The extraordinary cost of being dull - Peter Field and Adam Morgan

0:06Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. It's really good to have you join me. Now, in this episode, I've got not one, but two returning guests appearing together. Adam Morgan joined me on episode number two, way back when I was just starting out in this podcast. So it's great to catch up with him again, have him back on the show together with Peter Fields, who was in episode number 30. Peter, of course, as many of you know, is one half the dynamic duo that wrote the long and the short of it. Now, we're together to talk about a very important topic, being dull. It turns out that being dull costs us not just millions, but billions of pounds and dollars every single year.

0:43And we're on a campaign to try and end that problem. So I got together with Adam and Peter to find out what does the research tell us about being dull? And what can we do about it? Can we create a marketing world that's a little bit less dull? I think we'd all enjoy that. So here we are, my conversation with Peter Fields and Adam Morgan. Thank you both. And we'll get in a minute to the big question I'm sure people are wondering, why you're on together. We'll get to that in a second, but just for the listeners, if they don't know who you are, maybe I'll start with you, Adam, because you're a guest number two.

1:13Who are you and what do you do? So I'm the founder and partner of a company called Eat Big Fish, which we specialise in challenges. So I've studied and written books about challenges for 25 years now, which is a fairly extraordinary idea, ever since Eating the Big Fish came out. And yeah, I spend my life working and helping challenges succeed. now i should say big big plug for your books actually uh eat big fish is just phenomenal i mean i mean certainly i i've used it almost like the manual it's like the sort of the challenger brand manual so you know very understated answer to the question but but well i think the foremost kind of book on the subject of challenges um i know i've always said this to you a few times but my favorite book of yours is number two yes like the pirate inside has that done any better since we last talked about it or any plans to it's got a sort of hardcore of followers and enthusiasts like yourself so thank you for that um but didn't do as well as the first book yeah and if anyone listening and watching that doesn't know the pirate inside was more about how to be an entrepreneur within an organization and create change with the constraints that you find yourself in in kind of more big corporate life um of which there are many people i think you know i'm amazed how many people i bump into that sort of are trying to create the revolution from inside so yeah well interesting i originally wanted to call it how to be a pirate in the navy without getting hanged.

2:29Because as you know, you can get strung up from the yardarm if you try and stuff. But they wouldn't let me do that for some reason. Failed the word. Oh, I see, I see. But you've been looking at challenges for 25 years now, as you said. Any challenges that are particularly impressing you at the moment? Well, I think kind of the usual suspects, I suppose. I'm really struck, obviously, by people like Tony's. I mean, obviously, Oakley. People like Backmarket, I think, are really interesting. I think people are actually challenging very fundamental preconceptions that we have about, you know, new is good, for instance.

3:00I really like that kind of sort of fundamental upstream subversion of our expectations and assumptions that I think is necessary in the world we're moving into. Definitely. And do you think, you know, you wrote your principles, well, presumably more than 25 years ago. Do you think anything's changed in terms of those principles? Are they pretty fundamental and it's more the execution that might have changed in terms of being a challenger today compared to yesterday? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, it was written in a sort of more or less pre-digital world. So a lot has changed. But the fundamental principle that challenges challenge, you need to amplify your differences, be very clear what you stand against, what you stand for, sacrifice and overcommitment, you know, be ideas led rather than simply kind of just consumer centric.

3:39Those things are important. I think what's very different now is when the book was first written, there was kind of one challenger in a category. You kind of work out there was kind of a leader and there was a challenger in a category. Now, because of the influx of money into challenges, there's any number of potential challenges in a category. And actually, the good news is that the really successful challenges kind of elevate out of that really quickly, you know, unbelievably fast. So the market leaders, unless they're really on their toes, get caught short and depositioned by it at the very least.

4:05The downside is it's much more jostling, you know, to succeed. And you know that yourself. Yes, it's very true. I mean, even like banking, you've got Starling Bank, Monzo Bank, Tide Bank. You know, you're right. There can be all manner of challenges compared to, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So I think being clearer about your nature of your narrative, the reason I wrote Overthrow was about different challenger narratives. It's not just about David versus Goliath. There's all sorts of challenger narratives you can look at. Being really clear about your narrative because it's going to be different from the other challengers.

