Advertising and marketing effectiveness is not borne from an idea, according to BMF’s Anna Bollinger, executive planning director, and Christina Aventi, chief strategy officer, but rather from the working environment in which those ideas are spawned.
Speaking at Inside Effectiveness in Sydney, the pair explained some of the ingredients that led the agency to be named Effective Agency of the Year at the 2025 Effies.
“We talk a lot about great ideas. We talk about those ideas that we chase, the ones we fall in love with, all the ideas that we win awards for,” said Bollinger.
“But ideas on their own don’t deliver effectiveness… Effectiveness is more environment-led than just dependent on the ideas themselves.”
Trust and psychological safety, according to the pair, are crucial to building this effective environment. But rather than ‘psychological safety’ being used as a euphemism for an overbearing and relentlessly faux-positive work environment, it is allowing and encouraging questions to build understanding between and through teams. Naturally, this takes time. But that’s the point.
This focus on understanding, rather than simply delivering at pace, alleviates stress and tension in the workplace that leads creatives, strategists and planners to create less effective work.
“Chaos and dysfunction are just business as usual… The Edelman Trust Barometer tells us 70 per cent of people distrust those with different views. When distrust is the cultural backdrop, it’s operating inside our companies and our clients’ businesses as well. Fear, too often, becomes the default and that’s a huge problem because fear is truly creativity’s worst enemy.
“Creativity needs oxygen. It needs room to breathe, to entertain the slightly ridiculous, to experiment. Fear is like a vacuum; it sucks that oxygen right out… Trust restores the flow. It lets silly ideas live long enough to become the smart ideas. And the science backs this up.”
Bollinger went on to explain that fear at work sparks a vicious cycle of hormones that inhibit thinking, experimentation and judgment.
“It’s our biology, not incompetence, that this happens. It literally narrows the aperture of our mind. You stop exploring, we start defending. This is why psychological safety within teams is such a superpower. When people feel safe, challenge increases,” she added.
This attitude within BMF’s workplace was central to some of its most effective work, explained Aventi.
For instance, its ‘Algorithm of Disrespect’ campaign for the Department of Social Services was only possible because BMF’s team felt able to keep pushing challenging ideas despite the work it took to get a government client over the line.
“Some of the most abused women in the world are Siri and Alexa. We talk really poorly to our voice assistants. And there’s an idea here. What if we could train people in how they respond to that.
“But the government was just not into it. They’re very risk-averse. It all comes down to reputational management for them. When they look around the world, they also see some work in the consent and domestic violence space might get lauded in Cannes but isn’t necessarily effective, so they’re a bit gun-shy.
“It took about seven years until we could actually have something like the ‘Algorithm of Disrespect’… It took years of building trust, not just from our consent and domestic violence work but probably for all the work in the Federal Government village.”
While less affecting, BMF’s increasingly absurdist but deeply effective work for ALDI, culminating in the 2024 Christmas campaign that featured the five-metre-long gravy boat.
BMF has been ALDI’s longstanding creative partner, again proving a testament to a strong, trust-based relationship that forged over time.
Aventi even said that when BMF began working as ALDI’s creative agency, Christmas was not as significant a creative advertising period as it is today. It was because of BMF’s work for ALDI that other retailers started to up their game.
“Surfin’ Santas [2012] was ALDI’s first foray into Christmas. And Christmas wasn’t a really big thing back then, we’d sort of ignored it in terms of a retail event and it did really well and created an appetite for more Christmas curiosity for ALDI, so it got more quirky and even more absurdist. And then other retailers jumped on board. The point is that bravery begets bravery,” said Aventi.
Later in the morning, a panel of speakers included Aventi, Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom, WARC’s Rica Facundo and Lifeblood marketer Steph Garner, added that the language around creative “risks” can often be inhibiting.
“We’re always describing creativty as bravery, taking a risk,” said Facuno.
“But should that be the language we’re using for creativity? Right now, so many things are uncertain. If you’re going to senior stakeholders and saying ‘You should be brave and take this risk’ they’re going to step back and say ‘Don’t talk to me, talk to someone else’.
