Noah Smith: Marketing Has A Babysitting Problem

By Noah Smith, founder of Digital Strangers, a UGC agency specialising in social-led content and campaigns for TikTok and Instagram.

Marketing today is caught in a tug-of-war between innovation and risk aversion and too often, great ideas die in boardrooms, buried under layers of sign-offs, watered down into mediocrity.

Agencies are spending more time coddling hesitant clients than pushing boundaries. In-house, brand managers and marketing leads often want to greenlight creative agency advice but are stifled by ‘top-down’ risk-adverse leadership. Leadership rooted in fear of failure or the risk of negative impacts on revenue.

This is the marketing industry’s babysitting problem.

I’ve worked across a spectrum of brands, from Ultra Violette at Common Intent to Reflections Holidays and Newcastle Permanent at Enigma. I’ve seen firsthand how innovative, disruptive strategies drive results. Yet, executive level fear of failure is making cut-through brands a rare breed.

At its heart, this fear stems from a fundamental disconnect. Consumers have shifted. They crave authenticity, imperfection and relatability—ugly content that feels genuine to the human experience. Yet, many executives are still stuck in the polished, traditional marketing playbook of the past. Strategies that “have always worked” and have never evolved.

It’s the marketer’s job to bridge that gap but how can we lead when we’re stuck babysitting?

Leading Disruption in the Face of Fear

We need to reframe how we approach risk in marketing. Take the NSW Police for example. By leaning into disruptive TikTok content, they’ve built a relatable brand presence in a space where relatability wasn’t the expectation. Seeing officers dance on TikTok and receive over 3.9 million views for a piece of content on double demerits certainly wasn’t on my bingo card. It’s risky—but it works. They understand the shift in consumer attention and embrace the audience’s appetite for ugly content.

On the flip side, Jaguar’s recent attempts at disruption fell flat, exposing the dangers of innovation for innovation’s sake. Their misstep wasn’t in taking a risk, personally, I quite like the new logo, but the delivery in their launch video was incredibly off. “Copy nothing”, “delete ordinary” and “break moulds” were messages shown in the launch. They felt like ‘fake it till you make it’ statements and, paired with the seemingly cosmetics-inspired creative, nothing felt like an authentic shift to modernise. In failing to align the risk with authenticity, the attempt of innovation died.

Moving Away from Babysitting

To shift the narrative, marketers need to lead and what it takes is a repositioning of ourselves as innovators:

1. Sell the ‘Why,’ Not Just the ‘What’: Renowned marketer Simon Sinek said it best, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. The premise is the same when selling ideas to executives. They need to understand why your idea matters. Tie risks to tangible data and share examples of how similar disruption has driven results.

2. Embrace ‘Ugly’ Content: The rise of TikTok and UGC has proven that polished content doesn’t always win. That being said, social-led campaigns are today’s way of testing ideas before the commitment, particularly financially. This is your way of presenting the data.

3. Create a Culture of Experimentation: Innovation thrives in environments where failure is accepted as part of the process. Agencies and brands need to celebrate learnings from what doesn’t work as much as they do from what does.

4. Educate Up the Ladder: Marketing leaders must help executives understand shifting consumer landscapes. This requires more than reporting metrics. Your pitch should be telling a story that builds confidence in going against the grain.

The babysitting problem is a symptom of an industry-wide identity crisis. We’ve become executors of safe ideas, rather than leaders of innovative ones. That being said, platforms like TikTok and the dominance of UGC shows us the way forward.

The brands that win today are the ones willing to take the leap into the unknown and it’s our job, as marketers, to show them how to jump.

View Digital Strangers on TikTok here.