The angel in the marble

Great brands rarely look sensible at the point they begin. They look awkward, excessive, or naïve, often dismissed as unrealistic, indulgent, or out of step. Only later, once they succeed, do we rewrite their origin stories and pretend they were inevitable. 

I learned this long before advertising. I learned it by making things. Designing flyers and brands for club nights, promoting events, trying to get people to leave the house and turn up. If it worked, you felt it immediately. If it didn’t, no amount of explanation helped. The room told you the truth. There was no insulation, no framework to hide behind. Judgement formed through consequence, not justification. 

The longer I work inside advertising, the more obvious a shift becomes. We talk about rigour and discipline as if greatness can be engineered through optimisation alone. We celebrate process. We reward consistency. We mistrust anything that cannot be justified upfront. Yet the brands we admire most did not begin this way. They began with decisions that looked unreasonable at the time. Decisions that required conviction before evidence. 

I believe the brands that win commission ceilings; the rest plaster walls.

The metaphor is specific, not categorical. Not every wall is ordinary and not every ceiling is audacious. But Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling was the impossible commission of its era. Overhead, technically extraordinary, requiring someone to commit before anyone knew it could be done. Most Renaissance commercial work was at eye level: decorative, replicated, replaceable. The brands that win make the Michelangelo bet. They commission work that shouldn’t be possible and protect it long enough to become inevitable. The rest commission work that anyone could have done. 

Why Michelangelo and not his contemporaries? Both he and Leonardo had audacious vision. Leonardo imagined flying machines; Michelangelo saw angels trapped in marble. Yet, only Michelangelo changed the world in his lifetime, because only he paired vision with the discipline to make it real.  

The paradox: Audacious thinking that stands out feels risky; bland output that fails to register feels safe. We have inverted our understanding of risk itself. The result is something quieter than failure — brands that function but do not inspire. Ideas without incarnation. 

Act One: Seeing the Angel 

Audacity is conviction before permission. It’s the willingness to act as if something will work without waiting for evidence to catch up. It is not ignorance or a lack of craft. It is the refusal to let existing logic dictate what is possible. Nearly every brand that shaped culture began this way. Red Bull, Airbnb, Nespresso. None make rational sense as product propositions. Energy drinks in odd-sized cans. Sleeping in strangers’ homes. Expensive single-serve coffee. But these brands made the product make sense, not the other way around. Take Nike and Colin Kaepernick. They faced political backlash, internal disagreement and real financial risk. A decision that could not be justified in advance. What made the partnership work was not predictive certainty, but clarity of conviction. Apple removing the headphone jack initially had the same overwhelmingly negative response. There was no guaranteed short-term gain, but they acted on a conviction that could not be proven upfront. 

Audacity is not the right to ignore evidence. It is the willingness to commit before evidence is complete, where the strategic read justifies the leap. Every reckless founder also believed they saw the angel. The difference is what the conviction is anchored to. 

This is Leonardo’s gift. The ability to see what does not exist. Vision that runs ahead of reality. But vision alone does not build cathedrals. It fills notebooks. 

Act Two: Carving Until You Set It Free

If audacity is how conviction begins, discipline is how it survives. Audacity without discipline burns out; discipline without audacity stagnates. Discipline is conviction made visible. When sustained, what once looked audacious becomes the obvious truth. 

Leonardo’s notebooks overflow with audacious brilliance. Flying machines, diving suits, and mechanical marvels. Yet his output as a painter is astonishingly small. Of roughly twenty paintings attributed to him, only eight are universally accepted without dispute (Kemp, 2019). His major commissions tell the same story: The Adoration of the Magi (1481) abandoned mid-composition; Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (c. 1482) left as underdrawing; the Battle of Anghiari (1503) never completed; the colossal Sforza Gran Cavallo never cast beyond clay. Even The Last Supper began deteriorating almost immediately because of his experiments with untested techniques. Britannica describes his life’s output as a grandiose "unfinished symphony" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025). Michelangelo possessed equally audacious vision but paired it with brutal discipline. Painting 12,000 square feet of ceiling over four years. Carving the David from marble others had abandoned. Both had genius. Only Michelangelo’s audacity survived contact with reality. 

The psychology of audacious completion 

There is empirical ground beneath this distinction. Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown’s landmark 1988 paper on "positive illusions" showed that the most productive, resilient, creative people do not see the world accurately. They consistently overestimate what they can do, how much control they have, and how likely they are to succeed. Compared to realists, they are more motivated, more persistent under difficulty, and significantly more capable of completing hard, long-form work. Accurate, unbiased perception turns out to be a marker of mild depression, not health (Taylor and Brown, 1988). Audacity is not a flaw in reasoning. It is a feature of healthy psychology. 

