That's What I Call Marketing S5 Ep4: The Eye-Watering Cost of Dull Media & Creative with Karen Nelson-Field & Adam Morgan
Most advertising doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because it’s dull and dull is expensive.
In this episode of That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne sits down with Adam Morgan and Karen Nelson-Field to unpack the real cost of dull creative and dull media using hard evidence from IPA effectiveness data, System1 testing, and large-scale attention measurement.
The conversation moves beyond taste or opinion and into economics: why rational, low-emotion advertising can still “work” but only by wasting millions; why some media environments structurally suppress attention; and why optimisation, procurement pressure, and performance thinking have quietly normalised mediocrity.
If you work in brand, media, B2B, finance-led marketing, or any category that tells itself it has to be boring, this episode is a wake-up call.
What you’ll learn
- Why 50% of ads struggle to beat a cow chewing grass on attention and emotion
- How dull creative drives up required spend by millions to achieve the same outcomes
- Why CPM is often a cost per meaningless thousand
- How attention volume predicts ROI, memory, and effectiveness
- Why great creative fails when media doesn’t give it a stage
- How risk, responsibility, and “sensible” decisions slowly drain impact from work
- Where AI may actually help creativity rather than flatten it
This episode draws directly on the “Cost of Dull” research programme and explains what it means for marketers trying to balance effectiveness, efficiency, and real-world constraints.
02:27 – What do we actually mean by “dull” advertising?
03:55 – The cow-chewing-grass test and why half of ads lose
06:00 – Attention vs emotion: two ways to measure dullness
08:00 – The Cannes “Ennui” experiment and burning money as a signal
11:10 – What “dull media” really means (and why it’s misunderstood)
13:55 – When great creative is wasted by low-attention environments
16:20 – Is dull creative ever the better option?
17:24 – Trust, facts, and why rational messaging costs more
19:00 – Campaigns vs single ads: where attention is really lost
20:00 – Why mix matters more than hero-only thinking
21:00 – Global differences: creative vs media effects
23:00 – Why B2B marketing is structurally duller and the cost of that
26:00 – The “dull eclipse”: performance mindset, optimisation, benchmarks
28:20 – Procurement, pricing pressure, and creative erosion
31:00 – CPM, wastage, and the illusion of efficiency
34:20 – AI, challenger brands, and testing creativity at speed
37:55 – Risk vs responsibility: how sensible decisions kill ideas
41:00 – What marketers can actually do differently
43:45 – Final reflections and where the research goes next
About the guests
Adam Morgan is co-founder of Eatbigfish and a leading voice on challenger brands, effectiveness, and commercial creativity.
Karen Nelson-Field is Professor of Media Science and one of the world’s foremost researchers on attention, media value, and advertising effectiveness.
If you’re trying to explain to a CFO, procurement team, or board why “safe” work keeps underperforming, this episode gives you the language and the evidence to do it properly.
Content Mentioned in the Episode:
- Risk & Responsibility https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuJx2IJjaFw
- Cost of Dull Media Report https://21467338.fs1.hubspotusercontent-ap1.net/hubfs/21467338/COMPANY%20MATERIALS/Cost%20of%20Dull%20Final.pdf
- Cost of Dull Eat Big Fish https://www.eatbigfish.com/thinking/challengers-and-cost-of-dull
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