ONES THAT GOT AWAY: VIAPLAY ADS

02 / August / 2023

Sarah Lund and Saga Norén were moving to the UK (kind of) and Viaplay, the Nordic streaming company, asked us for some ideas to launch their service over here. Nordic Noir was always going to be the way in and the brief included some photos of where Viaplay’s ads were going to appear. The beautiful […]

It's hard to tell one NGO from the next

25 / April / 2023

“WHAT DO WE WANT?” “JUSTICE… AND A SYSTEM-WIDE TRANSFORMATION IN OUR ECONOMY THAT EMPOWERS CITIZENS AS EFFECTIVE STEWARDS OF OUR FUTURE THROUGH CIRCULAR PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND INVESTMENT PRACTICES, AND MANY OTHER CRITICAL SOLUTIONS.”“WHEN DO WE WANT IT?”“NOW!” We’re going to need a bigger placard. It used to be easy to write pithy, punchy slogans for […]

TOP OF THE MORNIN': COFFEE AFTER A TRIPLE ESPRESSO

27 / March / 2023

You know the drill: you walk into a stripped-back, slightly industrial space which has splashed out on the plywood, and head to the counter, where a bearded fellow in cobalt-coloured ‘workwear’ is lighting a bunsen burner while you read a menu with six different roast options. Mild panic kicks in when you realise it’s your […]

HONEST BURGERS: FAR MORE THAN TALKING THE TALK

27 / June / 2022

We write all kinds of things for all kinds of brands, but it’s burgers and rosemary salted chips that got us thinking. Since we worked on this project for Honest Burgers, we haven’t looked at fields in the same way. We now play ‘Industrial Farming I Spy’ – and it’s everywhere.

UP TO MUCH?

22 / February / 2022

We haven’t had a face-to-face meeting in two whole years now. Here’s some of what we’ve been up to from our swivel chairs in the living room.

HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY GREENPEACE!

13 / September / 2021

‘Nothing changes without you’: here’s Greenpeace’s campaign video featuring the concept and words we came up with to celebrate their 50th birthday. The brief was to create a campaign that would thank – and go down well with – their supporters. We played with a ‘growing old disgracefully’ idea, as well as a concept to […]

Alexa, how do you get hair like Alexa?

15 / February / 2021

If you’re Meghan Markle or Alexa Chung, every day is a good hair day. Their tresses just sort of tumble in a woke-up-like-this way. Not too styled, but just styled enough. The secret to their longed-for locks is the hairdresser George Northwood. He’s been doing Alexa’s hair for years and – in beauty circles, at […]

HOW WE WORK WITH START-UPS

12 / October / 2020

When we work with start-ups, we close Word and PowerPoint and begin where they need our words-and-thinking combo the most: the front page of their website.  So we sum up what they’re about in a wireframe, not a Word doc (it forces you to write in a different way), and play with how we can pitch […]

ONES THAT GOT AWAY PART THREE

14 / July / 2020

This time we’re heading to the Barbican… “Less is more” is a classic graphic design mantra. It looks good: I’m typing this on a MacBook, with a Muji notebook by my side, opposite some Vitsoe shelves, so I’m all signed up. But this style does a funny thing to words – mostly not very many […]

A non-essential word or two from us

14 / April / 2020

Back when London’s lockdown was beginning, writer and journalist Rhymer Rigby tweeted that his daughter described his job as ‘the opposite of a key worker’. Well, quite. It feels odd to take the coronavirus on as ‘content’ with tips and tricks on other ways to write about ‘unprecedented times’. And yet it feels just as […]

ONES THAT GOT AWAY PT 2

15 / May / 2019

Museums and galleries have a tried-and-rarely-strayed-from formula for campaigns. There’s nearly always a lead picture (that has tested well with focus groups), alongside the exhibition’s title. Any five-star reviews get added on later and there’s a last “final weeks” push before the exhibition closes. Often, though, that way of doing things preaches to the converted […]

ONES THAT GOT AWAY

02 / May / 2019

The first in an occasional series of ideas clients didn’t go for. This one’s for Duppy Share rum and shows you how we write stuff on social. You can read more about the tricky business of content in our new how-to guide. Our take is that a lot of what brands post on social is […]

MAVERICKS: ELLA'S KITCHEN IT AIN'T

28 / January / 2019

“Would you like to try our new snacks for kids?” said the nice man with a big pot of tasters, somewhere on a high street in south-east London. We had target audience written all over us: on the school run, in a hurry, pushing a buggy. Small child hears the magic word SNACKS, sticks her […]

BUSY BUSY BUSY

13 / February / 2018

“Are you busy?” It’s the meeting equivalent of being asked “Going anywhere nice?” in the hairdresser’s up-and-downy chair. And the answer’s yes. We have been busy. Too busy to update our blog for a while, in fact (at least that’s our excuse). Here’s what we’ve been up to:

