Survive 2021 Be Daring

How to survive 2021: Be Daring

Creatives share their advice for taking an adventurous spirit into the new year, and discuss the importance of how you frame risk

The nature of making risk-taking work means the stakes are often higher, and the potential pitfalls can be enough to cause people to shy away, particularly clients. And in times of great uncertainty such as these, risk aversion is be especially expected.

However, the need for creative work that steps out from the crowd, cuts through the waffle and makes us think differently has never been more necessary – and this often requires creatives to be daring, not to mention convincing. We speak to a range of experts about how to take your work in a more adventurous direction, why being daring doesn’t necessarily mean radical, and the key to framing risk to yourself and your partners.

BE PREPARED

Whether you want to start a personal project that has some originality or you’re looking to put an unexpected spin on a brief, for many creatives the starting point for producing adventurous work comes with research – whether that relates to a subject area or the work that’s already out there. Very few things in this world exist in a vacuum, and finding out what the status quo is – if only to intentionally veer away from it – can be a good place to start.

“Look at the category, look at the message you’re trying to convey as a brand to make sure you’re telling that in a different way. Some of the strongest – you might call it risk-taking – work we’ve done in the past subverted the genre, or subverted the category,” says Stephen Ledger-Lomas, head of production and partner at BBH London. “It can be the creative idea, the strategy – finding a unique insight – or it could actually be in terms of the way we execute it, right down to who our director or photographer is. We’re making sure we’re pushing ourselves as hard as possible to not just go with the prevailing news.”