Peter Gollwitzer’s mindset theory extends this. Gollwitzer (1990) distinguishes the deliberative mindset, cautious, realistic, weighing pros and cons with relative objectivity, from the implemental mindset, which takes over the moment you commit and begin. The implemental mindset narrows attention, filters out doubt, and floods the system with goal-supportive cognition. Motivation rises. Persistence increases. Performance improves (Gollwitzer and Bayer, 1999; Büttner et al., 2014). Commitment precedes confidence. Not the other way around. 

This is what Michelangelo understood instinctively. You do not wait until you are certain before picking up the chisel. The act of picking up the chisel generates the audacity to keep carving. Supreme demonstrates the same commercially. Fierce discipline over decades, controlling supply, refusing to dilute. What looked like audacity became discipline through repetition, and that discipline made the audacity real. 

The effectiveness data corroborates this. The IPA and System1’s 2024 Magic of Compound Creativity study analysed 4,164 ads from 56 brands over five years. The most consistent brands (top 20%) achieved 28% more "very large business effects" (profit gain, sales value gain, market share gain) than the least consistent (IPA and System1, 2024).

Binet and Field’s longitudinal work finds that emotionally led, fame-driving campaigns outperform rational persuasion on every long-term metric (Binet and Field, 2013, 2017). Discipline does not just protect audacity. It multiplies it. 

The institutional Michelangelo

Michelangelo did not work in freedom. He worked for Pope Julius II who was notoriously impatient and demanding, inside the Vatican at the height of its bureaucratic power. He had to deal with Cardinals, political rivals and constant interference. Yet he produced work that transcended the institution’s intentions. The difference was not freedom but structure. The Pope commissioned him specifically. Responsibility was concentrated. Accountability was to the work, and once authority was granted, the institution grudgingly left him alone to finish. 

Modern organisations claim they want Michelangelos but are not structured to produce them. They diffuse authority, demand consensus, evaluate quarterly, govern conviction the same way they govern operations. The tragedy is not that institutions constrain creativity. It is that they have forgotten how to commission it. 

Act Three: Why We’re Plastering Walls Instead of Painting Ceilings 

Modern organisations don’t outright reject audacity. They neutralise it. Decisions are diffused across committees, accountability spread, risk managed not embraced, and consensus becomes the default. When someone pushes something genuinely audacious, the system has multiple ways to absorb that energy without ever saying no. Meetings, approval layers, planning cycles, budget reviews. None are bad in isolation. Their cumulative effect is the point. Audacity does not survive the gauntlet. We have engineered the deliberative mindset permanently into our creative processes. Hannah Arendt described thoughtlessness in large systems (Arendt, 2003); James C. Scott documented how organisations impose legibility at the expense of local knowledge (Scott, 1998). Both describe what happens when discipline replaces thinking. Gollwitzer adds what replaces it: the defensive crouch of permanent deliberation. 

The effects are measurable, and the data is bleak. The proportion of award-entry campaigns evaluated over six months or less rose from around 10% in 2002 to 25% by 2018, while the efficiency multiplier of creatively awarded campaigns (points of market share gain per ten extra points of share of voice) collapsed from 12 to 4. Peter Field calls it a "catastrophic decline in creative effectiveness" (Field, 2019). Marketing budgets have followed: down from 11.0% of company revenue in 2020 to 7.7% in 2024 (Gartner, 2024). The structural reason sits at the top of the function. Average CMO tenure across S&P 500 companies stood at 4.1 years in 2025, against a CEO average of 7.6 (Spencer Stuart, 2024; Adweek, 2026). The share of Fortune 500 companies whose marketing executive reports directly to the CEO fell from 63% to 58% in a single year (Forrester, 2025). 

The person responsible for compounding brand conviction is, on average, in post for less time than it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. The result is what mindset research predicts. Deliberation becomes permanent, and audacity cannot survive it. 

The AI paradox 

AI should have made this impossible to ignore. It collapses the distance between thought and output. In theory it is the perfect instrument for the disciplined repetition that makes brands compound. In practice we have domesticated it. Slowed it through governance, confined it to execution, separated it from ideation and framed it as generative rather than assistive. 

The reason is structural, not technological. AI threatens what audacity threatens: the latency that lets weak judgement hide behind process, the delay that lets consensus form before commitment, the hierarchy that controls who decides what and when. AI trained on consensus reproduces consensus. Without audacity directing it, everything drifts to the mean. 

AI as infrastructure for audacity 

The argument that follows is informed by my work on the AI steering committee of a global agency network, where I lead testing and deployment across the business. 

We are using AI in the wrong place. It is most valuable as infrastructure for the audacious phase of the work, not as a production tool at the end of it. The literature is converging on this: a 2025 study of agency adoption identifies the strongest creative gains in front-end ideation, validation, and pressure-testing rather than final asset production (Vakratsas and Wang, 2025). The evidence on AI-generated final creative points the same way. Consumers rate AI-led video advertising as significantly more annoying, boring and confusing than human-led equivalents (NielsenIQ, 2024; Wang and Liu, 2025). The technology is in the wrong place in the workflow. 

Used as infrastructure, AI does two things process cannot. First, it compresses the validation cycle. The biggest threat to an audacious idea is the gap between conception and proof. The period when deliberation reasserts itself and the implemental mindset breaks. AI shortens that gap. Strategic hypotheses get stress-tested against synthetic audience response, competitor positioning, and prior campaign benchmarks in hours rather than weeks. Conviction reaches commitment before the system has time to neutralise it. 

Take an agency pitching an audacious positioning. A financial services brand committing to a long-form, emotionally led campaign in a category dominated by rational comparison ads. Traditionally that pitch dies between week two and week eight, as finance, legal, and the regional teams compound their concerns. AI infrastructure changes the sequencing. The CMO walks into the boardroom with the campaign’s likely emotional response already modelled, effectiveness benchmarked against the IPA Databank, competitor reactions simulated, and the financial logic surfaced in language the CFO recognises. The deliberative trap does not get to close. 

Secondly, AI scales the disciplined work. The compounding of distinctive assets, the swoosh repeated, the tone held, the codes maintained across every touchpoint. This is exactly what produces the largest business effects, and exactly the work that consumes time humans should spend on prophetic decisions. AI is good at this. Deploying established creative into new contexts, auditing consistency at scale, holding the line on what has already been decided. That is not the same as generating the creative in the first place. The distinction matters. 

The sceptical view, that AI is corrosive to creativity, that it produces homogenised output, that it deskills the craft, is not wrong on its evidence. The recent consumer-response data on AI-led final creative is real. But the sceptics are reading the data as a verdict on the technology. It is a verdict on one use of it. AI asked to generate the work reproduces the mean because that is what we are asking it to do. AI used to scale work that humans have already directed does something categorically different. The question is not whether to use AI. It is whether someone audacious has been commissioned to direct it. 

Recast this way, AI does not threaten creativity. It enables it. Without audacious direction, AI accelerates the trip to the mean. With it, AI is the closest thing the industry has had to Michelangelo’s scaffolding. 

Protected space for unreasonable work 

Mircea Eliade distinguished between sacred and profane space (Eliade, 1959). Sacred space is set apart, protected from ordinary logic. The profane is everything else: measurable, explainable, transactional. Modern brand building tries to make everything profane and eliminates the conditions under which audacious work can be completed. Apple’s product launches illustrate the alternative. The keynote creates protected space, where the audacious decisions, such as removing ports and killing products, can be presented without surviving normal justification cycles. Michelangelo did not explain the Sistine Chapel while painting it. He painted it. The Pope protected the space. 

Prophets and priests

Different work requires different authority. In religious institutions, prophets bring new revelation, challenging existing order. Priests maintain tradition. Every living institution needs both, but institutions favour priests, because prophets are destabilising. 

Brand building faces the same tension. Some work requires prophetic authority: making audacious decisions and protecting them long enough to complete. Other work requires priestly discipline: maintaining consistency, guarding standards, ensuring execution compounds. Modern organisations prefer priests. They want stability, predictability, governability. They are terrified of prophets, so they build systems that select them out or contain them in innovation labs where they cannot affect the core business. The result is brands that maintain standards beautifully but have no audacious moves left to make. 

Virgil Abloh is the clearest recent proof. LVMH appointed him artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear in 2018. He had no formal fashion training. A DJ, architect and streetwear designer by trade, he became the first Black artistic director in the house’s 160-year history. By the institution’s own logic (heritage, exclusivity, the priestly maintenance of luxury codes) he was the wrong choice. However, LVMH commissioned him to challenge the codes, not maintain them. 

His debut SS19 show at the Palais Royal drew Rihanna, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Naomi Campbell to the front row, with thousands of fashion students personally invited by Abloh lining the 200-metre rainbow runway (Dazed, 2018). Off-White, which he founded in 2013 on the same principle, became part of LVMH’s portfolio in 2021 when the conglomerate acquired a 60% stake from Farfetch (Business of Fashion, 2022). The quotation marks, the zip ties, the diagonal stripes were a disciplined visual system on an audacious premise: that luxury and street culture were the same conversation at different volumes. 