PURPOSE: SELF-HELP FOR BRANDS

19 / June / 2017

“Find your love”, “Be driven by a higher ideal”, “The sky’s the limit”… These smoochy words aren’t a pep-talk from a well-meaning, high-fiving parent. To find these – and many more like them – go to a bookshop. And while you might think you’re heading straight for the self-help section (via a pit-stop to buy […]

Famous for 15,000 likes

16 / January / 2017

We’ve seen the future and it’s a selfie starring a mum, a dad and some screaming kids with the hashtag #parentingtheshitoutoflife. But this is no ordinary post from one of your real-life friends (remember them?). This has 32,000 ‘likes’ from some 400,000 followers and counting. It’s A Strange Thing for our times when ordinary people […]

When charity isn't a quick fix

11 / January / 2017

Every marketing department has a sacred cow. In charity fundraising, it’s the image of the doe-eyed child asking you for help. Charities go back to this image again and again because they know it works. But for children’s charity Railway Children, getting kids off the street is only the start.

When everything stops

16 / November / 2016

When is a Christmas hamper not a Christmas hamper? When you’re Gail’s Bakery and you put together a ‘survival kit’ to see you through the oh-so-slow bit between Christmas and new year. Perfect for those of us (us) whose first-world problems go off the scale when there’s no way to get a perfectly-steamed flat white […]

ELDERBROOK: THE NOT SQUASH

13 / September / 2016

Gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, fun-free, free-free… It’s all healthy this and deliciously that at the moment. So what’s a new drinks brand to do to get heard above all the noise, when the cold-pressed brigade are doing a healthier-than-thou thing and even the big sugary drinks brands are singing about joy, happiness, health and ‘choice’?

That name is so 2016.

12 / April / 2016

“Grandpa? Why does that sign say ‘Guardian Unlimited’?”

Proof that words make people love you. Probably.

10 / February / 2016

We’ve always been pretty sceptical about the “results” agencies stick at the bottom of case studies or enter into awards. You know the sort of thing: doing x (whether that’s a new tone of voice, rebrand or whatever) has increased sales by 900% and brand awareness by five dog years. Because, as any good statistician […]

One nil to Cambridge

30 / October / 2015

Cambridge University and the city of Dublin both launched brand campaigns this month. Each of them looks different from ‘the usual’, but if you put them side by side (and put yourself in visitors’ shoes), Cambridge’s campaign is the only one that actually has something to say.

Another slice of panettone: Christmas words for Carluccio's

02 / October / 2015

Christmas. 'Tis the season to write lots of hackneyed headlines and carol puns (like we just did there). We write Carluccio’s Christmas annual for them every year. We try hard to make it something different each time, without doing anything too obviously Christmassy. For their 2015 annual, they asked us to write the words for […]

And it's time companies learnt from apps

06 / August / 2015

A little PS to our last blog…

It's time apps took branding seriously

03 / August / 2015

Rob talks apps, meetings at Silicon Roundabout and branding.

How not to write guidelines

07 / April / 2015

‘An early April Fool’s joke’ said the first tweet, mocking the University of Warwick’s tone of voice guidelines. And then those guidelines went viral on Twitter… well, as viral as these sort of things go.

Tone of voice like it's 1999

01 / March / 2015

Molly wrote this for the Marketing Society…

No bluffing: our how-to guides

02 / January / 2015

Like method actors, one of the first things we’re asked is “so what’s your process?”. People like process; it’s comforting. It means everyone knows the steps involved to get the perfect piece of work. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all, ten-steps-to-success way to do branding. If anything, we’ve found that process gets in the way and […]

Made in Britain: 2014 via 1950

07 / October / 2014

Last weekend we went to Best of Britannia (BOB), part pop-up department store, part celebration of independent brands designing and making things in Britain. On top of ideas for Christmas presents, it made us think a lot about ‘brand Britain’. Many companies at BOB were selling an idea and image of Britain as well as […]

The problem with management books

18 / August / 2014

Jill Lepore’s take-down of ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ by Clayton M. Christensen (a management book popular with Silicon Valley types) in the New Yorker is worth a read — all 6,000 words of it. Here’s a (bit of a chewy) taster: “Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle […]

Strategists! Step away from the acoustic guitar

17 / July / 2014

Here’s what I want from Airbnb. I want a website and app that work beautifully. I want to find an apartment so I can pretend I live in Brooklyn (even if it’s just for a week). And I want to make a few quid from my own apartment on the side. Here’s what I don’t […]

Something wonderful in Frome

11 / July / 2014

An uphill cycle race, a proposal to turn the town into an obstacle course, an art gallery and cafe in a loo, mysterious slogans graffitied on walls and pulled along by airplanes. Welcome to The Independent State of Frome. Since we worked on the branding project for Shrewsbury, we’ve been on the lookout for other […]

