Wordsmithing

By my mid 20s, already I had plenty of experience putting my words into other people’s mouths: CEOs, chairmen, and, once, a candidate for president of the United States (Steve Forbes in the 2000 primary campaign; I wrote part of a single televised speech — something about taxes, if memory serves).

When I moved into branding, I found myself putting words into the mouths of organizations.

To this day, I treasure brilliant, context-appropriate writing; I just think the right words are so important.

Strike that: I know how much the right words matter — they are more critical, in my opinion, than the right images.

Here are a few ready examples of my work as a wordsmith. They represent but a smidgen of my oeuvre.

Visit London (2008)

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I devised and set to paper most of the Visit London House Style Guide, including formulating a tone of voice and writing style for the organization, the marketing arm of Europe’s largest city. I engineered a rotating slogan system, too, which was first rolled out (above) at the 2008 World Travel Market.

The mayor of London’s communications office appears now to be adapting some of the key verbal aspects of the Visit London work (namely the values and tone of voice) for the whole of the city, finding it substantive and accurate enough to be useful well beyond business and leisure tourism.

Saffron Brand Consultants web site (2008)

I conceived and composed 8 things about us and How we see it — the site’s two main static sections — and Employment; they remain today as I wrote them, live on the company’s site.

AkzoNobel brand book (2008)

Saffron did a new corporate identity for the Dutch chemicals and coatings giant. I wrote the copy for the brand book; the style is very corporate, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

Lynx Grills (2007)

For various reasons, none of which would surprise anybody working in the creative industry, much of this work — done on behalf of Lynx, a SoCal-based manufacturer of the Rolls-Royce of barbecue grills (US$6,000 each) — never saw the light of day.

I loved the challenge of writing juicily about a subject that could get dry if you weren’t paying attention. To wit, here’s my catalogue description of the benefits of the Lynx grill’s infrared burner:

LVMH brand language and philosophy for Trash and Soul (2006)

The creative director of the Spanish division of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy dreamed up a jewellery brand based on making rubbish into what I termed “social decoration”. His brief to Saffron was, in essence: “What I’m doing comes from my unconscious mind, like art. Make it conscious — formalize it — so that it can be understood and so we can run it as a brand.”

Incorporating everything from poetry by Don Marquis to references to Claes Oldenburg (on the subject of rendering things in atypical scale) and Marcel Duchamp (regarding his ‘found art’ re-contextualizing of everyday objects), I backward-engineered an explicit philosophy, meaning and ethos for this new brand.

Somewhere I’ve got the brand book (one of the best things I ever did) buried, but here’s a picture of the Madrid storefront and some snippets from the English-language version of the brand’s live website; since they’re my words, verbatim, I take it the work we did still meets the brief three years after the fact. (Note: the name “Trash and Soul” and the jewellery designs were given us. We took it from there, including developing the wonderful T/S initials pattern illustrated below, the work of designer Martin Hansen.)

AKQA Ideas Volume 1 (2004)

Now a cult classic fetching upwards of 50 quid a copy, this was published in a limited run in August 2004 as a hard-bound set of case stories culled from the clients and experience of AKQA, probably the pre-eminent new media agency of the early 21st century (and still going strong in London, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, Amsterdam and Shanghai).

The Wall Street Journal (2001 to present)

It’s not copywriting, strictly speaking, but I keep my storytelling knack sharp as a regular contributor of travel articles and museum reviews to the Leisure & Arts page of America’s widest-circulating, and probably most respected, daily newspaper. Much of what I’ve written is ensconced behind the WSJ’s pay-for-play firewall; here are some pieces you can read for free: