SORRY ABERDEEN, BUT PLAYING SAFE IS TOO RISKY

There’s a concept in Ronald Heifetz’s Harvard tome ‘Adaptive Leadership’, that I’ve paraphrased as ‘the illusion of the broken system’.

The idea is simple. When something looks dysfunctional from the outside, it’s because you’re probably judging it against the wrong goal. The system isn’t failing. It’s succeeding, but just not at what you think it’s supposed to do.

What you’re seeing in Aberdeen’s ‘advertising’ ‘culture’ isn’t a failure of talent. It’s a system working exactly as designed.

The easy explanation is that local advertising is just a bit rubbish. That agencies don’t try hard enough, or that clients don’t ‘get it.’ But that’s lazy.

The more interesting truth is that most of the work you see isn’t trying to do what you think it’s trying to do. It looks like advertising and it uses the language of advertising.
But its real function is something else.

The dominant question is not ‘will this grow the clients' business?’
It’s ‘will anyone complain about this?’

Work becomes polite. to the point of invisibility. Not because people lack imagination, but because imagination carries risk. And risk, in a tightly networked community, is reputational before it is commercial.
So, it’s the ‘safest’ work that wins. And the safest work is the kind that disappears the moment you stop looking at it.

From there, a second dynamic plays out.
Markets get the advertising they deserve, as the saying goes.
Or, more precisely, they get the advertising they demand.
If clients don’t understand how brands grow, if they don’t value memory structures, or distinctive assets, or long-term mental availability, then agencies just adapt.
They optimise for approval.
They become suppliers rather than partners. Order takers.
I once had a local creative tell me that a ‘good idea’ is one that ‘the client approves’.
And so you get a long trail of competent, well-intentioned invisibility.
It’s not just poor creative. It’s a structural misunderstanding of how growth actually works.

Layered on top of this is something more cultural.
Creative advertising feels all a bit… ‘London’. Not done round here.
So edges are filed down so it won’t get anyone into trouble.
It won’t get anyone noticed either.
The result is a kind of equilibrium.
Clients don’t demand better because they’ve rarely seen it. Agencies don’t push harder because there’s no reward for doing so.

From the outside, it looks like mediocrity.
From the inside, it’s stability.

The bar isn’t just low it’s structurally held down.

So the problem with local advertising isn’t that it’s bad.
It’s that, on its own terms, it’s working perfectly.

And those terms are the problem.

The irony, of course, is that the opportunity is enormous. Because in a system optimised for safety, anything genuinely distinctive has an unfair advantage.