Introducing The Chaos Advantage: Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Move 

Every year at Cannes Lions, a theme takes hold. Sometimes it’s official, sometimes it just makes its way through every panel and beachside conversation organically. One year it was women’s sports. Last year, you’d have been under the table by Monday if you’d done a shot for every AI mention.

This year, my money is on ‘uncertainty’.

The past 12 months have been the most volatile, unpredictable and genuinely destabilizing in many of our living memories. There’s barely a client conversation where some macroeconomic threat stands in the way of sign-off or execution planning: tariffs, AI-fueled misinformation, the culture wars. The unpredictability of our operating environment has become one of the most predictable things about working in this industry today.

But we didn’t travel to Cannes to state the obvious. We came to find out whether, somewhere in the chaos, there’s an advantage for the brave.

Over the past year, we could feel it in the briefs. Caution in the notes back from legal. In that one phrase that ends every good idea: “Can we make it a little less?” A little less provocative. A little less like it has a point of view. 

We know that safe work doesn’t avoid failure, it creates another kind of failure brands are not thinking about. So we dug deeper, reaching out to 1,000 senior marketing and communications leaders across five markets in North America, EMEA and APAC to find out: what is truly safe work anymore?

We found that 78% of leaders expect to operate under moderate to high uncertainty for the next 12 months. The chaos isn’t a moment to wait out. It’s the new condition. And the data tells us what that condition is costing: 88% of leaders believe bold work works, yet the majority say their organizations are producing mostly safe work. More striking still, organizations playing it safe experience public backlash at exactly the same rate as those that don’t. 1 in 5 cautious brands. 1 in 5 bold brands. Playing it safe isn’t protecting anyone. That gap between what leaders know and what they’re able to do is exactly what we’re helping clients close.

This is The Chaos Advantage. In partnership with Contagious, we’re spending the week at Cannes previewing the findings before our full report lands in September, alongside perspectives from our brand and corporate affairs experts who are living these challenges with clients every day.

That conversation reaches the main stage later this week, culminating with Alex Jenkins, editorial director at Contagious, who will be using insights from our research in his main stage keynote: How to Win in a Volatile World (Rotonde Stage, 11.45am CEST). It feels like the right place for this week’s thinking to land with a public commitment that uncertainty is not a reason to go quiet, but instead a reason to get sharper. Because while uncertainty is inevitable, instability isn’t. Navigate it well, and it might just be your greatest competitive edge.

Ellie Tuck is the chief creative officer of the Americas based in New York.