4:34In a sense, they are the real competition rather than the market leader now, I think. And one thing, I mean, we've had quite a few challengers on the show, actually, which has been great, and I always get lots of inspiration having them on. You've always got to push more than you think you do, whether it's positioning, whether it's execution, or whether it's go to market, whatever it is, you always have to, the phrase you use, overcommit, a lot more than you think so. One little stat for you. So you were on episode number two. I just thought I'd share the podcast downloads, actually, just for comparison.

5:01So I know the fun thing we had, I remember we were, you know, it wasn't pilot, but, you know, we'd launched the podcast and you very kindly said you'd come on as number two. And I know one campaign we love is Avis. You know, we're number two, so we try harder, which I've taken inspiration from. So I thought it was kind of ironic that actually of the first season, your podcast was downloaded in number two spot from season one so congratulations we lived up to our number two but i thought really interesting statistics so um and again showing you kind of challenger brands and how things evolve we had 36 downloads on day one which i look back now i go you know you know it's probably you know a few of my friends bit of family whoever was down the pub that night anyway in total 1625 downloads of the episode since we did number two yesterday there were 640 downloads of the episode i released yesterday in less than 24 hours interesting so it's interesting isn't it three years of three and a half years now of listeners are now done in one day just shows the kind of evolution of the kind of media and so on which is great yeah so we have to beat that one next week when we launch this problem we'll go for it we'll go for Peter, let me turn to you.

6:09So probably most famous, if you don't mind me saying, for the long and the short of it. And we sit here 10 years on. So looking back, firstly, how has it gone compared to your expectations when you wrote the book? Did you imagine it would become one of the most famous kind of, I wouldn't say textbooks, but most famous pieces of work in kind of marketing? Well, it certainly tested my patience. It would have been nice if this had happened in the first few years or even the first year. It's been a real long, slow build. And I think things had to align before it found its role. I mean, I think we were putting it out as a warning to marketing when we first noticed the impact, particularly of the performance marketing revolution and making businesses go very short term.

6:56We put it out as a warning when I think most in marketing were saying, crisis, what crisis? We're doing very nicely. Thank you. There's no problem here. because you had to wait for that problem to manifest itself for a lot of these businesses to lose the growth and to be sitting there thinking what the hell happened before they were starting i think to become more receptive to the idea that actually walking away from brand and listening to all those very young tech nerds who told them hey love brand is so last millennium you just don't want to do any of that nonsense they had to kind of come through that and so yes it took most of 10 years before the book became well known certainly more than five um we were helped along the way and people like mark ritson bless him picked it up and you know with a few swear words to give it a bit of communication of course he's been he's been a good supporter and a good fan and has helped get it out there but it's become a bit of a roller coaster now i think a lot of people now know it because other people have told them they should know it and that's that's a good place to be and are you seeing evidence that marketing is changing because of the book i mean because if you look at the last 10 years as you know it appears there's been a shift to performance marketing as digital channels have proliferated and away from brand building is would that be true or are you seeing any evidence that i think it has nowhere near as much as it needs to i mean there's an enormous job yet to be done that it hasn't succeeded in doing but i think at least amongst more blue chip marketers, the lesson has sunk in.

8:27People know there is an issue of balance and that it's not that we're at any point have ever been rubbishing the idea of short-termism and performance marketing. It's a necessary part of a successful business. But it's just got to be balanced with this business of a vibrant, well-known, very reassuring and very trusted brand. And yes, there are developments in the market, I think are making brands more important or less important over time. So it's completely the reverse of the absolute claptrap that was put out 10 years ago about the death of the brand. You do still just occasionally come across pieces that say, you know, is brand marketing dead?

