Marketing leaders increasingly recognize that distinctive creative can drive business impact, yet many organizations remain reluctant to approve work that challenges established norms. A new study from FleishmanHillard and Contagious argues that this gap between belief and behavior is becoming a competitive problem.

Called The Chaos Advantage, the study analyzes recent Cannes Lions and Effie winners alongside a survey of 1,000 senior marketing and communications leaders across North America, EMEA and APAC. It finds that 88% of respondents believe bold creative drives impact, while most say their organizations still produce predominantly safe work.

The central argument of The Chaos Advantage is deliberately provocative: in an uncertain market, avoiding risk may itself be a form of risk.

According to the study, 87% of marketing leaders agree that uncertain environments create opportunities for bold work. Yet two-thirds say their organization's risk-management processes prevent action more often than they enable it. Meanwhile, 58% say missed opportunities caused by caution occur more frequently than negative consequences from taking bold action.

That disconnect has direct competitive implications. Forty-two percent of respondents say they have already watched competitors capture market share while their own organizations hesitated.

The research also challenges the assumption that conservative creative provides greater protection from backlash. FleishmanHillard and Contagious report that brands pursuing safe creative experience public backlash at roughly the same rate as brands taking bolder approaches. Their analysis further claims that uninspired creative is associated with a 37% decline in brand conversion and a 14% reduction in long-term ROI. Those findings come from the study's proprietary analysis and should therefore be distinguished from independent effectiveness research.

There is growing external evidence that creative quality deserves more attention in marketing investment decisions. NIQ's 2026 CMO Outlook found that 60% of surveyed CMOs considered creative a significant driver of marketing ROI, behind audience targeting and reach at 78% and campaign structure and execution at 69%. NIQ also says its research has found that strong creative can generate up to a 50% sales lift.

Research from LIONS points in a similar direction, although it also shows why organizations struggle to act on the insight. Its 2025 State of Creativity found that only 13% of companies considered themselves creative risk-friendly, while 29% described themselves as highly risk-averse. The same study found that 57% of brands struggled to react quickly to cultural moments.

The implication is not that marketers should become reckless. Instead, the more useful interpretation is that organizations need better systems for distinguishing manageable creative risk from uncontrolled business risk.

That is where FleishmanHillard's response becomes relevant to the technology side of the story. Alongside the research, the agency is promoting its Crisis, Issues and Risk Solutions Suite, including Risk ID, an expert-guided AI platform designed to identify, prioritize and mitigate potential risks before campaigns launch.

The concept reflects a broader evolution in marketing operations: AI is increasingly being positioned not only as a content-generation tool but also as infrastructure for decision-making, governance and risk assessment.

For enterprise marketing teams, that could be more consequential than simply producing more creative variations. If technology can help organizations identify potential reputational or operational risks before launch, risk management could become less of a veto mechanism and more of an enabler of experimentation.

The broader challenge remains measurement. Bold creative is valuable only when it is distinctive, relevant and connected to a business objective. Kantar's research has similarly found that creative quality and effectiveness are closely connected, while its 2026 Cannes analysis emphasizes that organizations need infrastructure, processes and measurement systems capable of scaling effective creativity.

That makes The Chaos Advantage less an argument for "taking more risks" than an argument for modernizing how marketing organizations evaluate them.

Market Landscape

The tension between creative ambition and risk management is becoming more pronounced as marketers operate across fragmented media, faster cultural cycles and AI-generated content.

Nielsen's 2024 global marketing research found that 70% of marketers planned to prioritize performance marketing over brand-building initiatives, even though long-term and full-funnel ROI remained among their leading objectives. Only 38% said they measured traditional and digital marketing together.

That measurement gap matters. If organizations evaluate campaigns primarily through short-term performance indicators, unconventional brand-building work can be harder to defend internally.

At the same time, the growth of AI is increasing the volume of creative output while making differentiation more difficult. Enterprise marketers therefore face a paradox: technology makes it easier to produce content, but stronger creative judgment may become more important as audiences encounter an increasing amount of interchangeable material.

Strategic Outlook

The emerging model is likely to combine creative experimentation with structured risk intelligence.

Marketing organizations will still need governance, but the goal may shift from preventing unusual ideas to understanding their potential consequences quickly enough to make informed decisions.

For MarTech teams, this creates an opportunity for AI-powered risk assessment, creative testing, brand-safety monitoring and marketing analytics to work together rather than operate as separate functions.

The competitive advantage may ultimately belong to organizations that can move quickly without becoming careless. In that environment, caution is not automatically the safer strategy—and boldness is not automatically the riskier one.

Top Insights

• FleishmanHillard and Contagious identify a gap between marketers' belief in bold creative and organizations' continued preference for safer, more predictable work.
• Two-thirds of surveyed leaders say risk-management processes block action, suggesting governance can become a competitive constraint when uncertainty accelerates decision cycles.
• AI-powered risk assessment could help enterprises distinguish manageable creative experimentation from genuine reputational, regulatory or operational exposure.
• External research from NIQ and LIONS reinforces the importance of creative quality while highlighting persistent organizational barriers to creative risk-taking.
• The emerging opportunity is not unrestricted boldness but faster, evidence-based decision-making that lets brands experiment without abandoning marketing governance.

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