For a while now I've almost been tempted to brand all of what we do as 'Risk'. For the vast majority almost everything we've ever done that's really succeeded started with a conversation where we said, "What if we did something really crazy?" Now, crazy doesn't mean the same thing in every situation, like for instance, in a music video I once directed, taking a big risk meant having the whole thing open up with a super slow four and a half minute long shot. In the world of music videos for rock bands that was a big departure from the norm, and a big reason why we did it. It's also worth pointing out that we didn't just do it to be different. It lended to the story in a way that a lot of faster shots simply wouldn't have. It reinforced our messaging.
The point here is extremely well captured in a quote from Seth Godin in his amazing book The Dip, where he says, "Playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do." I think one good addition to that is as long as it's still saying what you want it to. Don't just do something different for the sake of different if it's a total departure from your messaging and your audience.
It's those works of art that half of us love and half of us hate... those are the ones that we all talk about, and that we ultimately remember.
Everything else is just a wash downstream in the flood of everything else.
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