9:08But there's far fewer of them out now than there were 10 years ago. So I suppose if there is any benchmark of success, it would be that, that we have at least, I think, begun to make people realise that without a brand, a business essentially has no future, has no margin future anyway. So that is to some degree a success. But, you know, there's tons more to be done and hopefully others will pile on in there. It's interesting, I think, to reflect on that in the light of what's happening with individual agency brands and holding companies. So at the same time as, you know, marketers out there are realising the importance of brand, holding companies are killing their individual brands off they're combining them in in individual kind of you know offices where you know that the individual brand dies it becomes the holding brand as the main company very curious kind of counter current to that sense everywhere else that actually the brand is important no absolutely absolutely it wouldn't be the first time that the you know agents of marketing were actually lousy marketers that's true you could easily say that 10 years for the long and the short of it together is now we are clearly less or you've demonstrated your point which is you know you know it builds in the long term you build brand equity over the long term you've done that with your book you know i think in a way you've proven it one of my favorite observations from ritson actually as you mentioned him is he says i think the most important word is and in the long and the short of it and of course that's that's what the debate goes isn't it because you get this swing towards brand it's swing to performance and of course i think we're having a much more balanced debate at the moment aren't we which is you can build a brand with you know in the digital world it has constraints it's harder you have to do treat it in in a different way and actually that thing we've kind of been moving away from was quite useful after all and you know it's quite important to get a balance again so like all these debates people tend to forget the uh the bit in the middle indeed so to your podcast statistics if it's like being at school this isn't it anyway um could do better there we go so we'll move on to episode 30 and we had 216 downloads on launch day and 2800 downloads in total so you go so it just shows the evolution from 2 to 30 i knew those bots were well paid it's your charisma oozes out of the microphone but it's quite funny so i've had i've had guests on it like you know maybe going back 18 months ago so john how am i doing in the rankings am i still top five Well, unfortunately, the podcast has grown so much in that time that it didn't matter who would come on, you wouldn't be top five, you know, sort of thing.

11:42So anyway, but it's a lesson in itself. Now, the question I'm sure people are wondering is, why have I got both of you on the show at the same time? So tell us why you're both here today. Well, Peter and I started in advertising a week apart from each other. Peter beat me by a week in the same agency. That extra week, it's been so stressful. What you learned in that week. We worked together on the same beer account. I was the worst account man in the history of account management, and Peter was the finest planning trainee they'd ever had. And so we stayed friends, actually. And then in 1999, when I was starting to eat big fish, Peter helped me do that for a few years.

12:18And so we just stayed mates. And then this project came up that I got very interested in, and I thought actually Peter would be perfect to help on that. So I went to talk to him about it. So the idea, it's one of those things where, you know, when somebody, listen, you're interviewing lots of people, but something somebody says a while ago just sticks in your head and you think, I'm going to do something with that at some point, but I don't know what. So I was interviewing somebody for A Beautiful Constraint and he was a designer, a writer for industrial theatre in South Africa. So industrial theatre is the kind of theatrical plays they put on to teach safety procedures to miners, diamond miners, gold miners.

12:52And these are people of diverse ethnic groups, different languages, not always literate. So word is tricky to spend too much time on. So they put on these plays, songs and this kind of stuff. And he was talking about, you know, the fact you've got to disarm the group because they're heavily unionised, very suspicious of anything the management puts on. So it's charming and it's fun and it's theatrical. And, you know, if you're talking about danger, you do these big kind of theatrical gestures to illustrate it. And I said to him, so why does it have to be quite so theatrical? And he said this fantastic thing.

13:22He said, when it's a matter of life and death, you can't afford to bore the audience. I thought that's such an interesting idea, isn't it? Because for challenges, right, it's not literally life and death, but it is existential. You can't afford to board the odds. You need to engage your customer. You need to engage emotionally. All the things that Peter and Les talk about, you absolutely have to do as a challenger in spades. So I thought, what am I going to do with that? I just sort of parked you on the edge of my mental workbench. And then Peter and I were kind of having a conversation. And we've both, you know, been in the business a long time.

13:50We've been in the business 40 years now. And one of the things that struck us in the conversation was for all that we've learned, through all the wonderful kind of learning that Peter and Les and indeed others have put on in the data, and indeed System 1 have kind of contributed to what we learn about marketing effectiveness. The reality is that actually when you stop and look at most brands and most communications, fundamentally they're as dull as they ever were. And actually that hasn't changed in 40 years. You could argue that that is actually worse, for whatever reason we might speculate about where that is in a minute.

14:20And surely it's time for us to actually do something about that because things like Cannes, with all due respect to Cannes Lion, which is a wonderful event, they're complete anomalies. They're complete anomalies. And we turn up and we warm our hands at the fire of them and we turn our backs on the reality of the fact that actually most marketing, most brands are just very dull. So one of the questions for us was what could we do about that? And it seemed to us that actually one of the things you could do is get people much more interested in the whole topic of dull. And the way you could do that was to put a cost on it.

14:49If you could identify exactly how expensive it was to be dull, maybe people would take it more seriously. They wouldn't think it's a trivial thing. They wouldn't think it's okay to say it's fine. If you knew how much it was costing you to be dull, you'd treat it fundamentally differently. Yeah, and when Adam kind of came to me with the idea of putting a cost on dull, aside from the fact that I think it's just the most brilliant thing to do, I mean, lovely. I mean, this is something I've been wrestling with in my analysis of the data for a long time now because it's always been the case that there's been a pretty healthy slug of very, very dull campaigns in the IPO database.

15:23It's an effectiveness data. And why are they there? In the IPA database, these are award-winning or are these effective? They're not all award-winning. They're all entries. But they're entries. They're entries. So somebody behind those campaigns felt there was a story to tell. And they do. I mean, some of them it's relatively modest and others it's stellar. But you are assuming that they, by being submitted, they're judged to be good already. They have an effectiveness story. And although that percentage has dropped, I mean, 20 years ago, a little over a third of them. I'll define what I mean by dull in a moment.

15:58I probably should soon. More than a third of them were dull. That percentage has dropped, which is reassuring. But it's still the case that about one in six of them I would define as being unquestionably dull. So what are they doing in an effectiveness database? And the one thing that I've wrestled with, and I've known this for many years, is that these campaigns have a lot of money behind them, an enormous amount of money behind them. So clearly you can get away with being dull if you have very deep pockets and the extent to which that's the case is pretty astronomical. So prompted by Adam, the first thing I did was just to look at what the average budget of these dull case studies were compared to the high flyers.

16:41And this is early days in this project, you know, we've yet to explore the subtleties, but we've just taken the extremes. We've looked at dull campaigns, which are the ones that communicate messages it's about facts and information um you and orlando system one would probably talk about them as being very left brain kind of campaigns and we've compared them with those case studies that are the most right brain the ones that have big emotional responses and make people want to talk about them so we've taken extremes to get a real sense of what the absolute extreme cost is there's a big area in the middle which i'm sure we'll talk about later um just to get a sense on this And the difference in terms of average budgets is quite extraordinary.

17:25I mean, it's 11 percentage points of ESOV. That's the difference between share of voice and share of market, which are metric. If you put pound notes to that amongst the UK case studies, it means that these dull campaigns in this database typically spend about 15 million pounds a year more than the ones that are. The dull campaigns have more money. They have 15 million pounds more spent on them than the non-dull campaigns. Now, that, of course, doesn't prove that they are less effective. It may just be that that's the way the money rolled. But we can prove that that's the case because when we actually look at comparable performance metrics, when we say, let's look at what the budget levels were of dull case studies that achieved, and we're looking here first off at the top performance metric and we can look at things like profit performance, we can look at market share growth and so on.

18:20We've got a basket of six metrics. If we just compare like for like what the budgets were for those dull case studies that hit the high effectiveness points with those very non-dull, the ones that, you know, the famous kind of campaigns, we see something very, very similar. It's in the 10 to 20 million pound mark. So there is a real indication in the UK market, obviously it's just one small market in the global scheme of things, of the cost to a typical brand. Depending on your category, it's going to be somewhere probably between£10 and£20 million per annum. You are going to have to find as a marketer to buy yourself out of the dullness that your campaign has put you in.

19:05Dull means less effective. It doesn't necessarily mean ineffective. It means a lot less effective. and if you ain't got the money, you ain't going to get the results. It's as simple as that. That's so interesting. Well, I mean, you asked me the question, didn't you, before we met up, how does that compare to System One data? So we look back at the database at 68 ,000 ads. So we test everything that airs in the UK. We test about 60 % of ads that air in the US. So this is TV advertising. So I can't comment on other forms of advertising, but TV advertising. We've been doing that for around five years.

19:36So we've got five years of data, 68 ,000 ads. Two different ways of looking at it. So we measure emotional response, you know, happy, surprise, anger, contempt, et cetera, et cetera. We also have neutrality. So that's when people take the survey, so watching the ad, they have the option of saying they feel nothing. Right. The percent of ads where – or the percent of all emotions reported across the database over the last five years, 48 % are saying they felt nothing by the end of the ad. So during the ad, you can feel nothing at the beginning. You can come in at the end of the ad, 48 % of people have said they felt nothing.

20:16Now, when we translate that into business effects, I mean, we've got our five stars rating system. One star would be it's predicted to have no impact whatsoever. And again, 48 % of ads achieve that. Now, an interesting twist, actually, which actually concurs your IBA insight, which I wasn't expecting, is that the bigger the media spends, the duller the campaign. And it's very curious to know why you think that might be the case. But it's not dramatically so, but there's this gentle trend up that the higher the media spend, the more neutrality that we see in the database. Now, I've got another interesting observation, which is not as data-backed as that.

20:57But I do see when we look at different categories on the databases, we see the more interesting categories tend to have the most dull advertising. The dullest category, you take bread, right? You know, fairly dull category. Brilliant advertising. You know, it's almost that the constraint of the product forces you, a bit like you were saying earlier, forces you to lean in and actually become more interesting in what you say. So that's more of a hypothesis. I'd need to go and look at that a bit more. But certainly, now, interestingly, we get a media read from Nielsen on all the campaigns that we test.

21:28The value of that 48 % in Nielsen measures is$68 billion. And I know for a fact, because again, I've been an advertiser myself, and I'm able to compare what Nielsen said compared to the market. This is rounding a lot, but I think Nielsen pick about half the actual market spend. You know, if I look at what I actually spent as an advertiser compared to what Nielsen would suggest I spend, it only picks up about half. Because there's many, many channels it doesn't read. So you could say that dullness is costing the British economy at least$68 billion a year. No, this is US and UK. Oh, I see. Yes, US and UK, and it's five years.

22:05And it's underestimated at least by half. So$130 billion over five years, US and UK. Well, that would be interesting to work these numbers. I mean, we'll probably find that we come out somewhere very close in terms of the impact of a typical. Because, I mean, the kind of brands that I work with in the IPA data are probably not so wildly different from yours in the sense that there is a skew to bigger brands because it tends to be mass market brands that would be interested in your services and who tend to enter. So I think we'll probably find that we come out with some quite – but that's a job to be done.

22:39It would be great to do it, wouldn't it? Yeah, fascinating. So it does lead you to the obvious question, why? Wow. Peter has some of these ideas. Well, I think we all do. I think there are lots of factors. I mean, the one thing I would not for a moment suggest is because the marketers themselves are dull. I mean, I work with a lot of marketers who are desperately trying to do much more interesting stuff, And there are sometimes internal reasons, and Adam will have come across a lot of it with his studies into pirates. Sometimes companies have rules and systems and things that suppress and restrain it.

23:17And that is clearly an issue for some clients. But I think there are lots of other reasons as well. We live in days when we are, as marketers, increasingly being told to follow the science. And of course, science is good in some ways. It teaches us not to make dumb mistakes. But as we all know, high performing marketing and advertising campaigns go way beyond science. You have to allow room for creative magic. You have to allow room for the inspiration to do that. and the trouble of course with many of the great creative roots and the great creative inspirations is they they will not generalize across an entire population of marketing there really isn't room for every campaign every brand in a market to be famous by definition they can't all be famous can they so um you know these things don't generalize so they will never appear in the science as such because they will not work across all brands i think the obsession with science runs a risk of minimizing the drive for creativity but there's a far worse pressure as well i think a far worse explanation for all of this which is one we've already talked a little bit about and alluded to which is the impact of 15 years at least now of what i call performance marketing think which is you know and we know from the work that your colleague orlando wood has done that that impact of performance marketing think has had an impact on brand building.

