Safe Was Never Safe.

Ryan Forney · TACTIC · 2026

Last November, two things happened to Eli Lilly in the same week. On Friday, it became the first healthcare company ever worth a trillion dollars. That same weekend, in movie theaters, a 90-second film about Alzheimer's ran in the last ad slot before Wicked: For Good. A love story, told out of order, the way memory actually fails. Directed by John Hillcoat, the man who made The Road. Scored by Agnes Obel. Paid for by a pharmaceutical company from Indianapolis.

Seven months later, that film and its Olympics sibling each took a Bronze Lion at Cannes, plus two more craft shortlists. A drug company, winning in Film, in the categories entertainment people consider theirs.

I know how a certain kind of operator reads that story: waste. Vanity metal. Money that should have gone to media efficiency, or a rebate, or another round of performance spend with a tidy dashboard behind it.

Here is the problem with that read. A trillion-dollar company is not confused about capital allocation.

The people who call this stuff wasteful never price the alternative. System1 and the IPA did. Dull advertising, the professionally responsible kind, needs roughly twice the media spend, and in some cases 2.6 times, to buy the same commercial effect as work people actually feel. Using System1's modeling of U.S. television spend, closing that efficiency gap would take roughly 189 billion dollars in additional media, billed to brands whose work is competent, compliant, and gone by Friday. Havas has been measuring the endpoint of that road for years: 78 percent of brands could vanish tomorrow and nobody would care.

That is what safe costs. It never shows up in the deck, because the invoice arrives slowly, quarter by quarter, as reach you have to keep re-buying because nothing stuck the first time.

Safe was never safe. It just bills you later.

The swing started as a person

Lilly's bet did not begin as a budget line. It began around 2019 with an executive named Lina Polimeni, who tracked down the phone number of Wieden+Kennedy's president and pitched her own company's account to the agency. The agency behind Nike. They passed at first. Pharma advertising was the punchline of the industry, and everyone in Portland knew it.

She kept at it, and her reasoning is the part I have not been able to shake: why does the best creative on earth go to shoes instead of the purpose behind making medicine?

What happened next is a lesson in how conviction scales. W+K skipped the usual market research and interviewed Lilly's own people, down to the person who seals the packaging, and found the story sitting in the company's founding rule from 1876: what the label promises, the bottle contains. The first film shipped in 2021. The directors that followed were chosen the way studios choose them, for their connection to the material. Hillcoat on Alzheimer's. T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay, Oscar-winning documentarians, on Never Over, an Olympics film built from a 1954 educational recording about the scientific method.

By the time Polimeni sat on a Cannes jury this June, she was quoting numbers from the stage: unaided brand awareness up 216 percent, brand trust more than doubled. And she was still swinging in interviews that same week: "I am still unconvinced that pharma has to be boring."

The most regulated category in America just proved it can compete on craft with the entertainment industry. Nobody gets to hide behind their category anymore.

The company they keep

Duolingo killed its own mascot in February 2025. The owl, an asset its CEO had publicly valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, hit by a Cybertruck, coffin and all. The safe alternative was another push notification. The funeral drew 1.7 billion impressions in two weeks, users logged 50,921,342,438 XP to resurrect him, and the company followed it with one of the strongest user-growth quarters in its history.

AXA, a French insurer, added three words to its home insurance policies: "and domestic violence." All 3,429,611 contracts, so survivors get emergency rehousing the way fire victims do. An insurer voluntarily expanding its own liability as an act of brand. It took the Titanium Grand Prix by unanimous jury decision in 2025, then returned in 2026 and won Creative Effectiveness, the Grand Prix you only get by proving the business results.

Columbia Sportswear bet the entire company that the earth is round. An open letter from the CEO in the New York Times: photograph the edge of the world and the company is yours. Eighty million people watched no one find the edge. Ten Lions. They still get submissions every week, including one that arrived with a seven-page handwritten letter.

You can call each of these wasteful. You would have the causality backwards. The waste is the forgettable work, amortized across years of media that has to do the remembering because the creative never did.

Nike is the closest thing the industry has to a public confession. The slump had many parents: wholesale strategy, inventory, a thinner innovation pipeline, faster competitors. But on the marketing side, the company said the quiet part itself: it had shifted money away from building the brand and toward capturing demand it could measure. Then it paid to reverse course. The first Nike Super Bowl ad in 27 years, and in the quarter that followed, demand creation spend up 15 percent to 1.3 billion dollars. That is one of the clearest admissions on record from a Fortune 100 that brand investment had gone underweight. I don't have to argue the causation. Their budget already did.

And none of this leans on trophies alone. The effectiveness canon has been saying it for years: Binet and Field's long-run studies find brand building compounds efficiency over time, distinctive assets lower the cost of being recognized next year, and System1 and Effie's Creative Dividend, built on 1,265 campaigns, puts creative and media together at 60.1 percent of business results on average. The award winners are just the version of the evidence you can watch.

A colleague's applause

I run a creative consultancy built on this exact belief, so yes, I have a horse in the race. Notice whose receipts I brought, though. A drugmaker, an insurer, a language app, an outdoor brand from Portland. None of them needed my permission to swing, and none of them will lose sleep over this essay. Congratulations are cheap when you want something back. These are the other kind.

So, to the teams who greenlit an Alzheimer's love story, a dead owl, three new words of underwritten liability, and a wager staked on the shape of the planet: you made the case for every brave idea sitting in every approval meeting in America this morning. Budgets follow precedent. You just set it. The floor comes up for everyone.

Every brand deck in the country still opens with the same commandment: cut through the noise. The brands above did something quieter and harder. They made the noise irrelevant. One message, made unmistakable, whatever it costs up front, because the back end of forgettable is the most expensive place a brand can live.

Don't settle for safe. Make it count.