An opinion piece by Karine Mast, Strategic Planner at o3 (Oxygen Group), for CB News.

Pleasing everyone often means leaving an impression on no one

We talk a lot about "creative boosts," "idea culture," and "innovation engines." But what dominates today is, above all, a very specific form of creation: feel-good creativity. The kind that reassures, smooths things over, and rounds off the edges. The kind that makes you smile... but never bothers anyone.

And let's be honest: a large portion of the images and content we consume looks exactly like this. Clean, highly polished, very proper images. "Positive" content designed to be easily liked, shared, and commented on with a "so true." We feel good, yes. But do we really see the world differently afterward?

Yet, we know how to do things differently. We see it when a campaign takes the risk of tackling a real blind spot, such as Allianz's work on cyberbullying and the coded emoji language of teenagers. When creativity serves to lift a veil, to make the invisible visible, to bridge a generational gap, it finally escapes the realm of the simple feel-good "good deed" to become what it always could be: a tool for lucidity.

The problem, therefore, is not that we (marketers, communicators, creatives, entrepreneurs, organizations...) lack subjects. It is that we sometimes lack courage in the way we treat them.

This lack of courage is all the more unfortunate because our representations are never neutral: they act upon reality. This is the entire premise of Anne Besson, professor of general literature, in Les pouvoirs de l’enchantement. Usages politiques de la fantasy et de la science-fiction (The Powers of Enchantment: Political Uses of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vendémiaire, 2021). Long relegated to mere entertainment, fantasy and science fiction emerge as matrices for mobilization, capable of shaping our imaginations, changing mindsets, and giving form to the future we envision. In other words, the stories and images we produce do not decorate the world: they help build it.

That is precisely what makes their standardization problematic. Research on the social imagination and the "imagination industries" has shown this for years: our representations no longer stem solely from grand narratives, but from continuous streams of formats and content. And when these streams become standardized, our imagination becomes standardized along with them.

We see it everywhere. The codes repeat themselves: the same clean sets, the same smiling characters—"diverse" yet ultra-standardized—the same inspiring promises, written in a language anyone could claim as their own.

Fortunately, some players are showing that another path exists. For example, mutuals, insurers, and social and solidarity economy organizations, such as Macif or C’est qui le Patron ?, are daring to use more concrete slice-of-life scenes, less heroic stories that are more modest, and sometimes a little rough around the edges.

This choice is by no means an aesthetic accident. These brands do not imitate irregularity; they embrace it, because it says something genuine about who they are: a mutual belongs to its members, a brand like C’est qui le Patron ? was built by the people who consume it. The modest register is not a posture; it is the form that fits the substance.

Because feel-good has a strategic flaw that is rarely named: it is interchangeable. The clean scene, the calibrated smile, the inspiring promise—anyone can put their name on them. Hide the logo, and no one knows who the message belongs to anymore. Yet a brand that could belong to anyone ultimately belongs to no one.

Irregularity does the opposite: it makes the message irreplaceable. A face that lacks the airbrushed skin of a stock photo, a cluttered interior, a slightly clumsy phrase—these are the details we remember, because they break with the expected norm. What deviates, leaves a mark. What is smooth, slips away. That is why, when it works, it is never because it is "prettier." It is because it is more embodied. A bit irregular. And therefore, a bit alive.

The challenge is therefore no longer to produce "more creativity." It is to embrace two very simple things:

• The right to irregularity Not all images have to be perfectly smooth. We have the right to let bodies, accents, silences, and clumsiness that weren't in the script make a comeback. That is what a brand that truly exists is: not a Photoshopped surface, but a presence.

• The weight of words Our images have become industrialized... and so have our words. We "revolutionize" just about everything: an app, a credit card, a shampoo. Everyone is "changing the world." Eventually, no one believes anyone anymore.

Yet we underestimate the strategic power of simple sentences. What if, instead of grand declarations, we simply said: "We are trying," "We are learning," or even, "Here is what we know how to do, and here is what we don't know how to do (yet)."

Admittedly, it is less spectacular. But after so many grand promises, it might just be the only speech we still listen to: the kind that doesn't overdo it. Because creativity is not there to smooth over reality and distribute good vibes in a continuous flow. It is there to make sense, to illuminate, to question. To breathe life back into places where the system tends to align everything perfectly.