No One Achieved Creative Immortality by Playing It Safe

​​Hermeti Balarin knows a thing or two about taking a leap into the unknown. Now, as the chief creative officer at Wieden+Kennedy London prepares to review the world's best work on the UK, Europe, and Global juries for The Immortal Awards 2026, he is sounding the alarm for anyone thinking they’re playing it safe with a creative idea.

Speaking ahead of the September 4th entry deadline, Hermeti argues that the modern rush to mitigate creative risk is fundamentally flawed. In an era dominated by big budgets, share prices, and corporate caution, he believes that the pursuit of absolute safety actively destroys any chance a campaign has of achieving enduring mainstream relevance.

As he puts it, “Safety; I don't know if it even exists if you can predict every scenario. Can you really say that you took the risk to zero without hurting your chances of making something incredible? I don't think so.”

The Legal and HR Litmus Test

For Hermeti, the clearest indicator that an idea possesses breakthrough potential is corporate discomfort. Nothing signals genuine creative ambition quite like a boardroom full of anxious stakeholders.

“Whenever you get other departments involved,” Hermeti explains, “for example, the company has to check with their legal team and they bring in their CEO, their HR department, you know you're onto something. It ceases to be a little advertising event. Everybody knows exactly what it's meant to do, and you start to touch something a bit bigger that requires more people from the business to cast an eye on it before it goes out because it's more of a bet.”

He notes that this internal tension often precedes real cultural impact, “Every time we’ve had to go through a client’s business affairs, PR or other kinds of areas, I’ve known that we were onto something that had more of a chance of provoking a reaction.”

That creative nerve has famously paid off, notably during his tenure at Mother London, where he earned Commendations at the Immortals for campaigns like KFC’s iconic crisis response, ‘FCK’, and IKEA’s irreverent festive grime track, ‘Silence the Critics’.

The 'Move Me, Dude' Philosophy

To truly achieve creative immortality, bravery must be anchored directly to human emotion. For Hermeti, a campaign that fails to provoke a visceral feeling from its audience is entirely pointless.

At Wieden+Kennedy London, this pursuit of genuine connection is a core principle, famously championed by the agency’s co-founder, Dan Wieden. It is a philosophy that continues to cut through the corporate noise and remind creatives why they actually do the job.

“Over the years, there's one that I think when all else fails, you latch onto: 'Move me, dude',” the CCO explains. “If you're aiming for that – to cause some reaction, provoke some sort of annoyance or disruption, joy, awe or love. When you play it safe, you're removing that from the equation as well. You stop thinking about people as people.”

Escaping the Advertising Vacuum

A major trap for creative agencies is mistaking industry applause for genuine cultural resonance. The advertising echo chamber can easily distort reality, making a campaign feel massive simply because it swept the trade press or won a few festival shortlists. However, Hermeti argues that true immortality is never achieved within the confines of our own industry.

He points out that the ultimate test is whether a piece of work actually reaches real people in their everyday lives. "That's when we start to feel like we broke through the ad world, which is deceitfully noisy," he notes. "It makes you sometimes think something was big, when in fact it was not".

To Hermeti, if the work only resonates with other creatives, it has failed. To build an enduring legacy, brands must look beyond agency walls and aim to genuinely capture the public's attention.

The Taxi Driver Test for Mass Appeal

While it is tempting for brands to target highly specific demographics, Hermeti argues that creative immortality cannot exist solely within a niche. Achieving long-lasting cultural relevance requires massive, mainstream penetration that breaks out of the echo chamber entirely.

For a campaign to reach this elite status, it must permeate everyday conversation. “We always talk about  their mom seeing it, the hairdresser or taxi driver talking about it – that’s when I think you're getting more serious about becoming relevant,” he says.

Scale matters when you aim to sit in the history books. “I don't know if you can become immortal by being too niche… Mass appeal to a certain extent might has to exist in this equation,” he considers. “Even if it was a niche idea, it has to go out somehow... It needs to become a household name before that.”

Flexing an Iconic Brand’s Heritage

Once a brand achieves household status, it can play with its heritage rather than fiercely having to protect its image or identity. Wieden+Kennedy London successfully demonstrated this with Heinz's 2025 'Trigger the Taste' campaign. Tapping into the brand’s 150-year legacy, the creative overlaid its beloved tagline, ‘It has to be Heinz’, across popular product pairings, such as chips, toast, or beans, proving that even with the brand name removed, over 70% of consumers immediately associated the creative as Heinz, something they established in pre-launch testing.