24:51You know, it's kind of polluted the whole way we think. So performance marketing is about getting a result now. It's about the right now. How do I make someone who is predisposed to some degree to my brand actually get out and buy it now? So it's very different. It's very left brain, to use Orlando's thinking. It's in your face. It's those nudges that make us do it now. Now, that is the very opposite of how we build brands and seduce people in and make people feel good about our brands, which has to be done in a very different way. We've had 15 years of, you know, tools and techniques and thinking coming out, particularly of the big social media networks that tell us the way to make people buy now is to follow these best practice rules.

25:33And it's permeated a generation of young creatives and a generation of young marketers. And we have to reset that now. We have to get back to appreciating not just the importance of brands, but how you build brands. And there's a craft and an art and a magic to doing that. And there are no paint by numbers rule books that we can follow. And if there were, they'd become invalid tomorrow. So, you know, we have to push back against that. And I think there is a growing understanding of that. But by God, is there a long way to go? The curious thing is it comes back to the scale point, because I think logically you would imagine the best marketers should be running the biggest brands in the largest companies.

26:16You know, they can afford to pay the best and they can afford training courses to go and send all their marketers out to learn how to market. So why would the best marketing organisations, you know, be tending towards more dull rather than more interesting? I think one of the things that is going on is a kind of a flight to safety. in that the bigger you are, the greater the danger to corporate reputation from blowback. Nobody wants to be next Bud Light. So there's a lot of caution out there, frankly. And I think there's a confusion of risk and responsibility there. People think that the responsible thing to do is to play it a bit safe.

26:50Whereas in fact, you know, it's very expensive to play it safe, as we've just seen. I think the other thing that's going on, I was talking to a fascinating guy called Nick Reed, who's an Oscar-winning documentary maker who's started a company with a couple of other partners called Shareability in the States, which is the leading viral ad kind of company in the States. And he talks about the fact that actually what he sees is that the bar for marketing and dull within companies is far too low. There's a real bar that's much higher. You look at the bar on TikTok for how quickly something gets skipped within two seconds.

27:19It's much, much higher than the bar most marketers are seeing. And so there's a completely out-of-touch nature about how we are measuring what is dull and what is interesting that is very easily sold. We just need to lean into it and really grasp that nettle, I think. I love the idea that your benchmark would be it's unskippable. Yeah. Because that would be a wonderful benchmark, wouldn't it, for any bit. You know, it doesn't get made unless it's unskippable, demonstrably unskippable. That would be a really good bar. And quite quickly, right, so Spotify, I think it's 25 % of songs are skipped in the first three seconds, is that right?

27:50Something like that. Yeah, it's very quick. Yeah. Why should the behaviour be any different with us? Yeah. That's fascinating, isn't it? There's another interesting aspect to the cost of dull, I think, which is worth briefly talking about and impossible to dimensionalise in the same kind of way. But there's a very interesting book, it's a Sunday Times bestseller called The Examined Life by a guy called Stephen Gross, who's a psychoanalyst. And in the book he takes a series of chapters and he talks about individual cases and what we can learn from them. And one of them is about a guy who's very boring.

28:18And the patient is so boring that Stephen Gross, the analyst, gets bored in the sessions himself and he's supposed to be treating this guy. And he realises in the conclusion that actually it's a deliberate strategy by the guy He's being boring to exclude Stephen Gross and everybody else from his life. And I like really taken by the idea that being dull is excluding people. It's excluding consumers, excluding colleagues. So when we make a dull presentation to our teams to try and engage them, actually you're excluding them from participating in the success that you need to make. If you are, for instance, a democratiser as a brand, as you're trying to narrative, and you're being dull, you're excluding rather than including people.