Portfolio – Pinstripe Poet

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Happy readers

‘Great thought, consideration, practical application. Beautifully written and clearly articulated.’

Mel ExonLiteracy Pirates’ trustee on my messaging guide

‘When I watch consumers read the packaging, I see smiles. It resonates. There’s a point of connection.’

Dani McGeeDSM’s head of global brand and marketing on my back-of-pack copy

‘Before their help, tackling our tone of voice felt dauntingly intangible. Now we have clarity. They will always be welcome for a free pint or two.’

Will GuntonBeavertown’s head of brand marketing on my tone of voice guide

‘Love your work!’

Brett ShearerASICS’ lead copywriter for tone of voice on my copy audit

Tone of voice for…

When punters haul up to a bar, they see a fridge full of skulls and cosmonauts

That’s Beavertown. Their artwork blurs the edges of reality. Now, after my intervention, their words do the same.

I developed Beavertown’s tone of voice. After some frenzied workshops, I eventually defined four techniques: two to keep them down to earth; and two to kick their writing into hyperdrive.

See the writing style in action:

Social post

Raise a pint to another slick trip ‘round the sun. No world-ending catastrophes, asteroids or wormholes. (Just the way we like it.) Cheers and HNY!

Beer box

We tweaked the ingredients with the care of a rocket scientist mixing explosives. Juicy malts. Tropical aromas. An avalanche of gutsy American hops. Brewed until the whole street smelt of grapefruit. (Worth it.)

Web shop

FLESH
Black lager
Quench your unnatural appetites with Flesh. Born of twisted ritual. We roasted our Bones lager over hellfire. Unleashing a refreshing beer as black and as cold as the devil’s heart. (Oh, he’s a wrong’un.)

Newsletter

ESCAPE FROM PLANET JAN
It’s been a long, cold trek across the (infamously dry) surface of Planet January. And we’re parched. In serious need of sunny skies and IPAs, y’know? Yearning for something fruity.

Jump into February with Gummy. Our new bubblegum IPA. Laid-back pineapples and coconuts, bobbing in a candy sea.

*POP A GUMMY*

CRUSH IT ‘TIL THE END
Hotfooting it to the launchpad to ditch this planet? Or extending your stay a little longer?

Savour the last few days of Dry Jan with our Alcohol-free Beer Bundle. Eight cans of Lazer Crush with a matching tumbler. (And who doesn’t need a glass with a demonic skull on it?)

*GIMME*

Fine print

EVERYTHING WE HAVE TO SAY ABOUT DELIVERIES
You’ve placed an order through our site. Now what?

TRACK YOUR ORDER LIKE A RADAR OPERATOR
Right after you order, you’ll get an email with an order number. Wait a few hours and you should be able to track your package by looking up the number in the courier’s system. (Feel free to hit refresh obsessively.)

Tone of voice for…

1 umbrella company. 3 health brands. 50 of their best products.

Each brand needed a distinct tone of voice and fresh, relatable pack copy. How was I going to humanise all the rigorous science that went into making these supplements?

I gave each brand a unique character. Culturelle was a guru. AZO was a liberator. Estroven was a counsellor. I translated those personas into writing styles, tackling content, wording and pace.

Each tone of voice became a three-part formula:

Human + Scientist + Personality

Three easy and logical components to help people at DSM find the perfect blend of words for their brand voice.

Writing like a guru for Culturelle

They can’t have a healthy body without a healthy gut
Your child’s gut is like a village – home to bacteria, fungi and lots of other microbes. Our Probiotic gummies help balance the bacteria in their gut and boosts neighboring villages (like their brain and immune system).

Ingredients you can feel great about
Each yummy gummy uses natural flavors and fiber sourced from vegetables.

Writing like a liberator for AZO

Swat away night sweats
It takes forever to get to sleep. Then, when you do, it lasts 15 mins – before your temperature skyrockets and you wake in a puddle of sweat. Ugh. We bet you’re tired of that routine.

