On my first day at my first job – a Domino’s Pizza boy – I was told “if you make a pizza wrong, we all get to eat it.”

And on my first day at my first good job - in the social team at innocent smoothies – the Creative Director, Dan Germain told me: “If you’re not p*ssing anyone off, you’re not doing your job right.”

Two ways of saying the same thing: Mistakes are welcome here.

I hadn’t worked at a big company before innocent, and I was a bit nervous at the idea of one bad tweet landing on the BBC homepage – but this calmed my nerves no end. Creative risk-taking was not just encouraged, but demanded – and the occasional grumpy person on Twitter was a price worth paying.

Now, after years working in social media, I can tell you 99.999%* of my work fits neatly into one of two categories:

Category One: Content some people have really liked but some people have really hated

And the much larger Category Two: Content no one has noticed at all

(The remaining 0.001% ended up on the BBC homepage, oops)

Sadly, the magical category of “Content that has been universally adored by everyone” just doesn’t exist.

Not everyone likes the new Taylor Swift album or the latest Dune movie – despite the hundreds of brains and millions of dollars that have gone into them – so there’s no hope everyone will like my latest cereal advert.

It’s impossible for brands to go big on social without getting abuse on Twitter, or someone writing a 1000-word LinkedIn post called “Why That Popular Campaign Is Sh*t Actually”.

Instead of trying to avoid it, you just have to accept it.

Let’s say you’re opening a pizza restaurant – but you can only sell one type of pizza. If you go meaty, you’ll p*ss off vegans. If you go vegan, you’ll p*ss off meat eaters.

The solution isn’t to try and cater to everyone with a pizza that’s half pepperoni and half completely devoid of cheese.

The solution is to pick a side, and tune out the occasional naysayer.

Some people are not going to be happy, no matter what you do – so instead of worrying about them, I try and focus on the people we could make happy.

That might sound obvious, but I’ve been in plenty of meetings where it feels like the goal isn’t to make a really good advert, just an ad no one can criticise.

This leads to scenarios like being told to change an English headline because the translation won’t work in German. (The final outcome was a headline that sounded equally bad in both languages, but hey, at least the brand manager was happy...)

Let me be clear – accepting that vegans might not come to your Pepperoni-Onli pizza place is not the same as calling your pizza place “F*ck You, Tofu”.

I’m not saying actively try to piss people off (though “F*ck You, Tofu” probably would make headlines…) just that you make peace with the fact that not everyone in the world will like your restaurant.

And that’s fine. You don’t have 7 billion seats.

But that being said… there is a level below “p*ssed off” which I am fond of… and I’m going to call that “soft outrage”.

Using soft outrage

I try not to worry about “the algorithm” too much. Like Gen-Z fashion, it changes all the time and I can’t keep up. But to my super basic understanding, the platforms push things people are reacting to (via likes, shares, comments etc) and don’t push the stuff they’re not.

The stronger the reaction, the more they push it. Long comments are worth more than short ones – and there’s a reason Facebook introduced an “angry” like button.

This means the easiest way to spread on social media is to be controversial - and “F*ck You, Tofu” will definitely achieve that… plus an angry mob outside the door, and a sternly worded letter from the council about changing your sign immediately.

But you can actually achieve similarly good results, without a lot of the negativity, by using really, really mild provocations.

Tell people that you like pineapple on pizza, ketchup on roast dinners, or claim Bounty to be a God-tier chocolate bar, and you’ll get PLENTY of reactions. They won’t all be positive reactions, sure. But they’ll be much stronger reactions than if you tell someone you like tomato sauce on pizza – and they won’t be negative enough to damage your brand.

If we go back to the categories at the start, I can tell you Category One (“some like it, some hate it”) outperforms Category Two (“no one cares”) by a million miles.

The whole Weetabix-beans thing was a perfect example of that, and the most successful campaign I ever did at innocent was when we launched a turquoise-coloured drink, called it “blue”, and then argued for four days straight.

So nowadays, my starting point with content for Surreal is usually: “How do I wrap up this cereal advert in a way that will get a reaction?”

Whenever I’m stuck for ideas, haven’t had a hit in a while, or just need to get people’s attention, I just crack out some Comic Sans. People can’t resist telling you how much they hate it, but they’re probably not going to boycott you over it.

In fact, I can only think of one thing that’s as reliable as Comic Sans – and that’s dogs.

Posting a picture of a cute dog is the closest you will ever get to universally adored content. But even then, someone will be p*ssed off that you didn’t post a cat.

This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe