BoSacks Speaks Out: Have Media Strategists Lost Their Spine?

Cory Treffiletti’s recent MediaPost dispatch, “Are Media Strategists Becoming Innovation-Averse?”, reads like a long-overdue tap on the shoulder, or maybe a slap upside the head. And frankly, it’s a question we ought to be asking over our morning data dashboards: Have the once-bold navigators of media lost their edge, their nerve, their curiosity? Have they traded vision for vanity metrics?

There was a time, not long ago, but apparently long enough, that media strategists were the adrenaline in the room. They weren’t optimizing click-through rates; they were launching moonshots with startups, tinkering in the experimental garage of new media, whispering wild ideas into the ears of C-suite risk-takers. They were part mad scientist, part philosopher, part futurist.

Treffiletti’s warning is clear: When everyone has access to the same “innovations” at the same time, strategy becomes wallpaper, bland, ignorable, and everywhere. There’s no first-mover advantage in a world where the tools arrive pre-chewed and algorithmically neutered. What used to be risky is now routine. What used to be bold is now “brand-safe.”

And that’s the core rot.

We’ve bred a generation of strategists afraid to get fired. Afraid to lose a pitch. Afraid to offend a procurement officer. But guess what? Playing it safe is the new risky. Because safe gets replaced, by AI, by automation, by margin-chopping clients who don’t want ideas, they want KPIs.

Treffiletti isn’t all doom, thankfully. He makes a compelling case for how AI could liberate strategists from the digital drudgery we’ve somehow elevated into gospel. Let the bots crunch the impressions, humans should be conjuring the unforgettable. Creativity doesn’t scale, and thank God for that.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If strategists want to stay relevant, they need to find their nerve again. Stop optimizing. Start agitating. Reclaim your audacity before someone builds a bot that makes your caution look quaint.