Essay · Effectiveness
The measurable cost of being dull
Sameness isn't a creative failing. It's a line item — and the research now puts a number on it.
The most expensive thing a brand can do is bore people. Not offend them. Not confuse them. Bore them. For years that was only a feeling — the quiet dread of work that ticks every box and moves no one. Now it has a price tag.
Working from the IPA's effectiveness databank, Peter Field, Adam Morgan and System1 set out to cost the dull. They found that a dull campaign has to spend 2.6 times more on media than an interesting one to reach the same market-share growth. Same destination, more than double the fare. Looked at the other way, interesting work — the kind people notice and repeat — drives 6.1 times the share growth of dull, rational work. In one UK case, the dull version of a campaign had to spend £10 million more to arrive in the same place.
Dull isn't the exception. It's the default.
And it is the default. Across UK television, 52% of advertising provokes no emotional response at all — pure neutrality, the absence of feeling. In the US it's 47%. Roughly half the money in the room is buying a shrug.
Here's what should keep marketers up at night: nobody sets out to make dull work. Dull is what's left when sensible decisions stack up. Chase short-term performance metrics. Optimise every variable until the edges are gone. Average toward whatever tested "fine." Let procurement pick on price. Each step is defensible. The sum is forgettable — and forgettable is the thing you're paying double for.
That's the trap of the cautious year. Safe feels responsible, when safe is the expensive option. You just never see the invoice, because it's paid in the growth you didn't get.
This is why we refuse to treat creativity as decoration. A distinctive idea is the cheapest growth a brand can buy. It does the work that money would otherwise have to do — and it compounds, because attention earned once keeps paying out.
The instinct, when budgets tighten, is to sand off the strange and play it safe. The evidence says the opposite. In a market where half of all work registers as nothing, the boldest and most commercial thing you can do is refuse to be dull.
We don't make safe work. We make work worth the spend.