Defending dangerous ideas in the age of artificial intelligence

Can artificial intelligence make marketing and creativity braver? Digitas’ Simon Brock believes it can, and will.

Simon Brock is the executive creative director of Digitas Australia.

Bravery. It’s what earns the attention, applause and awards. Just look at this year’s standout Australian campaigns at Cannes Lions, like Telstra’s bravely crafted films, Suncorp’s bold creative business transformation and Finch’s eyebrow-raising bold health message. Works that cut through on the global stage by not playing it safe.

Bravery doesn’t just win, it works. In its 2025 State of Creativity report, LIONS revealed that creatively brave brands generate four times higher profit margins. Yet, according to the same report, 13 per cent of companies are “creative risk-friendly”.

The rest are playing it safe. And that’s dangerous. Safe ideas aren’t just ignored, overlooked and forgotten; they’re now damaging brands, with one on four of us less likely to buy from brands that make us endure generic marketing, according to Attentive’s 2025 Consumer Trends Report.

In our new AI-powered world, the industry is in a frenzy over optimisation, personalisation, efficiency, scale, speed, productivity and automation. All are useful. But also, dangerously safe. Because in marketing, there’s nothing more dangerous than a safe idea – especially one scaled into oblivion by powerful AI tools.

What if AI isn’t just here to make us faster, but to make us braver? To ask braver questions, test braver ideas, make braver choices and have the courage to defend dangerous thinking?

So how can we use AI to help us become braver marketers?

Start by asking it braver questions. Large language models (LLMs) are safe places for asking dangerous questions and finding answers that challenge conventional thinking. Try feeding your LLM of choice links to your business’s last 10 publicly available annual reports and asking, “What should our CEO be scared of?” You’ll definitely discover at least one brave new idea. Note: You should never feed confidential information to a public LLM … That’s a tad too brave.

Sometimes you need to see brave to be brave. So, try asking AI to curate the most daring work from anywhere in the world. Want to see brave work in telco? Health? Financial services? It’s right there, on demand. And it’s infectious. Make this a feature of every brief and every creative review and watch the bar for creative bravery rise to new heights.

Experiment more and fear less. Bravery used to be expensive, but when the cost of trying drops, the appetite to try grows. Gen AI platforms are playgrounds where a brand can explore dozens of creative directions, identities and executions quickly and affordably. Break the rules, without breaking the bank, to see where bold thinking might take you.

Get to the feelings faster. Prototyping has long been standard operating procedure in the world of experience design, providing audiences with ways to feel the creative output and respond accordingly. Now, that’s true for any creative idea, using tools that allow you to synthesise the emotional core of a concept – what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. That’s powerful for alignment, and even more powerful for courage. Because once you can feel the magic, you’re more likely to fight for it.

Lastly, you need to test ideas in a pitchfork-free zone. The braver the idea, the bigger the nerves. However, advanced data-powered AI tools now offer a sandbox for boldness, enabling brands to test work in simulated environments, against synthetic audiences, to gauge how ideas will be received without the risk of real-world backlash. This takes a little more effort, but if having a thousand focus groups on standby, 24/7, would help your brand make brave decisions that increase profit margins, it’s probably worth the effort.

AI is a powerful paradigm shift for scale. However, the real opportunity lies in using AI not to replace the human touch, but to enhance and protect it. To carve out space for bravely beautiful, courageously crafted, deeply felt ideas. Because at the end of the day, the bravest thing a marketer can do isn’t to move faster, but to make something worth remembering.

Simon Brock is executive creative director at Digitas Australia.