The greatest risk to your business is taking no risk at all

As budgets tighten marketing is becoming more cautious, not less. Jasmine Hansen, head of digital experience at ATime&Place, argues the brands pulling ahead now are doing the opposite.

In a market where every brand is fighting for the same shrinking pool of attention, playing it safe is the most expensive thing you can do with your marketing budget.

I've spent 12 years on the client-side watching this play out from inside the room. Budget pressure is real - there’s the rising costs, softer consumer spending and further pressure from the CFO to get it right and justify every cent.

For many marketers, the environment has felt like one long exercise in doing more with less. The irony is that doing more with less should be creating a golden age of creativity. Instead, in many cases, it seems to be producing the opposite.

When budgets become constrained, the instinct seems to be to become more conservative. The thinking goes that if there is less room for error, every decision needs to be carefully considered.

Before long, ideas are refined, adjusted, socialised and reviewed to the point where all the edges have been sanded off. The same thing applies to mediums - we revert to channels like TV and radio because they are the safe play, rather than push ourselves into the newer spaces our customers actually frequent like Twitch, Discord and ZEPETO.

Attention has always been the starting point, but consumers have never been more distracted. Every brand is competing against an endless stream of content, creators, entertainment and information.

Yet at the exact moment attention has become harder to earn, many marketers seem to be gravitating towards safer and blander territory.

I’ve seen first-hand the brands that stand out are often the ones doing the opposite.

Whether it's a challenger brand taking on a category leader or a global business finding new ways to stay culturally relevant, the common thread is rarely budget size. More often than not, it's a willingness to back a distinctive point of view and show up natively and uniquely on a multitude of different platforms.

Again, I know because I’ve been lucky enough to be in the room as these things evolve working for brands like e.l.f. Cosmetics and Sportsbet.

Take e.l.f. Cosmetics, now in its 29th consecutive quarter of growth and nipping at the heels of L'Oreal. They didn't get there by outspending one of the biggest advertisers on earth, they did it by treating every platform differently, rather than running the same brand deck through a different aspect ratio.

Sportsbet has built 50% market share by investing in its own platform instead of renting attention from someone else's algorithm, and by asking what their product looks like if they're not just a betting app but the home of sports entertainment.

Or Adidas, which went into Roblox and turned digital UGC into a seven figure revenue line that didn't exist a few years ago. It’s marketing, just not as we know it.

Then there's Didi. Genuinely annoying - deliberately so. Half the industry winces at Nudgy, its distinctive mascot and the drum n bass flute tune (which has had 170k streams on Spotify) that won't leave your head.

But Didi is trying to crack an awareness problem in a category where almost nobody can name a second player. So it’s not an accident, it's the strategy working exactly as intended - find a target audience and be single minded about appealing to them.

If we go back a bit further, another example is our work for Suzuki - where we created an album of “Land Shanties” as a soundtrack to the Suzuki Vitara, performed by The Longest Johns. Launched in 2021, the seven-song concept album now has over four million streams on Spotify.

What this tells us is if you try to be liked by everyone, you tend to be remembered by no-one.

So if you're anxious because of a tighter budget (and let's be honest, who isn't), here's where I'd start. Pick one platform and truly specialise in it. Make it your artform, and try to avoid the dangers of simply ‘maintaining’ your brand’s presence on it.

Build something that's yours, that doesn't vanish the moment a platform changes its algorithm. And before you soften an idea because someone might not like it, ask whether "nobody objects" is the bar you should be trying not to clear.

Marketing was never meant to be a spreadsheet sport, it's meant to create connection. Connection, by definition, means some people lean in while others look away. If everyone in the room is comfortable with your idea, that's not a sign you've got it right, it's a sign you're creating expensive wallpaper.