What made Abloh’s run possible was not just his talent. It was the structural arrangement around him. He was Michelangelo working for Julius II. LVMH had every reason to govern him by committee: the heritage was 160 years old, the codes were institutional dogma, the financial exposure was significant. Instead, the institution concentrated authority in one person, named publicly, given genuine creative latitude, evaluated over the arc of a multi-year tenure rather than season by season. The cardinals (merchandising, heritage custodians, regional managers) could object, but they could not override. That structural protection turned audacity into compounded distinction. His death in 2021 revealed how rare the arrangement was. LVMH did not lose a creative director. It lost the institutional architecture that made the work possible. Every transformative brand needs that architecture somewhere. But most structure for priestly maintenance, instead. 

The strongest objection

The strongest counterargument deserves a hearing. Someone could point to Pixar, P&G, or John Lewis’s Christmas campaigns and argue that rigorous process alone produces distinctive work. Process can produce competent work. But category-defining work requires a protected act of conviction somewhere in the system. Pixar under Catmull operated with a "brain trust" with genuine authority to make and protect creative decisions (Catmull, 2014). John Lewis succeeded because its adam&eveDDB relationship ran uninterrupted for over a decade, with enough trust to protect decisions that could not be justified in advance. P&G’s rigour works because it separates long-term brand investment from short-term activation. In each case, what looks like process is audacity that the institution chose to protect. 

What brands must do differently

The structural moves are simpler than they sound. Here are three changes any agency or 
client-side team could make in the next quarter. 

First, kill the translation layers. The standard agency workflow, strategy to creative to design to production, creates drift. Each handoff is a place where the audacious move gets edited, softened, second-guessed. By the time the work reaches the client it has been translated multiple times. Strip it back. Put fewer people closer to the output. Build hybrid roles that think and make in the same head. Align on outputs, not opinions, and let the work itself be the artefact people react to, not a deck describing each stage. Handoffs are not communication. They are insurance. Audacity does not survive insurance. 
 
Second, use AI to compress the validation gap, not the production cycle. The biggest threat to an audacious idea is the time between conception and proof. Many brands are pointing AI at the end of the workflow and skipping the thinking to generate more assets, faster. The leverage is at the front. Synthetic audience testing in days. Effectiveness modelling against live work. Real-time prototyping that puts the idea in front of the client before deliberation organises against it. Audacious conviction has a shelf life. AI is the first tool the industry has had that can extend it. 

Third, redefine finished. In most organisations, finished means internally approved. Signed off, locked down, ready for delivery. That definition is what kills the work. It treats "live in the world" as the end of the process when it should be the start of the learning. Launch earlier. Learn faster. Iterate while the work is in market, not before. Finished is not a state of approval. It is a state of contact with reality. Audacity needs contact with reality to survive. Approval is what kills it. 

Conclusion: Seeing Angels

The tension between discipline and audacity is not a flaw, it is the system. Discipline brings form, focus, longevity. Audacity brings spark, disruption, risk. Neither works alone. The brands that move culture are not those that played it safe. They are the ones that made unreasonable moves, then held them long enough to make them real. 

We are in an era where certainty has become the dominant currency. In politics, power consolidates around absolute conviction. In technology, AI offers answers without ambiguity. Everywhere, we are removing the spaces where commitment must be held without proof. The advertising industry has become a mirror rather than a counterweight. We have more tools than ever, but tools without conviction are noise. 

Any system that delays judgement and rewards consensus will eventually convert intelligence into maintenance.

Every brand claims it wants to build something great. But wanting Michelangelo’s ceiling while failing to protect the thinking produces Leonardo’s notebooks. Beautiful vision that never materialises. The question is not whether your organisation has visionaries. It is whether it is structured to let them finish what they start.  

If we want brands that transform rather than simply function, we have to hold the tension. To commit before certainty arrives. To act on something strongly enough to be wrong publicly. To make moves that cannot be justified in a single quarter but might compound for decades. To commission prophets, not just employ priests. And to use our most powerful new tool not to make more, but to give audacity the time and validation it needs to survive the system. AI does not remove the leap. It reduces the amount of darkness you have to leap through. 

Greatness will come from those willing to pick up the chisel before they know they can finish. Because commitment precedes confidence. It always has. 

The angel is still in the marble. The question is whether we still know how to see it and whether we are willing to carve until we set it free.

Alex Acosta is Creative Director (Managing Partner) at McCann Birmingham. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.

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