The Mission to Reignite Imagination

Each year, the IPA Effectiveness Awards showcase the power of creativity and the tangible impact of imaginative campaigns on businesses and brands. This year’s event spotlighted award-winning campaigns that not only demonstrated bold creative approaches but also delivered measurable, impactful results. Following a night filled with standout case studies and inspiring conversations, the mission to reignite imagination feels more relevant than ever.

In this context, we sat down with Adam Morgan, whose recent work in collaboration with Peter Field, the IPA, and System1 seeks to calculate The Cost of Dull for brands. This conversation explores why creativity is essential not just as an artistic pursuit but as a business driver — echoing the key lessons celebrated at the awards.

When I speak to Adam Morgan for the first time he’s in Brighton, admiring the sea view from outside his window, with the sun reflecting on his face. He tells me he discovered Brighton later in life and describes it as “enchanting”. 

Adam’s dad was a diplomat, so he grew up living all over the world. Born in Beijing, his family later moved to Yugoslavia, then the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and China again in his teens. He always thought he’d follow in his father’s footsteps, going into diplomacy himself. “I loved the windows into other cultures that living in those other places opened up.” 

But the wonders in Adam’s life seem to have unfolded through a meticulous compounding of serendipities. And as fate would have it, it was while working a summer job in London’s Harrods selling men’s silk underwear that he’d meet a “very famous advertising man” who inspired him to apply for a job in the sector.

Over the next 17 years, Adam worked in various agencies that combined strategic and creative elements. He played pivotal roles in early campaigns for Virgin Atlantic when the company had only two planes, the launch of PlayStation in the US when it seemed inconceivable for Sony to compete with Sega, and the relaunch of Apple when Steve Jobs returned, trying to resuscitate a brand on the brink of collapse.

During this time, Adam often found himself pitching the conventional narrative: showing Company X how well Company Y’s shares soared after an ad campaign. Yet, he felt there had to be more to the story. “Of course that was one way to tell the story, but there must be other things that these successful challengers were doing — things other than advertising,” he reflected.

After years in the industry, Adam decided to take a sabbatical to write a novel. However, he encountered difficulties and realised it would be easier to gain traction in fiction if he had established credentials in non-fiction. Although this assumption turned out to be flawed, it ultimately led him to write Eating the Big Fish, a book exploring how “challenger brands” can compete against market leaders. This work served as the catalyst for the birth of eatbigfish, a global strategic consultancy dedicated to helping challengers succeed. The Challenger Project emerged as an evolving study of these brands, delving into the essence of their success.

After the setbacks from the book he initially wrote that the agency no longer wanted, Adam was driven by “anger and bile” to step out on his own. “I’m not a natural entrepreneur, but it put a big corporate hand between my shoulder blades and forced me out into the world as an act of defiance.” The Challenger Project was designed as a continuation of his research, grounded in a commitment to understanding challengers through qualitative interviews. “Even when we were a very small team of five, we had a full-time researcher,” he notes. Over the past 25 years, they have researched nearly 400 challengers, creating rich insights into the nature of successful brands.

It’s a Matter of Life and Death

It was when writing his third book ‘A Beautiful Constraint’, that he met someone who would once again alter his course. That someone was Nick Warren, writer of ‘Industrial Theatre’ in South Africa. Industrial Theatre is how they teach, amongst other things, safety procedures to mining communities in South Africa. Adam explains that gold and diamond miners have very dangerous jobs. “The communities of miners are made up of lots of different ethnic communities with quite limited common language, and literacy. And because of heavy unionisation, many are deeply suspicious of their management.

“So, if you’re telling this group of very different people how to do safety procedures, you’ve got to be very creative about how you do it.” They began to put on theatrical, almost musical performances which demonstrated the safety procedures. Nick explained that it’s really important that everyone is engaged as it’s the main method for diffusing cynicism. “But why do you need to be quite so theatrical?” Adam asked.

“When it’s a matter of life and death, you can’t afford to bore the audience,” replied Nick.

That one sentence struck Adam at his core. “I got to thinking about how the same is true for challengers. It is literally existential. They cannot afford to bore their audience… I’ve been thinking about that ever since.” A couple of years after that conversation with Nick, Adam was visiting his mother when they ended up watching TV together. He remembers viewing the ITV break – “some of the most expensive airtime you can buy in the UK. And I couldn't believe just how shocking the quality of the advertising was. I mean, it was just shit.”

Adam decided to reach out to his long-time friend and effectiveness expert, Peter Field. Peter and Les Binet have been called the “godfather’s of effectiveness”. Their work with the IPA, alongside director of effectiveness, Laurence Green, has long provided much needed illumination to the once under-looked corners of the industry. It’s incredible work, equal in vastness as it is to depth.

“I asked Peter if we could take all the work he and Laurence had been doing – that amazing database that the IPA is sitting on – and turn it upside down.” Adam was taking the lead from Daniel Kahneman’s point regarding ‘loss aversion’, that says the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining it. “So let’s lean into that aversion,” Adam suggested. “Let’s take the data and instead of looking at the upsides of being creative, look at the downsides of not. Could we put an actual concrete cost on dull for the average brand owner in the UK?” And that’s exactly what they set out to do. 

