Interviewed by Sarah Tilley

After his session with Jon Evans,  ‘The Extraordinary Cost of Dull’  at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival, we sat down with Adam Morgan, founder and partner at eatbigfish, to hear about how employing a more Challenger Mindset can help brands to tackle the Cost of Dull.

For those who missed your talk, tell us – what is the ‘Cost of Dull’ and how did the idea for this research come about?

I've been in the branding and communications business for forty years now, and I was really struck about 18 months ago about how much dull and mediocre marketing and communications there is still all around us. Some have argued that it’s actually getting worse. Even with everything that we've learned about marketing effectiveness and the value on the impact of creativity, from some brilliant data and brilliant people like Peter Field and Les Binet, it's not really making enough of an impact on the output of the majority of the marketing and advertising community. And I thought, “How can we refresh this conversation about the need to be much more engaging, but in a more compelling way?”

I was reminded of Daniel Kahneman's observation that actually the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining something, which I thought was fascinating. So up to now, we've been talking about the upside of gaining through creativity but perhaps we should flip that conversation, and talk about the downside of being dull. And so, I had a conversation with Peter Field who has obviously done some seminal work with Les Binet on marketing effectiveness using the IPA databank in the UK. And I asked him, “Could you take that data you've got and turn it upside down: instead of looking at the upside, look at the downside? Look at what it costs a brand to be dull and how much money they're leaving on the table?” Basically, could we identify exactly how much extra money a marketer who chooses to be dull in their communications would have to spend in media to get the same commercial impact they would have got with if they’d chosen to be interesting? Because being dull is, of course, a choice.

And so we started off with Peter doing some initial analysis around UK examples using the IPA databank, and then we partnered with Jon Evans from System1 (& the Uncensored CMO podcast, of course), who’s Test Your Ad database contains more than 100,000 ads from around the world including from the US and UK. Between Peter and Jon and System1, we've now looked at the Cost of Dull in the US as well as the UK. Our focus up to now has only been on dull in TV advertising; going forward, we're starting to collect other collaborators to look at areas of the communications and experience funnel as well.

What have the findings been so far?

So by the Cost of Dull, when it comes to communications, we mean the extra amount of media money you would have to spend behind a dull campaign to get the same commercial return as if you'd spent it on an interesting campaign. So in the case of a typical TV campaign in the UK, Peter has estimated, using the IPA data, that a dull campaign (he's defining that as one that uses rational or factual based arguments to try and persuade the customer to buy them) would have to spend £10 million more on media to have the same commercial return as a more interesting campaign (i.e. one that is emotionally engaging or creating fame and social salience). So, we're using proxies for dull here, as you can see, but they seem to hold up pretty well.

In the case of System1, they measure the emotional response to a TV ad in the viewer, and the most frequent response they record in testing? Neutrality – people saying they feel nothing at all after seeing the ad. And System1 have tested over 55,000 TV ads in the US since 2017, so have an enormous and robust database. So they broke all those 55,000 ads into four equal quartiles of increasing ‘dullness’ (the most dull having the most ‘neutral’ responses, the least dull having the least ‘neutral’ responses) and looked at their relative commercial impact: what’s the cost to the US ad industry as a whole in being dull? How much would the 75% dullest ads have to commit in increased media spend to equal the commercial impact of the 25% most engaging ones? And the answer was roughly the GDP of Greece - $189bn.

Dullness is costing businesses a fortune.

That’s a lot of money but what can brands do to combat the Cost of Dull?

Well, as Vikki Ross, one of Jon’s guests on his podcast recently said, bland outputs come from bland inputs. So we’re looking at both execution and strategy. With System1, we're very much focusing on how to overcome dullness in communications and ads. From an eatbigfish point of view, our focus is as much on the strategic side. Basically, how do you get your strategic outputs to not only be right, but stimulating and interesting enough to engage and generate a response from a customer, and indeed, a response in terms of communications.

In terms of inputs, we’ve collectively taken all our expertise around Challengers, as well as the more recent interviews that Jon and I have been doing on our respective podcasts, and we are starting to create a number of simple tools we think will be useful. For instance, we’ve put together a group of five key questions which collectively and individually prompt one to think much more fundamentally about where you're arriving strategically. We’ve plotted this group of questions on what we are provisionally calling the ‘Anti-Dull Dial’.

The Anti-Dull Dial sounds exciting – can you tell us more about that and how it works?

To start off, what it means to be a Challenger has evolved a lot over the last 25 years, but at the heart of being a Challenger is the thought that ‘Challengers challenge’ – the secret is in the name. Not necessarily challenge someone, but challenge something – something about the category (a criteria for choice, or an assumption about the way things need to be), or even something about the culture. So that sense of challenge and really being intentional about standing out is clearly a very important part of that, and the Anti-Dull Dial is a tool that can help an individual or team be clearer on the degree to which the route they have is really doing that. Of course, it's a little simplistic, but in a sense, that's what's makes it useful and punchy.

I think the interesting thing about the Anti-Dull Dial is that the five questions are taken from both our ‘Let's Make This More Interesting’ podcast research into people who understand how to make dull subjects more interesting and then it’s cross-validated with Peter Field’s and Les Binet’s work around things like surprise, for instance, and also System1’s work about emotional connections in communications.

So although it’s not the whole story, those five questions do seem to be some of the fundamentals at the heart of finding more engaging solutions in strategy, in advertising – and perhaps in life more broadly.

Can you give us an example of how a Challenger would answer one of the five questions on the Anti-Dull Dial?

