Let's Make This More Interesting

In this episode Adam explores what it takes to use surprise effectively as an integral part of a challenger’s strategy. His guest is Kyrsten Halley, the former Marketing Director of Aldi UK, part of a team that for years has been putting the purposefully unexpected into the drudgery of the weekly grocery shop. One of the key ways Aldi has grown to become one of the Big Four in the UK. 

Adam and Kyrsten unpack how and why a discount supermarket came to offer the world's best champagne for £14.99, restaurant-quality lobster tails at Christmas, and a kayak in the middle aisle: where the real value lies for them in being consistently surprising, and the ‘share of heart’ they look to build through it. And why none of that worked without a real rigour and discipline across the business underpinning it. 

The conversation explores:

• How ‘delighting the customer with surprise’ can create that ‘chink of open-mindedness’ Aldi needs to grow
• How the origin of so much of what Aldi does lies in its challenger roots as a Democratiser – making goods available that many UK shoppers would have historically felt they couldn’t afford
• How the constraints of Aldi’s discount format stimulated the thinking around their famous ‘Special Buys’ 
• The strong relationships between the different areas of the business, and why they are so important.
• The codes of premium private label they felt they could and couldn’t break
• Why being consistently surprising, week in week out, really helps find the right boundaries with your audience
• Why Aldi maintains a challenger mindset even though they are now the fourth biggest UK supermarket
• What it really means to make a brave idea feel obvious to the rest of the business.

This conversation also formed part of the research for eatbigfish's Cannes Lions 2026 session, "The Startling Power of Surprise" with The Uncensored CMO Jon Evans— the latest chapter in the multi-year Cost of Dull project. For more on the Cost of Dull and the effective strategic use of Surprise, visit eatbigfish.com.

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/  

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Magda unpack what it takes to really deliver Aardman’s four principles – comedy, story, character and craft – alongside the value of constraints in forcing you to find better ways to tell your story. And what it really means to explore the human condition in plasticine.

The conversation explores:

• The combination of heartwarming and heartbreaking in creating audience engagement 
• How to give a character depth – and why flaws matter
• The real value of details and easter eggs
• Visual storytelling – using colour and shape to tell the story in parallel to the words

…And why you should be very, very careful never to win an Oscar 

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/  

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 York. And what starts as a masterclass in epic, layered storytelling turns into something rather different. Because as Jeffrey explains, a great dungeon master isn't in fact there to tell an epic story; they're there to make it possible for a disparate group of people –– with different motivations, different expectations, different levels of commitment –– to create an epic story for themselves.

There's a lot here for anyone trying to hold a room. Jeffrey and Adam explore:

• The importance of choices in storytelling experiences: why giving people agency over the narrative creates ownership (- and why the best choices always leave room for a secret third option)
• Why it’s key to see the experience as ‘carefully managed chaos’: how the most inventive moments come from building a system flexible enough to be surprised by its own players
• Where you do and don’t want surprise , and why it has to work in two very different ways here
• The lessons Jeffrey learned from superhero comics and Shakespearean drama that he brings to the experiences he curates
• The primacy of trust, and what a "Session Zero" can teach anyone who needs to unlock a group's imagination fast 
• What it means for good drama asks a question of its audience 

Along the way, there's a squeaky goblin, why it’s unexpectedly dull to play a villain, and what increasing consumer expectations mean in D&D: why so many people now seem to want a burned village to avenge…

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/  

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 communications campaigns around the world, Lucinda shares the two approaches that created real impact and drove growth, and the ones that didn’t. 

They discuss the cultural forces driving dull work: mechanistic thinking, an obsession with productivity, the quiet presence of fear as the “8th passenger” in the room: how, together, they create a system that rewards mediocrity. 

And Lucinda shares how and why she champions a challenger mindset in her team, even in a large company like Uber, and what it means for the way they both push for and protect more interesting ideas from those forces of Dull. 

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin.

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 false gods of quantification, how to help our team get lucky, Japanese toilets, and – obviously – the right and wrong way to think about a £300,000 rubber duck. 

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/  

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 matters. 

As he points out, sometimes the right thing to be is completely unsurprising: there will always be, after all "a market for "the drearily predictable." 

