Creativity still sits in the wrong column of most spreadsheets. David Nurse, founder of Belfast and Dublin creative agency Big+Bold, argues that purposeful creative work is one of the most dependable returns a business can buy.
There’s a question we hear frequently with a potential new client, always asked politely and always meaning the same thing: what will this actually do for us? It’s the right question. In the Profit edition of Business Eye it’s the only question — and it’s one our industry has been far too shy about answering.
Creativity has spent decades filed under ‘cost’. It’s the line that gets trimmed when the forecast wobbles, the nice-to-have that waits for a better year. The evidence points the other way. Businesses that hold their nerve and invest in distinctive, emotionally intelligent creative work consistently outperform those that retreat into the rational and the safe. Effectiveness research has been saying it for years: creativity is a multiplier on every pound of media, every launch, every hire.
We see that multiplier at work every week, and rarely more clearly than in our partnership with National Museums NI. The Ulster Museum campaign reproduced on these pages wasn’t designed to win awards; it was designed to bring more people through the doors of a museum that belongs to all of us. Our work for the Ulster Folk Museum, celebrates the makers keeping traditional craft alive – heritage as a living economy rather than a glass case. These are briefs where commercial outcome and public good pull in the same direction, and the work is better for it. That’s the heart of it: purpose isn’t the opposite of profit. Done properly, it’s the engine.
The market seems to agree. Big+Bold is now a team of eighteen, and this year we’re doubling our studio floor space. I mention that not as a boast but as a data point: demand for creative thinking in Northern Ireland and from Northern Ireland is growing, and it is growing fastest where the work means something.
But headcount is never the real measure of an agency. The better measure is who the work attracts and what they believe. The people. Josie Good joined us to help answer the biggest question our industry has ever faced: what is creativity for in an age of intelligent machines? Dearbhla Boyle has just been appointed to the Centre of Democracy and Peace’s Fellowship Programme, taking what Northern Ireland knows about communication and reconciliation onto an international stage. Hope Smith is quietly helping launch something called IRENE that we believe will matter well beyond our own client list. And Klaudia Lisek is exploring how experience design can make complex interactions feel simple, more intuitive and human.
The next creative dividend will be paid by tools as well as talent. Later this year we plan to launch Marque — something we believe is genuinely new in our industry: an AI platform built for clients rather than agencies. Working with creativity not against it. Helping safeguard the creative industries, not destroy it. We’re building it because we think AI’s job is to widen access to creativity, not to hollow it out. The businesses that win with these tools won’t be the ones that use them to make average work faster. They’ll be the ones that use them to make brave work possible.
Ireland has always exported imagination — in its writers, its makers, its screen industry, its problem-solvers. The next decade is the moment its creative businesses take that imagination onto a global stage and prove that creativity can be a force for good and a force for growth at the same time. The creative dividend is real. It pays in revenue, and it pays in something rarer: work worth doing.
We intend to keep collecting.
| “The best time in history to be creative” Josie Good, Junior Creative, on where the industry goes next — and why she joined Big+Bold. “The next decade will be the best time in history to be creative — and the worst time to be average. As AI makes competent work effortless, competence stops being worth paying for. What’s left is everything the machines can’t do: taste, judgement, meaning, the idea that makes someone feel something. That isn’t a threat to creative businesses; it’s the greatest repricing of imagination we’ve ever seen. I joined Big+Bold because it’s building for that future rather than defending the past — investing in people and platforms at the same time, and refusing to accept that ambition this size has to live in London. The future belongs to teams that can hold two thoughts at once: use every new tool, and protect the human spark those tools exist to serve.” |
| “Creativity is a peace-building technology” Dearbhla Boyle, Strategy Director on her appointment to the Centre of Democracy and Peace’s Fellowship. “Northern Ireland understands better than almost anywhere what happens when communication fails — and what becomes possible when it starts to work. I’ll be taking into the Fellowship something I see in the studio every week: creativity is a peace-building technology. Every piece of work that helps people see each other differently — a museum that tells all of our stories, a campaign that finds the common ground, is quietly doing the same job as any peace process: building empathy at scale. It’s a privilege to represent both my profession and this place, and to make the case internationally that the creative industries aren’t a luxury for peaceful societies. They’re part of how societies become peaceful.” |
| Meet IRENE Hope Smith, Head of Client Services, on the launch we’re leading. “Some of what I’ve been building since joining Big+Bold has to stay under wraps a little longer — IRENE launches properly in the coming months — but I can say what it’s for. Bringing collaboration across the island of Ireland, across the creative sector. Collaboration, not competition. What I can promise is that it comes from the same conviction as everything else on these pages: the point of new technology is to make good work, and good outcomes, available to more people — not fewer. Watch this space. And if you’d like to be among the first to see it, we’d love to hear from you.” |
“Simplicity is a creative advantage”
Klaudia Lisek, Experience Design Director, on why good creativity doesn’t make people think harder.
“Creativity often captures attention first, but its real value lies in making things easier to understand, navigate and use. The strongest ideas are rarely the most complicated; they come from knowing what to strip away.
Whether it is a campaign, a brand or a digital experience, simplicity builds confidence. Small, thoughtful decisions, be it a clear cue, a reassuring interaction, a moment of brand personality, can all transform an experience from functional to memorable.
The challenge is to be distinctive without asking people to work harder to engage. The best creative work is not just about how something looks, but how it feels. Leaving an impression precisely because it feels effortless.”
