Jac Mansour, Pinnacle’s chief creative officer, picked a fight with conventional wisdom this month in MediaPost’s Marketing Daily. His target: the industry habit of treating “nobody complained” as a win. Jac’s argument is pretty simple once you hear it. Brands have gotten really good at pricing the cost of offending someone, and they’ve priced the cost of being ignored at exactly zero. That math is quietly wrecking a lot of advertising.
Every Ad Has Two Ways to Fail
Jac walks through how most creative risk actually gets assessed before an idea reaches production. Someone counts every person who might object, might post about it, might call a client’s CEO. That’s one way an ad can fail, and it’s usually the only one anybody’s watching for.
The other way doesn’t set off any alarms. An idea gets softened, then softened again, until it stops being distinct from anything else in its category. Nothing about it will ever draw a complaint, because nothing about it will ever draw a reaction, period. That’s not a safe outcome. It’s just a quiet one, and quiet gets expensive fast when there’s a media budget attached to it.
Not All Caution Is Fear
Jac draws a distinction here that’s worth sitting with. There’s a real difference between softening a decision because a handful of people might object, and shaping a decision because it actually reflects who the brand sells to. From the outside, those two choices can look identical. Only one of them is strategy.
Where AI Fits, According to Jac
Jac doesn’t cast AI as the villain here, which is the more interesting part of the piece. His read is narrower, and honestly more useful: AI is exceptionally good at producing advertising that’s competent, on-brand, and nearly impossible to object to. That sounds like a win right up until you remember inoffensive was never the assignment.
Compelling was.
The risk he’s flagging isn’t job loss. It’s settling. When polished, plausible options show up instantly and in bulk, the temptation is to grab the first one that looks finished instead of holding out for the one that actually says something. He puts it well:
“The risky idea? That’s the one nobody notices.”
It’s a version of the same distinction Pinnacle’s own media leadership has drawn about AI: it’s a tool for moving faster, not a substitute for judgment.
Why This is Worth Sitting With
Anyone who’s weighed a bold concept against a safer backup has felt this exact tension. The safe option always looks lower-risk on paper, because you can picture its downside easily: a complaint, a call, an awkward Slack thread. The bold option’s downside is invisible until months later, when the campaign wraps and nobody outside the building remembers it ran.
That’s also where creative judgment starts earning its keep. As AI makes it easier than ever to churn out safe, competent work at scale, the scarce skill isn’t generating more ideas. It’s knowing which one is worth defending in the room.
Read the Full Column
Jac’s full piece, “Boring Is the New Risky”, is live now on MediaPost’s Marketing Daily.
If you’re staring down a choice between the bold version and the safe one, that’s exactly the kind of call strategy, creative, and media should make together, not creative alone. Connect with Pinnacle to learn more.
