The Cost of Dull

Mim Wells is joining us for this episode. Mim is co-founder at Allegory, a creative communications consultancy. Before Allegory, Mim worked at Ogilvy for almost 10 years, including as Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy PR before starting Allegory. Mim, great to have you join us.

Thanks.

Thanks so much for joining the conversation. Tell us a bit more about what Allegory does and the gap that you sought to fill when you set up the agency.

Sure. Allegory is a creative comms consultancy. What sits under that is a number of communications discipline-specific offers. We do that heartland of brand reputation, earned media engagement, publicity. We also have a public affairs specialty — lots of experience working with governments and on behalf of brands and organisations to engage with government, whether that’s getting a policy ask on the agenda or working in the health and pharmaceutical landscape around drug listings and associated communications.

We also work in reputation and ESG — building reputations, building executive thought leadership and brand thought leadership platforms, and also when things go wrong, defending reputations and dealing with crisis communications. We do that for a range of brands, with particular strength in the healthcare and technology spaces, as well as lots of experience working for brands that want to engage with small businesses and consumers.

Fantastic. I know your background is actually a non-traditional route within communications — drama and creative arts. How does that influence how you think about the work you do?

Well, I’m here for the drama, obviously. The skills I learned as a student in performance and creative writing — and I had a stint teaching at university as a casual academic in creative arts theory — I use those every day. Deep research skills, understanding and engaging with an audience not just on a cerebral level. We forget sometimes that humans aren’t just brains with access to screens. They’re bodies with irrational emotions, and that performance element really hones your sense of that.

How to speak, how to write, how to craft a narrative arc, how to elevate a sense of stakes — all of that is applicable in marketing and communications. And I’m very passionate about improv comedy. The skills in the improv comedian’s toolkit are essential for creativity, iteration, psychological safety. Improv teaches you it’s not about if you fall over, it’s when. That fast recovery, and the ability of a team to pick up and run, has been a key lesson I’ve taken from that experience.

That sense of drama ties in well to what you wanted to talk about today — that there’s a cost to being dull. Tell me more.

This is built on research presented at Cannes from System1 and Eat Big Fish — looking at the extraordinary cost of dull. Creativity as a force multiplier of effectiveness is pretty well-trodden ground. But they went: if we can look at the gain, we should also be able to look at the cost. Which is a really interesting way to shift the stakes and create tension.

They looked at 100,000 pieces of creative communication and got audiences to rate them from negative through neutral to positive. The overwhelming average response wasn’t even bad — it was neutral. And neutral is death. Default is death in creative and brand. You’re better off having a bad campaign, one that rubs people the wrong way, than a neutral one. It’s a tedium tax — costing brands $189 billion US a year in the US alone. The combined market cap of the four big holding companies in the world is about $62 billion US. So the industry is costing brands three times that value annually in attention left on the table.

And brands then need to spend 2.6 times what their creative peers spend on reach and engagement to catch up. I’m not even talking about award-winning communications. Just generally okay.

So spend will actually go further if the creative is better.

Yes. And we’re in an era of aggressively fine communication. AI tools make content readily available — that huge increase in supply means the value of that content plummets. But attention becomes a super-premium luxury. How can we use our humanity, our creativity, our edge to leapfrog the averaging machine of highly available, totally fine, coherent content that we’re drowning in across our feeds?

Not being dull must be particularly hard in the categories Allegory works in — heavily regulated, technical, B2B, healthcare. How do you look at this challenge with those clients?

I agree and disagree. It is challenging — you’ve got more stakeholder tentacles to navigate in categories with necessary guardrails. But give a creative a box to colour in, and when they step outside that box they need to do it with great intention, not as a default. That’s incredibly focusing for creativity — sometimes better than a blank canvas. Constraints drive creativity.

And the problem of dull is actually even worse in those categories. Whereas about 50% of all ads are dull, in B2B and healthcare it’s more like 60%. But the stakes are higher. We’re talking about policy reform, technology that’s going to change whole sectors, drug innovations that can save lives. The potential for human drama is much more amplified in those categories.

Any examples that come to mind?

One of my favourites — freight and logistics. A company called Flock Freight. They basically sell space on trucks and ships. Very commoditised, some really big players. They ran a campaign called “A Fuckload of Freight” — an education campaign explaining that as a customer you can buy a shitload, which is space in a container, or a fuckload, which is a whole container. And they got the Blue’s Clues guy, who has a certain cultural resonance for millennials who are increasingly the purchase decision-makers in these businesses.

They ran brilliant videos with heavy LinkedIn focus. Your LinkedIn feed is full of long em-dashes and AI slop copy posts — and then you find the Blue’s Clues guy talking about a fuckload of freight. Your thumb stops. You pay attention.

The category default is to sell on function, but in a highly commoditised market those functions are dry. You’re selling to people who are in spreadsheets all day, and you’re selling them with spreadsheets. You’ve got to do something different. At the end of that device or that email is not an economist with a spreadsheet at the ready. It’s a person who volunteers, who loves sci-fi, who can’t get their kid to sleep. Find the human way in. Make them laugh, make them cry. To make them think or do something, you have to make them feel something.

How do they know it worked?

They had a 620% uplift in MQLs off the back of that campaign while it was in market. And they’ve since reached unicorn status. That one campaign isn’t the whole story, but it was a key brick in building a high-growth company and attracting significant investment. And just in terms of consideration — how many other logistics brands can you name and differentiate between?

