Years back when I ran a digital marketing agency, clients used to tell us they w

Years back when I ran a digital marketing agency, clients used to tell us they wanted something creative. We believed them. We'd spend weeks on a pitch that genuinely pushed, a direction no one had tried, a campaign that took a real risk. And we'd lose.

The client would go with the safe option instead. The forgettable one. The campaign literally nobody would remember in 6 months.

We were young and naive. We'd sit in silence, wondering whether we were the problem, whether daring to try something different was just arrogance dressed up as creativity. We'd question our creativity, our talent.

Soon, we realised the winning pitches weren't original, they were proven concepts with one small tweak. The clients weren't lying to us, they genuinely thought they wanted creative when they briefed us. But when it came down to it, what they actually wanted was the safety of a proven idea wearing creative's clothes.

So we adjusted. When clients asked for truly creative 'out of the box' thinking, we dialled it back and realised they really meant 'what someone else has already done, tweaked for us'.

Have you ever poured everything into the bold choice, only to watch the safe option win the room? Or killed a pitch idea because it felt 'too similar' to something already out there?

Because most systems reward safety, not creativity.

What gets approved internally, what gets signed off, it's almost always the thing that nobody could object to.

This is as relevant to the content you're posting online as anything else. People scream a lot on here about 'AI slop' but AI isn't really the problem, it's just the fascilitator.

Beige is rewarded at every turn and genuine creativity is stifled.

Creating 'beige' content isn't a failure of creativity, it's a rational response. You might not fly to great heights posting something beige, but you won't get noticed or penalised for it, either.

That's the argument at the heart of The Beige Code, a book we've written based on conversations with a range of experts from marketeers to neuroscientists who've thought hard about this problem (and spoke at our first Beyond The Beige summit in November).

The book will be out shortly, you can register your interest at the link in the comments.

Have you ever intentionally 'beige-ified' something because you knew that was safer than what you actually wanted to create or publish?

++I'm Nigel. I built Ghostart and the Beige-ometer because LinkedIn already has more than enough forgettable content — I help professionals write posts people actually want to read.