Addicted to Dependency: Why We Keep Putting Our Ideas in Someone Else’s Hands

Agencies are practically addicted to dependency. We develop an idea with absolute conviction, only to hand it over the moment things get serious. To the client who has to sign it off. To the production company tasked with bringing it to life. To suppliers we don’t always choose for their ambition, but because they’re available and affordable.

We constantly look to others to help bring our own ideas to life, including people who care far less than we do about making them great.

This dependency takes two forms. The first is about whom we trust to execute our ideas. The second is about how we behave the moment someone else’s approval is required: we are default needy.

We make ourselves smaller to be liked instead of becoming indispensable enough to be needed.
Leonard captures the underlying dynamic perfectly: “The best trick CFOs, CEOs, and clients play on creatives is making you feel like they don’t need you.”

And we fall for it because pushing back might cost us the relationship. People-pleasing is an act of submission disguised as client service. And with every concession, we reinforce the very dependency we claim to want to escape.

Leonard illustrates just how absurd this can become with the story of a pitch that spent nine months waiting for approval, despite being an idea he considered obviously brilliant. Looking back, his verdict was simple: “That’s not actually good, that’s insane.”
So why do we keep doing it?

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s concept of loss aversion offers a sobering explanation: the pain of losing something carries roughly twice the psychological weight of an equivalent gain.

When you bring an idea to life yourself and take full ownership of it, you risk a visible failure that can be traced directly back to you.

When you hand it over to a client, a production partner, or a less ambitious supplier, you distribute the accountability along with the ambition.

Being needy, then, is a surprisingly rational response to an asymmetrical risk.

“Courage” is the wrong word for what’s missing.
Courage implies a recognizable danger: you know what you’re afraid of, and you act anyway.

Our industry rarely faces that kind of danger. Nobody dies because of a bad campaign. At worst, a client relationship ends, and even that is survivable. What we lack is the willingness to go further than seems reasonable, long before anyone has even told us to play it safe.

In the same speech, Leonard spells out the implication: “Stop giving yourself a way out.”
Every dependency we create is exactly that: an escape route we can take if things go wrong.

We need to scout for ambition, deliberately. We should actively seek out people with the energy and drive to make things happen, people who want to create, own the outcome, and take responsibility for it.
Ambitious makers, not just agreeable executors. That’s where the real creative power lies, because their commitment becomes visible in the work itself. Whether those people are in-house talent or external specialists is beside the point. What matters is that they share the same ambition.

We need to change the way we talk. Whatever we do, we shouldn’t sound like an agency, and certainly not like a management consultancy. No clever-sounding language. No buzzwords that make a simple idea seem more complicated than it is. Mark Ritson has been making this point for years: marketing is a craft, not a vocabulary. Plain language and compelling stories sell ideas more effectively than any methodology. Selling is a craft in its own right, a discipline that requires practice, just like any other.

We need to believe in our ideas enough to make them happen ourselves. Literally, if necessary. Leonard has since started asking himself a different question: “What if, instead of asking permission, we made the spray, did it ourselves, and then we went to them and said: we’re doing this, we’re not asking permission, we’re doing it, would you like to be a part of it?”

I know this isn’t how things usually work in reality. But there are some brilliant examples of what becomes possible when we approach things differently. Here’s one of them.

In 2014, Mike Cessario, then working in advertising, was briefed by a public-health client to develop something that would challenge the consumption of sugary drinks. His idea: canned water that looked like it belonged to a heavy metal band. The client rejected it. But Cessario refused to let the idea go. In 2017, he registered the brand with three partners: Liquid Death. By March 2024, the company had reached a valuation of $1.4 billion, according to Fortune, following $263 million in retail sales the previous year. It was still the same idea. What had changed was that Cessario had stopped waiting for a client’s approval and started proving his conviction with his own money, his own name, and his own risk.

This is the test we should apply to every idea we create before we try to sell it: Would we bring it to life ourselves if we had to? With our own money, under our own name, and at our own risk? If the honest answer is no, that’s proof we don’t believe in it strongly enough ourselves. And if we don’t, why should anyone else?

It also explains why so few agencies launch products, build brands, or bring their own ideas into the world rather than exclusively selling them to clients. Because we’d rather pitch our ideas than own them.