You’re feeling sleepy, veeeeery sleepy
Ok. So we’re not hypnotists. But we are scientists. Research tells us melatonin will get your body ready for bed. And hey. Let’s deal with overheating, too. Genistein is clinically proven to combat hot flashes and night sweats. Long, cool sleeps? Coming your way.

Writing like a counsellor for Estroven

Menopause and metabolism
Why should we talk about the big M-words together? Because they represent changes we go through after we stop getting periods.

Before then, our appetites are moderated by serotonin
When that hormone is in the brain, it affects what we want to eat and how full we feel. But soon after oestrogen levels drop, serotonin heads the same way. That makes weight management all the more difficult.

So how can we support our system?
The short answer is to find supplements with the right ingredients. And we’re fond of a plant called cissus quadrangularis. The plant is the basis for CQR-300^®, a metabolic herbal extract that has been shown to raise serotonin levels. It takes pride of place in our capsules.

Tone of voice for…

It was a conundrum

BT, EE, Plusnet and Openreach each had their own voice, their own personality, their own stories to tell. And this raised a question. When all these brands were already speaking… how could the parent company, BT Group, use its voice?

I worked with people from around BT Group to find the answer, deciding that the voice should a) connect the other brands, b) amplify stories from across the group.

Their tone of voice sounds like a thoughtful talk show host. BT Group passes the mic, so that colleagues, customers and business units can have their say. Here are some examples of that writing style:

Annual report

THIS WAS LAURA’S YEAR

“Fran and I have been friends since we were kids. And we’ve always talked about fashion. So, when we were furloughed, we decided to go for it and started our own label online. It was very scary, but the response has been incredible. We’ve had fashion bloggers with hundreds of thousands of followers get in touch to collaborate – and our collections sell out every season.”

Laura’s one of our 1.2 million Enterprise customers. In 2021, our Skills for Tomorrow training helped her take the leap and launch her own eCommerce business. In an extraordinary year, we accelerated change to help customers feel the power of technology.

Press release

Over the next six years, EE will cover another 4,500 square miles of countryside with 5G. We’ll strengthen and combine our networks. So consumers can stay connected anywhere in the UK.

A hiker will be able to check their inbox from a mountainside in a national park, for instance. And their view won’t be spoilt by cell towers. We’ll use drones, portable cells and satellites to reach such isolated places. Partnerships, like our recent agreement with OneWeb, will be key to offering mobile connectivity on demand.

Job description

At Digital, every project’s an opportunity for personal development: you’ll make recommendations and decisions. Get most things right. Some things wrong. Pivot, and keep moving.

That’s the way we innovate. And it gets results. Look at our performance metrics and you’ll see evidence of happy customers. Millions of smiles. Our Net Promoter Scores have never been higher.

This success hasn’t made us complacent. If anything, we’re going faster, investing further. So the question is, what will you explore?

Advertising for…

We played in the dark. Now we play under floodlights.

I gave that two-part heading to HSBC – along with many others.

Rugby SVNS is an intense offshoot of the traditional sport: seven players to a team, seven minutes to a half, constant action. Victory goes to athletes who can withstand the pressure: they win and they grow as people. And that was an aspect of the tournament HSBC was keen to celebrate.

HSBC asked me for headlines they could use over photographs of Hong Kong’s teams – and words they could place alongside snaps of kids trying the sport for the first time.

I responded with two-part headlines that told dramatic stories. They gave the beginning and the end of a situation, leaving it to readers to imagine the transformational middle.

Headline for HSBC Try Rugby

I was too shy to speak. Now the whole team listens.

Headlines for Hong Kong China men’s team

A lifetime of training. Fourteen minutes to make it count.

I played against classmates. Now I play against champions.

Headlines for Hong Kong China women’s team

We fought to play. Now we play to dominate.

We were told to play quietly. You should hear the stadium roar.

We played like no one was watching. We still do, when everyone is.

