Creativity Isn't Dying in B2B. We're Approving It Out of Existence. Apply the MAYA principle in marketing instead!

Before anything else, a confession.

I wrote this article with the help of AI. The ideas are mine: the sinking feeling, the meetings I'm about to describe, the framework at the end. But some of the polish isn't. An AI helped me sound sharper than I actually am on a Tuesday morning with a coffee going cold next to the keyboard.

Sit with that irony for a moment, because this article is about how AI and corporate caution are quietly pulling all of us toward the same acceptable average. I'm not writing about that machine from the outside. I'm writing from inside it, under its influence, right now. The most honest thing I can do is tell you it's happening to me, mid-sentence, and hope that naming it is the first step out.

The work that vanishes

For years I've had a sinking feeling watching B2B creative go out into the world.

Campaigns, brand platforms, websites, content strategies. On paper, better than ever: polished, targeted, technically flawless.

Also completely indistinguishable.

Every brand drawing from the same word bank. Transformation. Innovation. Seamless. Future-ready. Trusted partner delivering measurable outcomes.

The work was rarely bad. That was the trap; it was acceptable. It cleared legal without a scratch. It matched the brand guidelines. Sales got their talking points. Executives nodded. Nobody objected strongly enough to kill it.

Then it hit the market and disappeared. Buyers don't punish generic work loudly, they simply build their own version of the truth without you, long before sales gets a word in.

What the approval room actually does

Not long ago, an enterprise software client came to us with a brief that, on its face, was every agency's dream: do something bolder than the usual campaigns in their space. Their words, not ours.

We took them at their word. We dug into the nuts and bolts of the product, understood why IT leaders could genuinely feel confident in it, and came back with three campaign concepts built on the opposite of the category's default playbook: confidence instead of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. One concept borrowed the visual language of a pharmaceutical commercial. Another went full superhero. None of it looked like the stock-imagery sameness their competitors run on.

The people closest to the work loved it. Then the concepts started travelling up and down the ladder. Somewhere on that journey, the organisation got spooked at the prospect of looking too different from their own brand. A single product stakeholder vetoed the direction, and what eventually ran was the lowest common denominator: factual, safe, forgettable. We never heard how it performed. Nobody was eager to share.

Here's the twist that still stings. The same client asked us to build one small, novel thing for the launch anyway, an interactive game, precisely because they'd liked our creative approach. That little side project pulled in around 15,000 views and outperformed everyone's expectations. The bold thinking they explicitly asked for got killed; the sliver of it that survived was the thing that worked.

The campaign didn't die in a dramatic showdown. It was politely approved out of existence. And I can't claim the moral high ground; we took the notes, presented the safer options, and told ourselves that was collaboration.

The MAYA principle in marketing: Loewy saw this coming

I struggled to name the mechanics of this for a long time. I blamed risk aversion, weak creative direction, short-term performance pressure. Then I went back to Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer behind everything from the Coca-Cola fountain to the Studebaker, and his principle from Never Leave Well Enough Alone (1951): MAYA.

Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Loewy understood that work people actually adopt lives in tension between two forces. It has to be advanced enough to interrupt expectations. And it has to stay familiar enough that the audience trusts it. Too novel and you're rejected as confusing. Too familiar and you're invisible.

What's broken in B2B isn't our ability to produce the advanced. It's that every organisational system approvals, legal review, brand governance, quarterly targets pulls toward the familiar. The machine has one direction.

AI doesn't kill creativity. It accelerates the average.

Which brings me back to my confession.

AI isn't anti-creative. It's a pattern-matching engine trained on everything that already exists, built to return the most statistically probable answer. Ask it for a B2B article, and you get the synthesised average of every B2B article since 2015. Ask it for a headline, and you get the most common structure in the dataset.

I know because I watched it happen to this piece. The first AI-assisted draft was clean, confident, and it read like everyone. Symmetrical little sentences. Tidy aphorisms. The statistical mean of thought leadership, about the danger of the statistical mean. I had to fight to get my own rough edges back in, and I'm still not sure I won. My colleague Arun made a related argument recently: now that anyone can produce polish in an afternoon, polish has become the noise — a real point of view is what's left.

That's the real lesson. AI can tell you what's likely. Only a person can decide what's worth saying and only if they're willing to push back against the tool's gravity. Most days, most of us don't. The irony compounds: even the AI engines themselves reward distinctiveness, citing original research and proprietary frameworks far more often than derivative opinion. The average doesn't even win with the machines that produce it.

We ask for boldness and reward safety

Executives ask for bold, category-defining work, and I don't think they're lying. The breakdown happens in translation. Middle layers strip out risk before the work ever reaches the top. By the time an executive sees the concept, it's tame, and they wonder why.

That's not a communication failure. It's an incentive failure. Teams don't listen to what leaders say about innovation; they watch what happens when an experiment fails. If a bold idea misses and the first question is "who approved this?", the culture learns instantly. The risk of being distinctive is visible and punished. The risk of being invisible is hidden and safe.

Does this Leewardist cartoon strike a familiar cord?

Somebody has to defend the advanced

Legal protects safety. Sales protects conversion. Product protects accuracy. Finance protects capital. Every function in the approval room has something it's paid to defend except the thing that makes the work worth noticing.

If marketing doesn't fight for the advanced, nobody will. That doesn't mean defending every strange idea as misunderstood genius; unpopular doesn't mean visionary, and plenty of killed ideas deserved it. It means building what I'd call protected provocation: a deliberate, bounded space where the uncomfortable part of the idea survives review.

From Acceptable to Accountable

So here's my amendment to Loewy's MAYA principle in marketing, seventy-five years on: keep the acronym, change the last word. Most Advanced Yet Accountable.

Creative risk survives inside an enterprise only when someone senior owns it out loud. When a campaign strays from category norms and misses, the leader's job is one sentence:

"I approved this experiment. The team ran a rigorous hypothesis inside boundaries we agreed. It didn't hit the benchmark and the decision to test it was mine."

Said once, in a real meeting, that does more for a culture of innovation than any keynote about failing forward.

Before your next campaign gets approved into oblivion, six questions for the room: What's the familiar entry point that lets the audience orient? What's the provocation that challenges the category consensus? Which single element, if removed, turns this into wallpaper? Is the objection a legal risk or just creative discomfort? How do we bound the test so it can't sink the ship? And who owns the outcome, by name?

Still under the influence

It's easy to complain that corporate conservatism is killing creativity. It's harder to admit how often I participate in it.

I've softened headlines to avoid long comment threads. I've recommended safer positioning because I knew it would clear legal by Friday. I've confused what a client would approve with what a customer would remember. And I've just written an article about the gravitational pull of the average with a tool whose entire job is to produce the average.

I'm not immune. I don't think anyone is anymore. But awareness is the one advantage we have over the machine; it doesn't know it's averaging, and I do.

Novelty creates attention. Familiarity creates understanding. The job isn't to pick the safest idea in the room, or the strangest. It's to find the most advanced idea your audience can digest and to be the person who signs their name to testing it.

Starting with mine.