But if you're trying to change behaviour - to challenge, disrupt, or eat the big fish - then surprise becomes essential. 

Because the brain isn't built to notice what it expects. It's built to notice what breaks the pattern. 

In this first half of the conversation, Rory explores: 

• What is ‘Just the right amount of weird’?
• Why it is that we give disproportionate attention to what find surprising
• How all human perception is context-dependent, and why recontexting is so powerful
• Why the healthiest creative human activity is to try on as many frames as we can
• What it means to bring a Game Theorist’s mindset to everything we do - even the way we take holidays. 

And why, in fact, surprise might be the most cost-efficient way to earn attention there is. 

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/  

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 uncompromising figures in modern business — from Steve Jobs, Phil Knight and Michael Jordan to Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai — and has been at the heart of some of the most celebrated and impactful creative work coming out of America in the last 30 years. As account director, copywriter and client. A unique perspective. 

Andy reflects on: 

• Why “nobody out there cares” can – and perhaps should – be the beginning of any great creative work. 
• The particular talent that Steve Jobs and Phil Knight brought to assessing the work they were presented with
• How humour in the room is often the doorway to the breakthrough idea
• Whether clients get the creative work they deserve  
• And how Google’s Creative Lab grew from small stickers to Super Bowl spots

Along the way, he explains how his ADHD became a creative advantage, why briefs are sometimes best answered with a poster instead of a presentation, and how “kids with crayons” built some of the most celebrated work of the digital era, including the now-famous “Parisian Love” film.

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/ 

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Sleep Work Repeat. His first book, The Joy of Work, was a Sunday Times number one business bestseller and an FT Book of the Month. He is also the host of the hugely successful podcast ‘Eat Sleep Work Repeat’.  

In this episode Adam and Bruce first discuss how to get rid of the things that suck the joy out of work, and then how to create a positive buzz in our engagement, as an individual and as a team.  

They talk about: 

• What the really big disruption in work has been (and it’s not wfh) 
• The essential foundations for making any impact whatsoever on engagement in a culture 
• The two key indicators of real engagement at work 
• Why idle time is so important  
• The real enemy of productivity in an organisation 
• The power of Positive Affect 
• The surprising importance of laughter  

And why, when so much is known about how to drive up engagement at work, so little of that knowledge makes it into the leadership meetings of big organisations.  

Listen to Eat Sleep Work Repeat:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eat-sleep-work-repeat/id1190000968

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5KUW5Lu36O4nnfIFqIIUh4

Bruce's books:

The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job

Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength

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Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/ 

Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish. Thanks to our editor Ruth, our producer Travis, and to Tiny Podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 in the world in one week. 10 years later, she remains a relentless campaigner and innovator around communicating the SDGs, including the podcast she hosts with Loyiso Madinga, ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Saving The World’. 

In this week's episode, Gail and Adam discuss:

• How the combination of a big ambition and a fierce time constraint drove breakthrough solutions for Project Everyone
• The new context: how the whole world has changed, and we need to move on from the old model now
• What this new model of impact campaigning should look like 
• The role of surprise here, and how to get the most value from it
• Why the creative campaigning community now has to go for broke
• What it means to engage people in the conversation where they care when it comes to the SDGs, and in language they can relate to 

And, in Richard Curtis’ words ‘What is the sound of hope we can make against the noise of despair?’

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Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/ 

Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish. Thanks to our editor Ruth, our producer Travis, and to Tiny Podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Nothing. Nick brings his experience as a marketer, advisor and investor to discuss:

• How TikTok has changed the playing field for a new generation of brands
• How he led ‘Project Cheetah’ to reduce TikTok’s campaign development cycle from 10 weeks to a few days.
• The creativity that financial and time constraints force you to develop
• Why he always looks for win-win-win partnerships 
• Learning how to create a ’must-see’ piece of creative work
• Why he believes in moving creative in-house to speed up social
• The need for a balanced diet of marketing measurement beyond KPIs and ROI

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Connect with Nick on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholastran/

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/ 

Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish. Thanks to our editor Ruth, our producer Travis, and to Tiny Podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.