Let's Make This More Interesting

In this episode of Let’s Make This More Interesting from eatbigfish, Adam explores what it takes to be more interesting in a very different medium: stop frame animation. Madga Osinska , today’s guest, is a director of short films and commercials for the world-famous Aardman Animations, besides her own projects, and a winner of jury prizes throughout Europe for her work.  Adam and Ma...

What does it take to be interesting enough for people to brave the New York City subway to come and join you on a cold, wet, Tuesday night? Every Tuesday night?  For two years?  In this episode, Adam Morgan is joined by Jeffrey Robb, professional Dungeon Master, actor, and educator, who runs paid games of Dungeons and Dragons up to eleven times a week across the five boroughs of New...

How engaging do you have to be, really, to break inertia? To disrupt beliefs? And what does that take in your communication and in your culture?   In this episode of Let’s Make This More Interesting, Adam Morgan is joined by Lucinda Barlow, who leads International Marketing at Uber across more than 60 countries. Drawing on a remarkable body of evidence spanning 19 communic...

In this second part of the conversation with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and behavioural science evangelist, we discuss why Rory feels we are thinking in entirely the wrong way about the payback for marketing, and the different way we need to go about finding those big, engaging ideas that will disproportionately impact the success of our business.  We talk about the fa...

What is the value of surprise to us in becoming more interesting? And how does one of today's most stimulating thinkers stay so consistently surprising himself?  In Part 1 of a two part conversation, Adam sits down with Rory Sutherland - Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, behavioural science evangelist, and endlessly fascinating reframer of what we thought we knew - to talk about why surprise...

What does it take to make iconic work with iconic founders – when nobody out there cares about you or your product? And why might having ADHD be a gift in helping you think about how to overcome that?  In our Season 3 opener, Adam Morgan sits down with Andy Berndt, former agency leader and the founding force behind Google’s Creative Lab. Andy has worked alongside some of the most un...

If work takes up so much of our lives, and so much of work’s output is down to discretionary effort, how do we make work more engaging - as leaders of teams, and as workers ourselves?   Bruce Daisley has become a world expert on it. Previously the MD of YouTube in the UK, Bruce was the European Head of Twitter when he started exploring the meaning and future of work in a podcast, Eat Sle...

We’re at an inflection point in how we engage people about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Gail Gallie believes: we now need a completely new model – ‘The gloves are off’. Gail left a successful career in advertising and at the BBC to help set up Project Everyone with campaigner and film director Richard Curtis – their aim: to communicate the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to everyone...

Is TikTok the most interesting platform in the world? What’s at the heart of its success – and what does it mean to be more interesting in a post TikTok world, when the audience on TikTok is “10x bigger every day than the Super Bowl”?   In this week’s episode, Adam meets Nick Tran, former Global Head of Marketing at TikTok and advisor to a new generation of Challengers, including tech company...

For 10 years Sara Stark was part of the team helping the founders of Dishoom build their restaurant brand and business – a brand that is as rich, engaging and layered as so many other restaurants are superficial and glib. It’s a conversation about stories, and curiosity, and inventiveness, and layering, and pushing the idea. About a continual commitment to exploring and digging and...

Warren Berger began exploring how to ask better questions through a journalistic interest in innovation. He’s come to believe the importance of questions is much broader than that, and has come on to champion the development of better questioning skills in everything from education to our personal relationships. He has written widely on the topic, including ‘A More Beautiful Question: The pow...

How do you engage an audience in something that really matters in just 90 seconds? Where do you start? How do you overcome the ‘curse’ of everything you know?    In this episode Adam talks with two former BBC reporters, Louisa Preston and Luisa Baldini , about how they become experts in being compelling in 90 seconds, in careers where they covered everything from the 7/7 bombings an...

This week Adam talks to renowned planners David Nottoli and Jeffre Jackson about their research into ‘interestingness’ in advertising. Drawing from their experience David and Jeffre share their definition of the five key components of interesting: How incongruity reinforces memory Why Don Draper might be wrong about emotions The significance of fish sticks Why authenticity isn’t just a buzzword Wh...

