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 view over the A3220 through West London looked exactly like locations in The Killing or The Bridge to us… job done! A Nordic Noir home from home: where Viaplay’s UK launch ads were going to be. Nordic Noir on a plate! These ads pretty much wrote themselves. We played with locations in different ways ..read more

Most children’s charities lead with a photo of a child appealing for your help. We decided to start with something different for Railway Children. 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. Most of what they do is about making sure children don’t go back to the streets again. But they weren’t telling people about that. Why? Because, frankly, that ..read more

Gail’s Christmas Pantry: to keep you going when all the good places shut up shop over Christmas… 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 and a made-by-hand sourdough loaf for toast in the morning. NOWHERE! FOR DAYS! …and you can’t get a decent loaf of bread or coffee. We branded this and the rest of Gail’s Bakery’s range f ..read more

Call it not-as-dull-as-water, call it a better-for-you cordial, just don’t call it squash. A new brand and tone for Elderbrook drinks.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’? Elderbrook Drinks send cordials by post and you’ll find them in a few independent shops too. Elderbrook Drinks was set ..read more

“Grandpa? Why does that sign say ‘Guardian Unlimited’?” A relic from the early days of the internet. There’s something quaint about the sign by the old Guardian building on London’s Farringdon Road. Especially the ‘Unlimited’ bit – which was what they called the online version of the Guardian back in 1999, and basically describes what the internet is. It seems faintly ridiculous that anyone might give the online version of their brand a different name. We take it for granted that the Guardian is the Guardian whether it’s on a phone, iPad or paper. Someone could probably write a (niche) PhD abo ..read more

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 will tell you, ‘correlation’ (that something happened) is different to ‘causation’ (especially if, say, ice cream sales went up during a heatwave). But for once, we have some impressive stats that don’t have anything to do with anyone else – or the weather. We’ve been working for a ..read more

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. Dublin: just a pretty face Designed by Annie Atkins for Think & Son. There’s something a little surprising about hand-drawing a logo for a capital city. It’s a shame, then, that “a breath of fresh air” is such a predictable tagline. We also spotted this ad on the tube: Again, it’s sort of refreshing not to see touri ..read more

Another year, another Christmas annual for Carluccio’s. 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 a notebook. They’d already worked with an illustrator, Daniel Haskett, who’d been on a trip around Italy to meet and illustrate their producers for their packaging. This one’s a notebook… We themed the annual around ..read more

A little PS to our last blog… We’ve already written about how apps need to think more like brands. Enough said. Curiously, though, it’s a two-way process and one that’s changing things for the better. The good things about apps – that they need a tight idea and do one thing well – are influencing everything else. And small companies are starting to look more like mini apps. It could be that the rise of mini businesses everywhere – from craft beer to street food stalls – are all part of the same phenomenon. Going to most street food markets is a little like going to the App Store. Each one’s g ..read more

Rob talks apps, meetings at Silicon Roundabout and branding. Here’s my pet theory: apps are still in the dark ages, at least as far as branding goes. This is something I’ve been thinking for a while and recent meetings I’ve had with startups haven’t persuaded me otherwise. *** I’m sitting around a table as the development team’s in-house designer shows me the brand guidelines he’s put together. There’s a bright logo. The app’s front page has full-bleed photographs, a simple, monochrome interface and boxes in bold, bright RGB colours. (But no gradients or ‘skeuomorphic’ imitation 3-D buttons ..read more