I will remember this one. I’m not sure I can name any others. Going back to your background in drama — tell me more about how you bring improvisation into the work you do.

There’s the improv truth of yes-and — not denying the creative offer that’s put on the table. The classic example Tina Fey talks about: you’re on stage and someone says “Put them up. I’ve got a gun.” Denial is “That’s not a gun, it’s a hamburger.” That’s bad for creativity. Accepting the offer — “On our anniversary?” — builds the story. Really trying to live that yes-and philosophy in practice.

When I host creative workshops, I talk a lot about the black hat. It gets a bad rap — people say no black hats at the ideation stage, because creative ideas are fragile little things you have to hold gently and give sunshine to. But when it comes to commercial creativity, it does have to be strategically sound and reputationally safe. That’s where the black hat really shines. Black hats ask the questions about feasibility, reputation, scope. They need to come in at the right point in the process.

And creativity doesn’t come from brain introversion and isolation. It comes from bouncing around. It comes from play. It comes from jokes. It comes from culture. People need to warm up — get people out of their chairs.

I know you sometimes have a habit of getting people to do uncomfortable things at the start of a creative session. Tell me more about that.

Sometimes I make people do left-right brain teasers, or stupid little things that make you feel like you’re in preschool. Sometimes it’s a drawing — and people say “I can’t draw.” That’s the point. I’m not asking for a beautiful still life. I’m asking for a three-minute warm-up where you have to draw something related to the brief, or pitch an idea for the Olympics as if it were a Beyoncé music video. It’s about breaking down the “oh my god, I can’t do that in front of other people” factor.

Getting people to look stupid together instantly creates psychological safety and a group norm of participation. We’re very basic beings — we want to be safe, we want to be seen as smart and worth including. By giving people little pressure-cooker environments where they have to be slightly uncomfortable and a little bit silly together, it creates glue so they can feel brave enough to put forward the so-called stupid idea that might lead to something great.

Let’s change gears and talk about AI. You’ve got a view that what we’re seeing with AI is also driving a proliferation of the middle. Tell me more.

AI is a tool. It can be used for amazing or nefarious consequences. Honestly, the most exciting applications of AI aren’t in marketing and communications — they’re in scientific innovation and experimentation in very different fields.

But in terms of content and communications, we’re at a stage similar to where we were with blogging and news in the early 2000s. Blogger made everyone have a publishing capability, but it didn’t mean everyone had a voice. All of a sudden we had this average, publicly published content in the world. And what happened? The brands and organisations that doubled down on quality — deep insight, hardcore journalism, fact-checking, rigorous standards — grew. The New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian has a model where people literally donate to them with no paywall, and they have a very healthy endowment. These organisations are gaining subscribers in an era where news media is really challenged as a business model.

We’re at a similar precipice with content and AI. In an age of aggressively fine, coherent, not-egregiously-bad content flooding in from the middle — super high quality, super creative, superhuman becomes an edge. Interestingly, so does really bad. You want to be one of the bookends. The middle is a place you’ll get lost in.

So for a CMO sitting on a brief that’s a bit functional, in a heavily regulated category with stated category norms — what would you say to them to get them to think about that brief differently?

The category is the enemy. One of the things we love doing at Allegory is bringing outside thinking. When we’re casting teams to briefs, we want a specialist and an outsider — the person who asks “why do we do it that way?” alongside the person with deep expertise to answer it. If you’re comparing yourself to the category, you’re going to remain in lock-step with it. Compare yourself to other categories, and outside of business altogether — is this a comic? Is it a sculpture? Break down the default thinking underlying the brief.

Earned creative lives on novelty bias. We have to find the new. And the other thing — assemble the squad. A CMO with great ambition is amazing, but you need a supporting structure of stakeholders to get big ideas up. Every year we do a Cannes retrospective looking at the work leading in categories, and one thing that always strikes me: the really big, bold ideas don’t live and die in a deck. You need legal on-side, you need patient communications on-side, you need logistics, you need the Chief Risk Officer backing the idea.

Think about “A Fuckload of Freight” — think about all the conservative stakeholders in a B2B logistics operation who could have killed that idea. Or Morning After Ireland — taking women into international waters to access the morning-after pill because it wasn’t legal in the country. The president was offside. Think about all the people who had to say yes for that to see the light of day. That’s the machinery you need.

I really like that — both the cost-of-dull framing as a case for why you shouldn’t be neutral, and the confidence you can build by showcasing to a CMO’s peers other examples of where boldness paid off.

There’s also Essie, who do period products. They’ve built category-defining work over many years pushing against stigma around women’s bodies — menstruation, menopause, a whole spectrum of women’s health. They started with a small out-of-home campaign that showed red blood, then built from there. You don’t have to jump in the deep end with an international waters campaign from the get-go. There are degrees of boldness — assemble the squad, prove the idea, build momentum.

Brilliant examples. Mim, tell me what’s next for Allegory and what you’re excited about as a team.

We’ve got a whole bunch of campaigns in the pipeline with some amazing clients in healthcare in particular — working with some health technology companies on improving patient experience in Australia. We have a world-class health system, but it has gaps, and we’re working with some very brave clients who are looking at those gaps and asking what conversations we can have about them.

And I’ve got some top-secret stuff I’m not allowed to talk about yet — very exciting work at the diverse intersection of policy, technology, and communities, and how platforms interact with those communities and the double-edged sword that sometimes comes with them.

Thanks so much for joining us, Mim. It’s been a great conversation and I think you’ve made a brilliant case for the cost of not being dull. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.