Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesProfessionalism deserves a narrower job description. It should prevent dishonesty, exploitation, cruelty and shoddy delivery. It should ensure people are paid, claims are supportable and responsibility survives a mistake. All useful. None tells us whether an idea should contain a talking animal, an indecent joke or glorious nonsense.
Advertising became frightened of that distinction. Reviewers began asking playful ideas for paperwork that safe ideas never have to produce. Why will this odd detail work? Which reaction is guaranteed? Can the joke be expressed in approved vocabulary? A predictable line passes because its failure will look respectable.
Play is uncertain by definition. Research can expose confusion or harm and assess what happened after exposure. It cannot certify delight before the idea exists. Demanding certainty here does something rather sneaky: it moves career risk from the cautious reviewer onto the unusual proposal.
This hardly excuses lazy stereotypes or untruth under the flag of “creative freedom”. Those are failures of judgement, not evidence that every sentence should resemble a tax leaflet. Keep the adult standards and allow childish pleasures. People have managed both in food, games, books and conversation for centuries. At approval, record the legal, factual and ethical objections separately from “I would feel safer choosing the other one”. The second concern may be valid. It should at least appear under its real name.