The Cost of Dull

It’s important to Adam that I understand the ‘Cost of Dull’ in the broader context of it all. It’s something at its beginning – “we’ve only just scratched the surface.” He explains that they’ve investigated TV, which is of course only a very small fraction of the total output of the creative industry. “It’s going to be at least a two year project,” Adam says. 

A sister project that is running parallel to the Cost of Dull is called ‘Let’s Make This More Interesting’. It’s a podcast supported by a series of tools that focuses on what we can learn from people outside of marketing, whose job it is to make dull subjects interesting. “Marketing is not making enough progress from learning from itself,” says Adam. 

Peter was able to take the IPA’s case histories and look at brands that have used a rational or information based approach to put across their message, as opposed to an emotional or fame pursuing one. The former is a proxy for ‘dull’ and the latter for ‘interesting’. In System1, they measure people’s emotional responses after viewing an ad. The emotions vary from responses like disgust, all the way through to happiness and surprise. They also record neutrality, meaning that people felt nothing at all. For the purposes of calculating the ‘Cost of Dull’, neutrality is used as a proxy for dullness. 

The initial findings refer to different levels of ad dullness, which System 1 grouped into quartiles, ranging from “non-dull” (lowest neutral response) to “extremely dull” (highest neutral response). For brands in the three dullest quartiles to match the effectiveness of non-dull ads, they would need to spend an extra £13.29 billion in the UK and $189 billion in the U.S. annually. The latter is as much as the GDP of Greece. 

Over 50% of UK TV ad viewers and 47% of U.S. viewers experience emotional neutrality, making neutrality the most common response to ads. Not only does this blunt brand impact, but inflates the spending required to maintain customer attention. The analysis also shows that certain positive emotions like happiness and surprise diminish as neutrality rises. The ‘Cost of Dull’ stems from the missed growth and brand engagement that emotional ads can yield over the long term. 

“We took a 30 second video of a cow chewing grass and ran it through as if it was an ad to see how many ads it beat. Up against around 55,000 ads, it beat 50% of them,” says Adam. 

But Why Are Things So Dull? 

It’s easy to view creativity in isolation. Your imagination might conjure up several creatives sitting around a table getting animated, throwing hands, drawing atoms of ideas onto whiteboards. But it isn’t true that individuals are just having shit ideas. There are entire networks and ecosystems that are strangling the air out of creativity before it gets a chance to breathe, nevermind speak.  

Adam tells me there are two different explanations for dullness. One is the ‘resource curse’. It’s a phenomenon where countries with abundant natural resources such as oil and minerals, have not been more economically fruitful when compared to countries without these resources. It leads to an overdependence on the source. “You could argue that the resource curse is true in very large companies. If you’ve got very large budgets, you can quite literally afford to be dull. You don’t have to be interesting. You can just spend your way out of it,” explains Adam. He says that many challenger brands can’t afford to do that.

Peter and Adam discovered there are also some macro forces going on. “We’ve called them ‘the four horsemen of the dullocalypse’. These are: performance, optimisation, averaging and procurement. Individually, each of these trends are incredibly justifiable; often sensible. But their research shows that “taken together, these factors are creating a toxic atmosphere for exciting, fresh, work.” 

The Bones of a Roadmap

Adam and Peter are encouraging brands to invest in creativity and memorability, advocating for dynamic storytelling, right-brained elements like humour and strong characters, and content that emotionally engages audiences.

Adam warns that today’s advertising climate risks falling into “tweaking indifference” — slight adjustments to already uninspired campaigns that barely register with audiences. Dull ads are no longer a minor annoyance; they’re a major expense, costing billions in additional media spend to create the same impact as emotionally engaging ads

Adam advocates for a shift back to “right-brain” creativity, borrowing insights from inventive teaching methods: storytelling, emotional connection, and surprise. As he notes, seemingly dull topics like physics taught with personal anecdotes or humour holds attention far more than data alone. Likewise, the most successful ads — the Black Horses of Lloyds, Specsavers’ humorous mishaps — employ narrative and emotion, sparking positive responses that build brand affinity over time. Ads like these, driven by vivid characters and relatable stories, turn neutrality into engagement.

Ultimately, Adam and Peter’s project calls for an industry-wide transformation, where creativity becomes a fundamental — not incidental — investment. The stakes are higher than ever as generative AI opens the floodgates for cookie-cutter content. Brands that commit to memorable, bold advertising will not only outpace their “neutral” counterparts but lead the charge in restoring emotion to the heart of advertising.

The fight against dullness has just begun, but for Adam, it’s an exciting prospect. With renewed creativity, advertising can once again captivate, inspire, and drive real results.

Now, as I speak to him, he’s writing a children’s book. It seems to me that for Adam, this battle against dullness is not just a professional mission, but the full circle of something deeply personal – maybe the kernels of one once rooted in his childhood dreams of diplomacy. Just as he once imagined opening windows to vibrant cultures around the world, this work is a vehicle to opening those very windows in a different form. By infusing brands with life and purpose, they can become carriers of connection, offering glimpses into diverse stories and shared human experience. One window at a time.