Hasta La Creative!

Of the fascinating trends we’ve seen come and go in 20 years of honoring the best of the internet at The Webby Awards, one strategy we see time and time again in Webby-honored work is risk. Whether it was eBay betting that it could get people who had never met to trust each other; Wieden+Kennedy convincing its client Old Spice to let it produce online personalized commercials in real time; or Pokemon Go launching a global augmented reality game to a world where only a small percentage of the population had even heard the term AR, the internet’s biggest sites and moments appear, from the outside, like high-stakes gambles that at times seem more lucky than planned.

But when you dig further into these cases and dozens more, what you find is not luck at all, but people who, when confronted with challenging ideas, didn’t run away, but opened up and put in place plans and processes to make the riskier parts of their idea, well, less risky. To offset its trust risk, eBay created a way for users to review each other; W+K built a strong relationship with its client and put processes in place for client approvals in real time; and Niantic (creator of Pokemon Go) built a global game experience based on data and behavior it had been collecting since 2009 from a lesser-known product, Ingres.

When I look back at this year’s Webby-winning work, there are countless stories that speak to the different ways digital and creative professionals were brave enough to take big, calculated risks and — because they did a lot of hard work to offset that risk — were able to achieve big, unanticipated rewards.

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