Like venture capital or Hollywood, marketing's value comes from rare, breakout successes that far outweigh all other efforts. The marketer's job is to create opportunities for these unpredictable "10x" moments, rather than focusing solely on incremental, linear gains.

To avoid constant battles over unproven ideas, proactively allocate 5-10% of the marketing budget to a line item officially called "Marketing Experiments." Frame it to the CFO as a necessary fund for exploring new channels before current ones tap out and for seizing unforeseen opportunities.

Conventional, consensus-driven marketing seems safe but ensures your brand never cuts through the noise. To stand out and create something differentiated, marketers must be courageous and fight against mediocrity, even if it feels riskier in the short term.

Many brands retreat to safety during turmoil. However, a true existential crisis can be a unique opportunity, forcing teams to abandon failing playbooks and embrace the unorthodox, high-risk creative ideas that would otherwise be rejected by the system.

Coming from product, Wiz's CMO sees marketing as liberatingly low-risk. A bad product feature creates permanent technical debt and maintenance costs. In contrast, a failed marketing campaign can be stopped instantly with no lasting negative impact, which encourages creative and unconventional experiments.

Marketing's value, like brand fame, compounds over time and is probabilistic. Finance departments, however, wrongly apply simple, linear math (addition, subtraction) and demand immediate ROI, killing long-term initiatives that require time to pay off.

Don't censor ideas early. The path to innovative marketing is generating a high volume of unconventional, even "bad," ideas. Most will fail, but the one or two that succeed can become massive multipliers for your brand, often requiring you to ask for forgiveness, not permission.

The highest risk-adjusted return comes from amplifying what already works. The likelihood of a new marketing channel or sales script succeeding is statistically low. Instead of rolling the dice on something new, you should allocate resources to dramatically increase the volume of your proven winners.

To ensure continuous experimentation, Coastline's marketing head allocates a specific "failure budget" for high-risk initiatives. The philosophy is that most experiments won't work, but the few that do will generate enough value to cover all losses and open up crucial new marketing channels.