Advertising for…

Yes, I can still fix a router

I was a founding member of BT Group’s in-house studio. In my four years with the team, I wrote whitepapers about cybersecurity, odes to key workers, and plenty of ads.

Here are some of my favourite campaigns:

After this ad appeared in The Telegraph, directory enquiries saw a 10% increase in calls. It conjures up nostalgic memories and explains the service, all in a few words.

In March 2020, BT had a couple of big problems: our key workers were being harassed for ‘breaking lockdown’; and our network was under attack, because of a conspiracy theory about 5G. With no budget, I set out to change public opinion. Instead of fanning the flames by addressing the conspiracy directly, I devised a positive campaign for social media to show the public why our engineers, advisors and infrastructure were essential to the UK. Our first post made 194k impressions on Twitter (roundly beating the Group account’s average of 4-5k impressions per post) and that was just the beginning of an uplifting, impactful campaign.

Businesses are built on human relationships, but companies often come across as cold and impersonal in their ads. My ‘business rule’ campaign avoided this pitfall by featuring BT Global’s experts.

This ad holds a lot of product information, but the focus isn’t on features. Its headline and imagery hooks new parents eager to capture their baby’s every gesture.

After the launch of Skills for Tomorrow in October 2019, it fell to me and the film team to explain how the programme was going to give 10 million people digital skills by 2025. We decided to film five interviews with people who had benefitted from Skills for Tomorrow. The programme had led them to secure jobs, teach kids and win business. And these are the posters that completed the campaign. It generated positive coverage and helped improve one of our key sentiment scores by 94%.

Product descriptions for…

Move your mind

The average sportswear brand fixates on your body. ASICS wants to move your mind. I held ASICS’ philosophy close as I wrote product descriptions for a new range of clothing – descriptions like:

Move smoothly from start to finish
One piece of breathable fabric, mapped to a runner’s body and vented in all the right places. See how a cool, smooth feeling leads to a seamless run. Total ease. Zero distraction.

Those last four words were important. They linked the piece of clothing to the rest of the range. Look at any of the items in the Zero Distraction collection and you’ll see a similar tagline.

This table offers a glimpse of my thought process — how I touched on the benefits of each piece, while making them feel like part of a cohesive range:

Product	Unique feature	Benefit	Tagline
Road 2-N-1 7in Short	Elasticated inner layer	Support	Total mobility. Zero distraction.
Wild Camo SS Top	Mesh panels and flat seams	Comfort	Total comfort. Zero distraction.
Road 3.5in Short	Side slits and high waist	Free movement	Total freedom. Zero distraction.
Seamless SS Top	Single piece of fabric	Easy movement	Total ease. Zero distraction.
Accelerate Bra	Adjustable back straps	Support	Total support. Zero distraction.
Ventilate Actibreeze Singlet	Side slits and ventilation	Coolness	Total vitality. Zero distraction.
Ventilate 5in Short	Stretch woven material	Flexibility	Total flex. Zero distraction.
Ventilate Actibreeze Tank	Breathable fabric	Coolness	Total flow. Zero distraction.

Messaging for…

Catriona Maclay wanted to do more

She saw students struggling in her class. She noticed kids falling behind. They needed more support than she could hope to give from inside her North London classroom. Her frustration mounted until, in 2010, she launched a volunteering programme that grew into Literacy Pirates.

When I spoke to Literacy Pirates, they didn’t need more teachers (fully staffed – result!). But they were after a messaging guide. And that was something I could give them for free. So I started scheduling calls, holding interviews, and crafting copy. Here are just a few lines of my guide – Talk like a literacy pirate:

Tagline

Write your adventure

Vision

Children should become authors of their own adventurous lives.

Proposition

We take children on voyages as readers and writers. When we meet our Young Pirates, they’re behind in class. But our programme unfurls their sails and broadens their horizons. By working on publishing projects in the real world, they develop the skills, the savvy and the grit to succeed. They become the authors of their own adventurous lives.

MORE WORK