Can we please stop calling ads 'brave'.

Calling an ad that doesn’t show a product or logo ‘brave’ is laughable at the best of times, but when thousands of people are performing acts of genuine heroism in the face of a devastating pandemic, it’s borderline distasteful.

Let’s be honest, convincing a gullible client to stick up a poster without his product in it isn’t quite the same as dragging someone from a burning car or storming an enemy machine gun nest, is it?

Far from being courageous, these supposedly daring feats are, at best, risky for brands and, at worst, foolish. For every ad you can show me where the gamble paid off, I’ll show you three where it backfired spectacularly; with the agency being fired, corporate PR departments having to perform brand triage and some low-level client being thrown under the bus.

The Charge of the Light Brigade. Brave? Possibly. Stupid? Absolutely.

And before someone trots out that old trope about consumers ‘rewarding’ brands that make them think, I call preemptive BS on that one too.

Imagine this scenario.

A couple of first responders en route to an emergency speed past a poster on a bus shelter.

 Bob: Wow! Did you see that incredibly brave poster back there?

Jen: No. Who was it for?

Bob: Don’t know. It didn’t say.

Jen: That is brave! What was it advertising?

Bob: I’m not sure.

Jen: Well, did it say where we can buy one of their products?

Bob: Nope.

Jen: Pity, because after we’ve performed life-saving CPR, I wanted to go round there and buy something to reward them for their outstanding bravery in making us work out what they are trying to sell us.

Let’s get real.

The only ones rewarding these ‘brave’ ads are awards juries. Because that’s who they are written for. In fact, the harder it is for the consumer to decipher what is going on, the easier it is to find a crowd of ad folks willing to swoon over the sheer bravado of it all.

The best marketers I've worked with don't consider themselves brave; they sign off on work after carefully weighing the pros and cons, listening to all sides of the debate, and drawing on their experience of what works and what doesn’t. To them, it's about balancing risk and reward.

It's not an act of heroism. It's an act of professionalism.

It’s what we are all paid to do and, ironically, paid vastly more than people whose work calls for true courage on a daily basis.

So, before you proudly post yet another insignificant piece of logo-less, product-less, pointless, awards bait, please think before labeling it ‘brave’. In the grand scheme of things, it really isn’t.