By Claire Denham-Dyson
There’s a growing moan among marketers and armchair ad critics alike: “You can’t say anything anymore.” Or worse, “Woke politics has ruined creativity.” The reason your campaign flopped wasn’t because it was derivative or directionless – no, it’s because you weren’t allowed to make a joke about your secretary’s legs while selling tyres.
Let’s be honest: If your creative idea can’t survive being asked not to offend half the population, was it ever that creative to begin with?
The claim that ‘wokeness’ is killing creativity is not just tired – it’s lazy. It imagines creativity as this fragile, trembling thing that needs infinite freedom to thrive. But any real creative knows that’s not true. Great creative work lives in constraint. The tighter the brief, the more inventive the execution. You don’t get brilliance from a blank canvas. You get brilliance when you give someone a Sharpie and tell them to turn a bathroom stall into the Sistine Chapel.
And in today’s landscape, so-called ‘wokeness’ – a clumsy catch-all for awareness, inclusion, and not being an asshole – is just the newest brief. So why are we acting like it’s a burden, rather than what it really is: A provocation? A juicy new set of creative parameters. A call to speak to people we’ve ignored for decades.
The Budweiser problem: Values ≠ Vibes
Take the infamous Budweiser x Dylan Mulvaney debacle. People often cite this as proof that ‘inclusive’ campaigns backfire. But that’s not what happened. The problem wasn’t the trans influencer. It was the brand schizophrenia. You can’t spend decades targeting tailgate bros and then, with no warm-up, slap a rainbow on a can and hope for the best.
It’s not ‘woke’ that killed that campaign – it’s incoherence. The creative didn’t fail because Dylan is trans. It failed because the brand hadn’t done the work to understand what it actually stands for, or how to hold that line while expanding who’s invited into the party. That’s not a creativity problem. That’s a brand strategy problem with a side of cowardice.
You’re not being cancelled, you’re being ignored
Good creatives adapt. That’s the job. You take the tension in culture – the clash, the chaos, the climate – and you translate it into something meaningful, human, and surprising. If your idea can only land with a very narrow audience (read: straight, white, cisgender, middle-class people aged 35 to 49), that’s not ‘timeless’. That’s limiting. We’re not here to make private jokes for the old boys’ club. We’re here to tell stories that people actually see themselves in.
Let’s not forget: Both the audience and the creative class are shifting. Slowly, painfully, and with a lot of fragile egos flaring – but shifting, nonetheless. The people making the work aren’t all from the same school in Cape Town or an ad agency in Soho anymore. And neither are the people buying it. If your work can’t connect beyond your demographic mirror, then you’re not making good creative – you’re just making inside jokes. And that’s why hearing ‘wokeness is killing creativity’ from anyone in the global majority makes me raise my non-existent eyebrows… When did making ads for the actual audience become so offensive to the creative class?
‘Wokeness’ is not the villain – it’s the toolbox
Blaming wokeness for boring work is like a mechanic blaming a wrench for not knowing how to fix an engine. Inclusion, nuance, and empathy are not obstacles – they’re the raw materials of 21st-century creativity. ‘How do we tell a story that resonates with more than just people like me?’ should be the most exciting brief of your career, not the beginning of a rant on LinkedIn.
If you’re a creative, your job has never been to play it safe. So why are we suddenly hiding behind this idea that everything is too scary now? Since when did not offending people become such a high bar to clear?
The truth is that a lot of people aren’t scared of offending – they’re scared of not being the centre of attention anymore. They’re scared of saying the quiet thing out loud – we don’t understand the audience. We don’t understand how to be with people who are different from us, and still feel like we belong.
Call it what it is: A crisis of bravery
The problem isn’t political correctness. It’s creative cowardice.
Too many brands want to ‘tap into culture’ without committing to anything. They want the look and feel of relevance without the risk. But you can’t outsource bravery to your agency and then freak out when the Internet has an opinion. You have to stand for something. And yes, that means someone might disagree. But you know what else people disagree on? Pineapple on pizza. And yet, life goes on.
What’s killing creativity isn’t wokeness. It’s brands without spines and creatives without conviction. It’s the endless hedging, diluting, and apologising before the work is even made. It’s pretending that reaching more people means saying less, when it actually means saying more, but better.
So what now?
Marketers: Clarify what you believe. Commit to your audiences. Give your creatives a clear stake in the ground and then let them play.
Creatives: Stop pining for the golden days of Mad Men and get excited about the possibility of being wrong, being awkward, being curious. The world’s wider, messier, and more interesting than ever. If that doesn’t light a fire under you, maybe you’re in the wrong industry.
Creativity as we knew it IS dead. And maybe that’s a good thing.
Because let’s be honest – a lot of what we called ‘creative’ wasn’t that creative. It was exclusionary. Trite. Predictable. Often punching down, rarely reaching up. It thrived on cheap stereotypes and the assumption that everyone in the room looked and laughed the same.
‘Edgy’ used to mean mocking the margins. And now that the margins are here, in the room with you, suddenly creatives are ‘afraid’? Please.
South Africans – we know how to laugh at and with one another. We’re fluent in irony, contradiction, and survival. We should be leading the creative world at this moment. So what’s up?
The truth is, ‘wokeness’ didn’t make creatives cowardly. It just revealed who already was. It asked you to stretch. To feel something you hadn’t felt before. To make space. To let go of the crutches – the lazy joke, the flat archetype, the comforting gaze.
That’s not a threat. That’s the assignment.
So if you’re feeling uncomfortable, good. You’re in the right place.
Because that’s where real creativity begins.
