Copywriting articles and ideas

It’s that time of year again where we all hark back to the good ol’ days of riding one horse sleighs, building snowmen in meadows and conspiring as chestnuts roast on blazing fires. And so on.

But these days, nostalgia isn’t just a Christmas trend.

Throwback Thursday, the ubiquitous ‘vintage’ Instagram filter, a boom in flea...

As you will probably have noticed by now (unless you’re new to our blog, in which case hello there, it’s lovely to meet you!) we use Kiva.org to make monthly ‘loans that change lives’ to entrepreneurs without access to traditional banking systems.

However, this month’s loan is a little bit special, as we are making it to take part in...

One way to make copywriting easier… is to stop writing.

This tip is so effective that one of my clients actually fired me after he put this into action.

Watch the video to learn more.

Last Wednesday was the most shocking US Presidential election of all time. Luckily for me, I had the perfect antidote in an event for Women With Voices that night.

I was part of a panel dubbed as the ‘Spice Girls of Business’ (pictured) which included my business partners-in-crime Emma-Louise Smith and Kerri Walker, as well as...

As Hemingway allegedly said, “the first draft of anything is sh*t”.

And personally, I think that is a wonderful thing.

Knowing your first draft will be crappy removes all the pressure from your shoulders.

Your job is simply to get the words on the page.

Learn more in the video above.

And if you’re still...

The City of Oakland, California has long been home to a thriving African-American community, which has shaped black identity in the USA for decades.

However, whilst it remains one of the most ethnically diverse major cities in the country, that historically renowned African-American population has decreased by around 10% (over 10,000)...

“As soon as I started telling people about our method, instead of the software, overnight sales literally doubled. The message was unique, we weren’t just this thing to help you track your expenses anymore, we were much more than that”. Jesse Mecham, Founder, YNAB

These are amazing times for innovators like you. It’s never been...

This article first appeared in the D&AD series on brand storytelling.

You may not have heard of most of the people I work with; niche consultancies, tiny charities, 10-people technology companies. They’re unlikely to win any yellow pencils. They don’t have advertising budgets....

The slashing of art lessons in schools, brutal cuts to arts funding, the number of creatives asked to work ‘for exposure’ or ‘for the love’ … our society certainly seems to question whether art really matters.

I began pondering the value of art as we made this month’s “loan that changes lives” to Tigran, an Armenian looking for a loan to...

I met Nellie through a friend of a friend. We were making the usual small talk when she dropped casually into the conversation that she was catching a flight to Belfast that night.

“What are doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to have a fight” she replied.

I stared at her, puzzled. But she was deadly serious.

No, she...

At brand strategy workshops I often hand out cards with different logos on them and ask the group to say what each logo means to them. The replies are fascinating … and usually hilarious. At one workshop when someone picked the BMW logo, it provoked some unexpected reactions:

“Pretentious”
“Bad drivers”
“Essex...

“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one” John Steinbeck

One of the key pillars to growing a successful brand is a deep understanding of who you’re there to serve.

Who are your users, customers or...