For a marketer whose budget—and perhaps job—is on the line, doing consistently boundary-pushing creative work may seem like a gamble. However, the riskiest thing a brand can do is to be ignorable. While this may seem a creative colloquialism, it is actually more of a business imperative, especially as the marketing world faces a new era of technological advancement.
Over the last few decades, marketing innovation has relentlessly pursued efficiency in the market for consumer attention. Programmatic advertising revolutionized media buying. Social platforms turned targeting into a science. Marketing automation made personalization scalable.
Each innovation made it easier to reach exactly who we want, when we want—and drove up the cost of that attention in the process. Now, AI promises to accelerate this efficiency exponentially, generating endless variations of content and optimizing every customer touchpoint with algorithmic precision.
As these tools become ubiquitous, we're approaching what financial markets call “perfect efficiency”—where it becomes increasingly easy to guarantee average market returns. Most marketers, like their counterparts in finance, respond by playing it safe. After all, these tools promise predictable, if modest, results. A conventional strategy could underperform slightly, but it certainly won't get you fired.
But as more brands adopt this safety-first approach, the cost of achieving these average returns keeps rising. Everyone's paying more to reach the same audiences in increasingly optimized ways. In the attention economy, average returns have a unique problem: When everyone achieves the same level of attention, that level of attention becomes meaningless. Average means ignorable.
So, we arrive at a peculiar situation where brands are likely to continue paying premium prices to achieve average results that, by definition, fail to make them stand out. The real risk isn't in a campaign failing—it's in spending more and more money to guarantee your invisibility.
This is where poker players enter the picture, offering an unexpected lesson for brands. No successful poker player aims for average returns—they know the average poker player loses money. Instead, pros operate on the principle of positive expected value (EV)—making decisions based on the likelihood of favorable outcomes over time, even if individual bets don't always pay off.
What does positive EV look like in marketing? It means betting on ideas that might seem risky at first glance—creative approaches that might have only a 20% chance of breaking through. But these are exactly the kinds of bets that can generate outsize returns. When a campaign captures the cultural zeitgeist, it doesn't just slightly outperform the average—it can generate earned media value and brand impact that's 10, 20 or even 50 times the initial investment. A single breakthrough moment can deliver more value than years of “safe” campaigns.
This asymmetry is what makes the expected value calculation so compelling for evaluating creative risk. Even if an unconventional creative approach has a lower probability of success, the potential magnitude of that success makes it mathematically superior to the safe bet.
This math becomes even more favorable when you consider what “playing it safe” really means in today's efficiency-obsessed attention market. When everyone is paying premium prices to minimize risk and avoid losses, being another risk-averse voice means paying top dollar to be invisible. Under such circumstances, taking a creative risk with even just a 20% chance of standing out is actually less risky than guaranteeing your irrelevance with a safe approach that makes you indistinguishable from everyone
But winning in poker—like winning in marketing—isn't just about understanding the math. It’s about finding exploitable edges where that math can be leveraged. The best poker players don't just make positive EV decisions; they hunt for spots where they can exploit their opponents’ tendencies and blind spots.
Similarly, not every agency can consistently find edges in the attention market, likely because these edges emerge only when you push creativity into territories that feel genuinely uncomfortable—places where conventional wisdom screams “too risky.”
Such ideas may sound absurd. But they represent a deeper understanding of where the attention market can be exploited—those moments where conventional wisdom creates blind spots that can be turned into opportunities. These aren't just creative swings for creativity's sake; they're calculated bets on human psychology and cultural momentum, backed by the statistical principles of expected value.
Perhaps there's some creative wisdom in the same cold mathematical truth that every successful poker player knows: When the pot odds are right, you have to make the bold call—even if it means occasionally losing your chips. It's the only reliable way to end up ahead of the game.
This piece first appeared in Ad Age on Feb 27, 2025 and can be found here.