brave, but because the marketing effort was coordinated across multiple stakeholders — restaurants, tourism boards, local government — with clearly assigned roles and shared measurement. It is a case study in what structured, distributed risk management looks like when it works, without a single slogan attached to it.
Engaging the Counterargument Directly
The obvious objection is that removing “brave” from the vocabulary risks producing timid, forgettable work — that some spark of institutional permission-giving is still necessary to get unconventional ideas approved at all. That objection has merit, but it misdiagnoses the mechanism. The Cannes data on why brands avoid risk points to weak customer insight and slow reaction speed, not a lack of encouragement. Replacing “be brave” with a risk-and-return framework does not remove permission to be unconventional; it replaces an unfalsifiable pep talk with a structure — a budget ratio, a measurement plan, a tenure-adjusted timeline — that can actually defend an unconventional idea in the room where the decision gets made.
Data & Evidence Layer
Methodology note: This analysis synthesizes five primary research streams rather than presenting original survey data: Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA Databank effectiveness research (996 case studies, 700 brands, 83 sectors), WARC’s 2024 marketing budget allocation tracking, Cannes Lions’ 2025 State of Creativity survey (1,000+ marketers and creatives), Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study of S&P 500 companies, and Forrester’s Predictions 2026 report. Figures are reported as published by each source; no independent recalculation was performed, and the comparison table below is an original synthesis for illustrative purposes rather than a reproduction of any single source’s data.
| Dimension | “Be Brave” Rhetoric | Structured Risk Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Operational content | A feeling to summon | A budget ratio and testing protocol to defend |
| Time horizon assumed | Immediate | Matched to tenure and payback period |
| Measurement | Rarely specified | Brand equity + activation ROI tracked separately |
| Who it protects | The person giving the advice | The person acting on it |
| Cannes 2025 framing | The historical default | The emerging replacement, per WARC’s festival summary |
Implications
For CMOs, the practical takeaway is to replace “be brave” as an internal rallying cry with a specific, board-defensible ratio — something close to the 60:40 brand-to-activation range, adjusted for category and brand maturity — and to present that ratio, not adjectives, when budgets are challenged. For boards and CFOs, the implication is sharper still: if tenure keeps shrinking toward four years while brand-building effects take longer than that to compound, the measurement system itself is structurally biased against the long-term investment the company claims to want. Fixing that requires tenure-adjusted incentive design, not braver marketers. For agencies, the shift from bravery to risk management is a pitching opportunity: work that arrives with an insight base, a measurement plan, and a stated time horizon is easier for a risk-averse client to approve than work that arrives with only a promise of impact.
Counterpoints and Limitations
This analysis has boundaries worth stating plainly. First, the profit and revenue-growth figures cited from WARC/Kantar and Deloitte describe correlation between self-reported risk appetite and financial performance, not a proven causal mechanism — brands confident enough to call themselves risk-friendly may also simply be better-resourced or better-led on other dimensions. Second, the 60:40 rule is, by Binet and Field’s own account, an average across a large dataset rather than a fixed prescription; category dynamics, brand maturity, and competitive intensity all shift the optimal ratio in ways this piece has not modeled sector by sector. Third, this argument is built primarily on consumer-brand advertising research; B2B marketing, where sales cycles and buying committees behave differently, may not follow the same budget logic. Readers applying this framework to a specific category should treat the ratios as a starting hypothesis to test against their own effectiveness data, not a rule to import unmodified.
Conclusion
The industry does not have a courage problem. It has a structure problem dressed up as a courage problem, and the two are easy to confuse because “be brave” is a much shorter sentence than “restructure your budget allocation, extend your measurement window, and give your CMO enough runway to see a brand-building investment compound.” The data — on profit margins, on budget allocation, on tenure, on Cannes’ own pivot away from the word — all points the same direction: risk-taking works when it is engineered, not when it is requested. The next time a keynote speaker or an award jury tells marketers to be braver, the more useful question is not whether they have the nerve. It is whether anyone has given them the ratio, the runway, and the measurement system to survive being right.
FAQ
Is creative risk-taking in marketing actually profitable?
Yes, according to available research — WARC/Kantar analysis cited in Cannes Lions’ 2025 State of Creativity report found risk-taking brands post roughly four times higher profit margins, and Deloitte found high-risk-appetite brands are 33% more likely to see long-term revenue growth. The caveat is that these are correlational findings, not a controlled causal study.
What is the Binet and Field 60:40 rule?
It is an effectiveness framework, built from nearly 1,000 IPA Databank case studies, finding that brands achieve their strongest long-run results when they allocate roughly 60% of marketing budget to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation, with the exact ratio varying by category and brand maturity.
Why are CMO tenures getting shorter?
Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study found average tenure among S&P 500 CMOs fell to 4.1 years, the lowest in over a decade, driven by intensifying pressure to demonstrate measurable ROI on shorter timelines than brand-building effects typically take to compound.
What should replace “be brave” as marketing advice?
A structured risk framework: a defensible budget ratio, a stated measurement plan separating brand-building from activation returns, and a time horizon matched to how long the organization will actually let the marketing leader stay in the role to see it through.
