The New CMO Mindset: Risk Is Not the Enemy
In boardrooms and marketing departments around the world, the phrase "brand safety" has long been treated as sacred. Protect the logo. Protect the reputation. Avoid anything that might alienate a segment of the audience. But at the 2025 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, a growing chorus of the world's most influential Chief Marketing Officers delivered a very different message: playing it safe is the riskiest thing a brand can do.
At Business Insider's annual CMO Insider Breakfast at Cannes — supported by founding sponsor BCG, supporting sponsor PayPal, and contributing sponsor LinkedIn — top marketing executives from Duolingo, Gap, and American Express gathered to discuss how they are fundamentally reshaping the way they think about risk, creativity, and authenticity. Their collective verdict was clear: in today's hyper-fragmented digital landscape, boldness is not optional. It is a survival strategy.
Why "Brand Safety" Thinking Is Holding Marketers Back
For decades, the instinct of most marketing departments has been to minimize exposure to controversy, stay in carefully controlled creative lanes, and measure success through awareness metrics and unaided recall. That model made sense in an era dominated by a handful of television networks and print publications. In 2025, it is a relic.
Audiences are scattered across dozens of platforms, each with its own content norms, algorithms, and cultures. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Threads, LinkedIn, podcasts, connected TV, and emerging AI-driven content surfaces all compete for consumer attention simultaneously. In that environment, a brand that optimizes for inoffensiveness simply disappears into the noise. The algorithm does not reward caution — it rewards engagement, and engagement almost always requires an emotional reaction.
This is precisely why the CMOs at Cannes argued that the traditional risk matrix needs to be inverted. The question is no longer "what could go wrong if we take this creative swing?" The real question is "what is the cost of never being remembered at all?"
Duolingo's Approach: Leaning Into the Unhinged
Few brands have embodied this philosophy more visibly — or more successfully — than Duolingo. The language-learning app became a cultural phenomenon not by following conventional brand playbooks but by essentially throwing them out. Under the creative direction of Manu Orssaud, Duolingo leaned hard into absurdist humor, irreverent TikTok content, and a brand persona that was equal parts menacing and loveable.
The strategy polarized some and captivated many more. The brand's social media presence regularly generates millions of views without significant paid amplification, because the content itself earns attention. At the Cannes panel, Orssaud spoke candidly about the importance of "pushing the envelope" — of being willing to produce content that might make an executive nervous before it goes live. That discomfort, he suggested, is often a signal that something genuinely interesting is about to happen.
The lesson for other marketers is not to copy Duolingo's aesthetic, but to identify what authentic risk-taking looks like for their own brand — and then actually do it, rather than endlessly workshopping it into safe irrelevance.
American Express: The Strategic Value of In-House Perspective
Elizabeth Rutledge, CMO of American Express, offered a different but equally compelling angle on how brands can embed bold thinking into their structures. She highlighted the role of American Express's in-house agency as a critical source of perspective — a team that understands the brand deeply enough to push creative boundaries without losing coherence.
In-house agencies have sometimes been criticized for producing work that is "too safe" precisely because of their proximity to internal stakeholders. Rutledge's framing challenged that assumption. When built correctly, an in-house team can act as a creative nerve center that balances the speed required in modern marketing with the strategic continuity that external agencies can sometimes struggle to maintain. American Express has used this model to move quickly on cultural moments and execute campaigns with a consistency that reinforces rather than dilutes the brand's premium identity.
For Rutledge, risk-taking is not about being provocative for its own sake. It is about having the organizational architecture to make smart, fast decisions — and the institutional courage to act on them before the cultural moment passes.
Gap and the Return of Authentic Brand Voice
Gap, a brand with one of the most recognizable identities in American retail history, has spent recent years navigating how to reclaim cultural relevance without abandoning its heritage. The CMO conversation at Cannes reflected the challenges and opportunities facing legacy brands in this environment — the need to move with the speed of a startup while carrying decades of brand equity on their backs.
The key insight for legacy brands is that authenticity cannot be manufactured through trend-chasing alone. Consumers are remarkably skilled at detecting when a brand is performing relevance rather than actually demonstrating it. The CMOs who are winning are the ones who have done the harder work of understanding what their brand genuinely stands for, and then finding the creative expressions of that truth that resonate in current culture.
The Three Pillars of a Risk-Positive Marketing Strategy
Drawing together the perspectives shared at Cannes, three clear principles emerge for CMOs who want to integrate risk into their marketing playbooks in a meaningful way.
- Move fast and commit. The window for a brand to participate in a cultural moment is often measured in hours, not weeks. Brands that require multiple rounds of legal and executive approval before posting a single piece of content will consistently miss those windows. Building pre-approved frameworks for rapid response is now a competitive necessity.
- Define your authentic edge — and protect it. Risk-taking without a clear brand point of view produces chaos, not creativity. The most effective bold campaigns are those that feel inevitable in hindsight — like something only that brand could have done. Finding and defending that distinctive territory is the foundational work that makes brave creative possible.
- Measure what matters, not just what is easy to measure. Brand safety metrics have persisted partly because they are simple to report. Cultural impact, brand love, and creative distinctiveness are harder to quantify but far more predictive of long-term growth. CMOs need to advocate internally for measurement frameworks that capture the full value of bold creative work.
The Bigger Picture: Authenticity as the Ultimate Risk Mitigation
There is a certain irony at the heart of the new CMO playbook: by embracing risk, these executives are actually pursuing a form of long-term brand safety that the old model could never deliver. A brand that is genuinely distinctive, culturally resonant, and emotionally connected to its audience is far more resilient than one that has simply avoided controversy. When crises do occur — and they always do — it is the brands with real equity in consumer hearts that survive them.
As the digital landscape continues to fragment and audiences become ever more selective about what earns their attention, the pressure on marketers to be braver will only increase. The CMOs at Cannes are not just predicting this shift — they are actively building the organizations, the processes, and the creative cultures needed to lead it. For anyone who wants to understand where modern marketing is heading, their message is worth listening to carefully: the risk is not in taking the swing. The risk is in never swinging at all.