Foundational Essay
The communications industry is facing an identity crisis.
Caught between the complexity of the modern world and the hyperactive nature of communicating in it, we’ve been forced to settle for normalised mediocrity, watching our potential to shape culture, policy, and lives fade in the race to keep up.
This means an essential focus on real impact for business, customers, citizens, and communities is often diluted by short term, easy metrics that serve as a crutch to 'perform' value creation, often in place of actually creating it.
Complicated is not a reason for caution.
In a world of automation and artifice, ‘good enough’ is within reach of everyone.
The real currency now lies with the extraordinary. If you’re making noise without eliciting real feeling in your audience, you might as well be wallpaper. Very expensive wallpaper.
A reappraisal is needed. The challenge is also the opportunity.
First, we put human creativity front and centre to help bridge the gap between a fragmented world and a frantic public square.
Next, we cast aside adequacy and timidity, and commit that every story should strive to leave the world better for its telling. Humans making humans feel something, well, human. It’s as simple - and difficult - as that.
Finally, we treat impact as both a privilege and an imperative, by being ceaselessly insight-led and delivering real, measurable results that move the needle, not just meet a requirement.
So how do we realise the potential of the opportunity?
We start by building something new. Something with meaning. Something that helps make meaning.
This is Allegory.
A fiercely independent creative consultancy that exists to tackle some of the biggest communications challenges we face. To take complex issues and create human stories which earn trust, build reputations, win customers, influence agendas, inspire workforces, and transform perceptions.
Like the world around us, we are a mix of earnest and audacious, deadly serious and seriously fun, highbrow and lowbrow, relentlessly optimistic and healthily sceptical.
We combine the sure hand of big brand and big agency nous with the hunger, freedom, and audacity of an independent.
After spending decades honing our craft, we know the difference between excellence and adequate. We choose the former. With a relentless focus on delivering real value through provable impact.
We know that to be interesting requires us to be interested, in our clients, in their world, and in the wider world around us. So we spend every day doing just that.
Our ambition is for Allegory to be a creative powerhouse, a centre of excellence for talent, and to challenge the typical agency model in search of something better.
We will evolve over time, but our beliefs remain firm. They are:
Make a difference: Through what we do, how we do it, and how we treat each other, we seek to change the world around us for good.
Make an impact: We look to measure value and outcomes over time, and we really measure it. Because we humbly but firmly trust in this impact, we are transparent and upfront with clients.
Be human: Methods, models, tools, and technologies have their place, but we will always remain innately human.
Be interested: We are curious about the world around us and hungry to know more, from our clients to culture.
Be interesting: We stand against mediocrity in all its forms, and believe creativity is the pathway to excellence.
Let’s get started.