' Find your happy ' makes us sad

12 / June / 2014

At first glance it looks normal. It looks like a line. It sounds like a line. It reads like a line. Kind of. Because it isn’t normal at all. It’s been brandified. ‘Find your happy’. You can see how they got there. Rightmove is all about finding a home, but research probably told them that […]

The Turing Test for brands

20 / February / 2014

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing came up with a test for artificial intelligence; what became known as The Turing Test. Could people tell if a machine or a person was ‘talking’ to them? If a computer could fool someone into thinking there was a person in charge, it passed the test. We’ve ctrl-alt-deleted the […]

Rob gets moody about mood boards

07 / February / 2014

As part of the Ideal Client, a project from It’s Nice That and Represent:

#Hashtags: home of the lame joke

09 / October / 2013

Hashtags started out on Twitter as a useful way to tag topics, so others could search for and add to the conversation. Think of the times Twitter has come into its own, like the #Arabspring or the #londonriots. When hashtags are done well, they’re really useful. But that’s becoming increasingly rare. Mostly they’ve gone the […]

Why brands need to stop going on about 'content' and find something worth saying

24 / July / 2013

We came across our first ‘content strategy’ just after we started We All Need Words. A planning agency had been hired by a big (non-sporty) brand to sponsor the sort of sports events that Nike do. Their twist on this was to support the spectators – the families and friends who go along to things, […]

Wild Lime Bar & Kitchen

02 / June / 2013

Move over All Bar One, Slug and Lettuce and JD Wetherspoon. A new high street bar brand is in town. High street pubs – especially those outside London – haven’t moved on much since the mid-nineties. Chains like All Bar One, Pitcher & Piano and Slug & Lettuce have struggled to reinvent their formula of […]

Shrewsbury nominated for D&AD pencil

22 / April / 2013

The branding work we did for Shrewsbury with & SMITH last year has won a D&AD award. Shrewsbury is the only branding scheme nominated for a D&AD pencil in its category (just nudging ahead of London 2012’s Olympic branding, no less). Read all about Shrewsbury here – then go there.

Who wrote it? I did

28 / January / 2013

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

19 / November / 2012

‘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 […]

Ten signs a copywriter is on autopilot

12 / September / 2012

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 […]

No, I don't want to see your brand dodecahedron

16 / July / 2012

Brand strategy has puffed itself up to be so important it’s put on a pedestal, and it’s high time we knocked it off. Let’s drop the diagrams and faux-strategy once and for all. We’ve all been there. Brand presentations that take about three-and-a-half days to go through. The first part often goes over that particular […]

What's the big idea?

11 / June / 2012

Branding types love to talk about ‘the big idea’: a thought that makes you feel differently about something or see things in a new way. But most so-called big ideas aren’t really that big and they don’t have much of an idea behind them either. It’s much easier to come up with touchy-feely slogans than […]

Apologise unreservedly seems to be the hardest word(s)

09 / May / 2012

Oh dear. Diageo have got themselves in a bit of bother with small brewers BrewDog. You only need to look at Diageo’s apology to see how they got into trouble in the first place (and why BrewDog deserve to win more awards than them). Diageo’s at-arm’s-length statement vs… A Diageo spokesperson: “There was a serious […]

When small independents learn big companies' tricks

01 / May / 2012

As of today the contents of my fridge have changed. Bye-bye big name labels and uniform vegetables. Hello real food delivered from local shops by Hubbub. If you haven’t come across them already, Hubbub is roughly what you get when you cross the good bits of buying local with the convenience of ordering from Ocado. […]

Tone of voice. No tone of voice.

25 / April / 2012

What is tone of voice? And does it really matter? We can show you. All we need is some butter and a Jedi Master. TONE OF VOICE A humble ingredient, no more: a rousing tone for Lurpak plays on how you feel when you’ve baked something yourself. Clever. NO TONE OF VOICE Spend £££s to […]

The day we went to Selfridges. To speak not to shop.

12 / March / 2012

Here’s Rob talking about stopping brand slop in Selfridges at an event set up by It’s Nice That. We were tickled that the soundbite flying around afterwards on Twitter was: ‘If you feel like a berk saying it you shouldn’t write it down. – Rob Mitchell’. We’re determined to bring the word berk back into […]

Once upon a time we didn't need strategic storytelling

01 / March / 2012

Once upon a time stories weren’t called ‘narratives’ and we didn’t need a process, archetypes or rules to help us tell them. And most authors of books, plays, films and the like (ie real stories) didn’t use them either. So why have so many agencies started banging on about the power of storytelling all of […]

A tea by any other name

09 / January / 2012

Spot the difference between these two boxes of Teapigs tea. They look the same; they taste the same. The only difference is their names. Once upon a time this ‘Everyday Brew’ was called ‘English Breakfast’. After all, this is Teapigs’ signature blend and their tea is fancier and tastier than PG Tips. But some of […]