Faris Yakob believes that attention is not merely the first step to engagement with something, but a fundamental shaper of who we are: if ‘we are what we eat’, then what we pay attention to comes to define us.    The author of ‘ Paid Attention ’ and co-founder of Genius Steals , he and his wife Rosie have spent the last ten years as modern nomads, consulting, speaking and writing. In thi...

That’s enough about humour and the lighter side of interesting.   It’s time to step into the dark.      This week Adam meets researcher Mathias Clasen, co-founder of the ‘ Recreational Fear Lab ’ and author of Why Horror Seduces and A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies , to talk about what he’s learned from haunted houses and horror movies, and how to find the ‘s...

Last week’s episode made the business case for humour - but how do we start to find our funny? This week Adam Morgan meets standup comedy writing and speaking coach Chris Head for a comedy masterclass.    Chris shares practical experience and techniques he uses when working with comedians, how he helped stand-up Stepfania Licari push her personal stories for the biggest payoff and coache...

Is our business leaving money on the table by being too serious? In this episode, Adam speaks to Bridget Angear, legendary strategic planner and co-founder of Craig + Bridget , about her recent research “The Business Case for Humour in Advertising”.    Adam and Bridget explore the evidence for the business effects of humour as revealed in the IPA database, and the different values t...

This week Adam meets award-winning improviser and director of the iconic Assassin’s Creed video games Simon Peacock to explore how the element of surprise makes his work and life more interesting.    Beginning with Simon’s early success as a professional improviser in Montreal, they discuss the 10 commandments of good improvisation, why routine and repetition rui...

In this episode Adam talks to Heather McGill, Head of Spectator Experience at London 2012 and previously Tour Manager for the Spice Girls, about how to create more interesting shared experiences.    Heather shares lessons about how to create more engaging spectator experiences for live tours and ‘global mega events’ such as the Olympics and Paralympics, large industry expos like Dubai 20...

A year into the project, what have we learnt about the real price of being dull? Adam opens Season 2 with one of the core collaborators on The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, marketing effectiveness expert Peter Field.     Peter and Adam share how the Extraordinary Cost of Dull has grown from an idea that kickstarted our last season to a 3-year research project with multiple contributor...

In this bonus episode Adam summarises the key themes and learnings across all the guests from the first season, to make it useful and usable for you. He breaks his conclusions into five sections:  1. The Cost of Dull and the Value of Interesting  2. The Four Kinds of Dull 3. Finding the right way to be interesting for you 4. Common themes and key ideas across all the guests 5. How to use...

Named ‘one of the most 10 influential Brits in Hollywood’ by The Sunday Times, Nick Reed has been a successful Hollywood agent, won an Oscar for a documentary called ‘The Lady in Number 6’, and co-founded the most successful viral content company in the US. In this episode, Nick discusses with Adam what makes something not just more interesting, but interesting enough to share – alo...

Powerpoint has become the poster child of Dull – can even this most maligned of mediums really be a tool to be more interesting? Russell Davies not only believes it can, but that it’s the third American art form, along with jazz and hip hop – but only if we think of it and use it in a very different way. It seems such a symbolic flip for the cliché of ‘Death by Powerpoint’, that we’ve given it its...

One of the most stimulating speakers in brands and communications, Russell has been thinking about what it means to be interesting for over 20 years. In his new book  Do Interesting – Notice. Collect. Share.   Russell has codified the practice he’s used to make the world more interesting to him, and to make himself better positioned to bring interest to whatever topic he finds himself wo...

While storytelling isn’t the automatic answer to every kind of ‘dull’, if we’re going to learn how to tell more interesting stories we should learn from the best. John Yorke founded the BBC Studio Writer’s Academy after a career that included being Head of  Channel4  Drama and Controller of  BBC Drama Production , working on and producing some of the world’s most wide...