One of the interesting evolutions of being a Challenger is that it's obviously not just about ‘David versus Goliath’ anymore. It’s quite clear that the nature of what it means to be a Challenger narrative has changed, and today it's not just about who you're challenging but what you're challenging.

And in that regard, one of the five dimensions on the Anti-Dull Dial is about ‘denying a key assumption of the audience’. This idea originally came from somebody sending me a really interesting article by a sociologist called Murray Davis, written in 1971, about which social theories over the previous 100 years had taken off and succeeded. By social theories, Davis meant everything from Marx and Freud all the way to Marshall McLuhan and RD Laing. Davis said that the theories that really landed and are still talked about and studied are not simply the ones that are true, but the ones that are interesting. And by interesting, he said, they are the ones that deny a certain key assumption of the audience. Dull ones are theories that confirm what we already think, interesting ones are theories that deny it. So inevitably if you, as a Challenger, are challenging something about the culture of the category, or indeed the culture around us, you need to really understand the existing assumptions of your audience and you're going to be denying one or more of them in some way. And, as I say, we know from System1’s data and Peter and Les’ work that surprise can be one of the most powerful engagement approaches one can use. 

One of the winners at this year’s Cannes was a striking example of this. The Orange campaign by Marcel took what was apparently a bit of film of the French male football team playing – beautiful skills, goals, all that kind of stuff, and then reveals that actually, the original film had in fact been of the French female team playing, and they had simply digitally superimposed the men’s faces and bodies on top. So it was powerfully challenging the assumption that the women's game is a fun but a much less skillful version of the men's game. Instead, and very explicitly, they showed that that assumption is wrong. I think it's a very interesting example of challenging an assumption about the category in line with this core thought on the Anti-Dull Dial.

What are the barriers for brand leaders in the fight to be more interesting?

I think that there are two ways to answer that question. One is that many clients don’t seem to understand what the real competition for attention is – by being so locked into their categories and what everybody else is doing in the category, we can be tempted to think all we really have to do to be more interesting is to be at least as interesting as the other brands in your category. And of course, that's not the case. People have got a lot on their minds, and they've got lots of things competing for their attention. So, the real bar that we've got to beat in terms of being more interesting, is a much, much higher bar than many of us are currently setting ourselves. Brand owners are not looking up and looking out and really understanding what the real competition for attention, and therefore interest, is.

And at the same time, the bigger, related question is of course: why are so many smart, well-intentioned people producing such dull stuff?

It's not that the marketing community is not full of bright people. It's full of very bright people.

It's not that they want to produce dull stuff - they don't want to produce dull stuff.

They want to do the best they can for their brand and their company…and yet, they're producing dull work anyway. And one of the reasons is that there are various forces that are making people take what appear to be individually very sensible decisions, in the best interests of the brand or company, but which collectively and unintentionally add up to dullness. Optimisation and averaging, for instance, I think have become the new version of ‘best practice’. At some level, it seems to make a lot of sense to lean into best practice, but when everyone does it, that leans to a generically bland look and feel in a category, and that’s dull.

And, those of us collaborating on this project would argue, a big reason that people are reluctant to change is that they don't understand the cost of being dull. They don't understand how expensive their lack of differentiation is for them. That understanding is part of what we’re here to change.

How does eatbigfish help clients to not only understand the Cost of Dull, but break free from it?

Part of the way we help is to design processes which allow cross-functional teams beyond marketing to all go on the journey in the same way, at the same time – to all understand the cost, and what’s at stake, and all own the solution together. It can be difficult for the CMO to make those kinds of decisions on their own, if they haven't helped the rest of the company recognise the need to be more differentiated or more interesting at the same time. So the work we do recognises that strategy often has to be social, and that you need to get a collective group of people to move and make those decisions together.

Secondly, we help clients to look up and look out from their own category, to get them to see and learn from Challengers in other industries who must do things that are much more interesting and engaging with their customers - because of course, Challengers can't afford to bore their audience. It's existential, in fact, for Challengers to bore their audience. If you're a very big player in a category, actually, then spending an extra £10 million per campaign doesn't really matter – you’ve got the money. You can afford to be dull. But a Challenger can’t. So let’s pay a lot of attention to what the successful ones are doing.

The third thing we do is use a rigorous set of exercises and frameworks, which have been developed over the last 25 years, that help the client team – with their primary business partners – work out how to get to a more interesting challenge and narrative for their brand.

And lastly, we try to ensure that strategy and ideas travel together. We work with the team to develop, alongside the strategy, illustrative and engaging ideas that bring the strategy to life. Helping everyone to see how the strategy and ideas can start to work together to express their more interesting Challenger narrative.

Last but not least, what’s the main thing that you hope people take away from this research?

I hope between us all – Peter, Jon, System1 and eatbigfish – we can frame the Cost of Dull in a way that a CEO or CFO can understand. We're not trying to be judgmental about it – if there’s a reason you want to be really cautious, then by all means be dull.  Just recognise what that will really cost you to be commercially impactful. 

And if you want to invest that extra media spend, that's fine. But let's have that conversation with our eyes wide open, rather than just pretending. We can help you ask the right questions to get at a better, more interesting strategy. And we’re working with the others to create a suite of tools that will help us all have more productive conversations around this, strategically and executionally.

If you’d like to know more about how eatbigfish can help you and your team take on ‘dull’ with a Challenger Mindset, get in touch at www.eatbigfish.com – we’d love to hear from you.