Hermeti argues that this willingness to disrupt a long-standing client’s legacy is essential. “Play to that because brands dream of having that; to be able to remove their logos from their posters and 80% of people still notice them,” he urges. “Flex that because that's what iconic brands should do.”

Earning the Right to Go Rogue

While demanding bravery is easy, getting a client to actually sign off on a risky idea requires a foundation of absolute trust. Hermeti notes that agencies must demonstrate they care just as much about the commercial realities of the business as they do about winning awards. “I think a lot of creators pay a heavy price for not making that as clear as humanly possible,” he explains.

At Wieden+Kennedy London, the team earns their creative leaps by actively leaning into the less glamorous side of the job. “We love this stuff and we love the highlights and the big hits and the wow moments and the LinkedIn explosions and all of that, but [we are] here for the gnarly challenges and the hardworking things that come with it, and checking results as well with them,” he says.

By taking on the heavy lifting and the "safe" work alongside the massively provocative, culture-swinging work, agencies build the goodwill required to push a client out of their comfort zone. 

The ‘Nike Tax’ and Baking in Disruption

For truly immortal brands, bravery isn't a one-off; it is an operational standard. Hermeti points to Channel 4’s recent ‘Fountain of Filth’ activation on the South Bank as a prime example. The brand’s willingness to put such a bold, physical idea out in the open pushes a brand to become a serious contender for immortality.

“One of my favourite pieces this year was the “Fountain of Filth’,” he explains. “It was bizarre, disruptive, bold, annoyingly good and simple.” By taking that extra level of risk beyond just delivering a standard film, Channel 4 proved what it takes to break through; being innovative and thinking beyond traditional media spaces

For brands like Nike – the agency’s Wieden+Kennedy founding client of course – disruption is baked into its DNA. “Nike is always disruptive, so it's almost part of the DNA to disrupt,” he observes. “I don't even think we have debates about safety there. It's almost the other way around, watching for work that might be becoming too safe”. When bravery is the baseline, the real alarm bells ring when the creative work stops pushing boundaries. So work like 'IIOME', when the English Lionesses won the Euros for the second time in a row, seems like a safe move.

For agencies managing historically brilliant brands, Hermeti warns of the "Nike tax" – a phenomenon where a client's legendary archives actively raise the bar for new work. He explains that “brands that have had too much love in jury rooms now pay the hefty price”. Speaking from his own experience as a judge at various shows, he notes, “The Nike tax is probably the first one that I've experienced, not from working for Nike, but from being in rooms where I was on the other side and people were using old Nike work as a barometer for Nike, almost separating it from the rest [of the brand’s archive work]”. Rather than evaluating a campaign solely against its modern peers, juries inevitably ask, “This is great, but is it as good as that [classic campaign in] 1998?”. Yet, Hermeti concedes this intense scrutiny is completely fair. He points out that this legacy carries “a lot of aura or juice” that acts as “a superpower to make something go further” in the real world.

Why Safe is Actually Risky

Ultimately, Hermeti believes that playing it safe is the biggest risk a brand can take. With everyone else researching everything to the limit to avoid getting cancelled, the safe space is incredibly crowded.

“Sure, everybody's doing that, so why not go left?” he asks. “There's not many people working on the other side, so it's probably easier for you to excel on that side rather than trying to really break through with the same piece of work across the same channels against a bunch of safe ads that nobody cares [about]”.

Settling for the middle ground is a dangerous game. “Isn't that fucking suicidal?” he questions. In a landscape plagued with caution, taking the unexpected route is not just the bravest option – it is the smartest strategic choice creatives and marketers can make. "That to me is quite risky. I'm amazed that so many people do all of these roles to get to the conclusion that playing safe is the way to go.

“When I look out in the world, surely you can justify [the creative idea] to the person next to you that something is smart and safe. I'm more interested in the other half [of the argument], which says, ‘This should be famous and productive work, that might not be measurable upfront and might generate this much more for the brand, but yes, it does carry a bit more risk. We could fall flat here.’ Isn't that a really good discussion to have? I think so.”