Other things Archives - We All Need Words

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Direct Ferries: How do you rebrand ferry travel?

19 / May / 2025

You know Expedia. You know Booking.com. How about Direct Ferries…? Exactly. If you’re one of the 2.5 million people who books ferry tickets with Direct Ferries, you’ve even spent time – and money – on their website. But because a Google ad sent you there, you just don’t know the Direct Ferries name and brand. […]

B CORP: MORE THAN A BADGE

04 / February / 2025

We’ve ended up carving out a (nice) niche working with smaller B Corp businesses. They’re all doing business in a good way, all growing fast and they’re good at branding. But they’re all struggling to articulate quite why what they’re doing is markedly different to anyone else, beyond the B Corp badge. The main thing we tell them is to stop thinking of B Corp as a reporting exercise alone.

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS: CREATIVITY IS NOT A KEY STAGE

17 / October / 2024

Every year, newspapers make a splash about “the best state schools in England”. League tables are published; schools are ranked; supplements produced. Like the national curriculum, these rankings prioritise – and test – ‘core’ subjects. Science is core. Maths is core. English is core. Art? Art is not. It means teachers’ time and energy are […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Rob gets moody about mood boards

07 / February / 2014

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

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 […]

Two's company: our way of doing things

04 / January / 2011

This time last year we handed in our notice. It was bit scary, but we knew we wanted to run a company our way and do more of the sort of things that made us happy. One year on, we’ve learned a few things along the way, and we’ve got a bit wiser about what […]

Would you ask a baker to fix your boiler?

17 / March / 2010

Here’s a true story. Big Client asks Agency A to pitch for a tone of voice project. “Yes yes!” They cry. Except they don’t do tone of voice. So they call us. We say we’ll pitch but we’d like to be honest and say who we are (and tell Big Client that we’re working together). […]