Writing
Who wrote it? I did.
We’ve noticed something. Behind a lot of brands with good writing, there’s a founder who penned the words themselves. Someone who had a clear idea of what they wanted to do, knew who they wanted to be and how they wanted to sound. It goes to show that good writing and clear thinking are one [...]
Writing for social media:
our theory to add to the theories.
‘How should our brand write for Facebook, Twitter and [insert the next big thing here]?’ That’s a question nervous brand managers ask us a lot at the moment. To their slight dismay, we don’t hand over a template, a guideline or a guaranteed-to-get-you-more-retweets-than-that-photo-of-Barack-and-Michelle trade secret. Because social media is different to other writing. You’re talking [...]
No, it won’t do. Ten signs a copywriter is on autopilot.
It’s easy to blame bad writing on cautious clients or the scars of two-thousand-and-one track changes. But much of the blame has to lie with copywriters themselves. Too many of them have knocked out sloppy words for far too long. We want it to stop. So we’ve written, not rules exactly, but provocations. What if [...]
Tone of voice. No tone of voice.
What is tone of voice? And does it really matter? We can show you. All we need is some butter and a Jedi Master.
KC: local words for local people
‘Proud to be part of local life’ – that’s KC’s slogan. They’re a phone and broadband company in East Yorkshire. We’ve been helping them make these seven words into more than a line, so they can show how proud they really are to be a local company (without having to say it all the time).
Innocent’s answer to tummy rumbles
We’ve written a guide to nicking stuff and leaving notes for innocent’s new recipe book. Written Ranted in our finest passive aggressive.
On the Underground. On the Subway.
Here are two ads from ING Direct. One’s from London’s Underground, one’s from New York City’s Subway.
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
I spy with my New York eye lots of little wordy details. Snaps from our trip to the big apple.
Just don’t do it
We think we’ve uncovered a global conspiracy to make all straplines sound the same. American Express’ strapline used to be ‘Don’t Leave Home Without It’ and now it’s ‘Realise Your Potential’. They had a memorable line and now they could be anyone. If they swapped their line with Microsoft’s ‘Your potential. Our passion’ we bet [...]
Minibar for the Mind
An overpriced packet of peanuts, a 50ml bottle of Smirnoff and a titchy can of Sprite? Not in our hotel minibar.