Thank you for all of your fabulous Summer haiku entries, we’ve been overwhelmed with the response!
Unfortunately, there can only be one winner and after much deliberation we are pleased to announce that
Linda Gardner is the lucky Haiku Mistress.
Linda will receive a wonderful typographic print of her triumphant haiku:
Wasp, enjoyed my wine
Now lazily slumbering
Intoxicated
Once again, thank you for all your entries!
It’s summer, no really, it is, and to celebrate, we’re launching the Remedy Creative summer Haiku competition.
If there are any Haiku purists reading this post, now is the time to look away. And yes we know, the plural of Haiku is Haiku, but cut us some slack here.
There are different ideas for the structure of the perfect Haiku, but in this case, what we are looking for is a three line poem in a 5, 7, 5 syllable format. The theme has to be summer, and to show you what we mean, here’s one what we wrote earlier:
Asleep in garden
Forget to put on suncream
I look like lobster
All your Haiku needs to do is make us smile, giggle or go “wow” a little bit, to stand a chance of winning:
a one-off, money-can’t-buy, extra special prize – your Haiku as a stunning typographic poster –
designed and printed by Remedy and delivered with love (or in the post).
To enter, simply post your haiku as a comment below.
Terms & Conditions:
1. You can submit as many entries as you wish.
2. Automated entries will be disqualified.
3. Entries must be received by midday on 22nd July 2011.
4. A winner will be chosen by an independent panel from all the entries received.
5. The winner will be contacted via email on 22nd July 2011 and delivery of the prize will be arranged.
6. The poster will be delivered in a frame unless the winner is outside of the UK.
7. The winner consents for their name to be used for publicity purposes by Remedy Creative Ltd. in printed and/or online formats.
8. Remedy Creative will not pass on your details to any third party without your prior consent, but your name will be shown on our blog.
Another lovely bunch of creative stuff to feast your eyes on. This time the wall plays host to everything from PG Tips to Bullfinches, pink wellies to dandies in top hats.
We were particularly fond of bird photography by Luke Stephenson, Macmillan’s typography and the Prontaprint brochures
For more inspiration, check out previous posts:
If you come across any creative gems that you think deserve a place on the wall, then please send them to:
The Wall,
Remedy Creative
17, Mount Ephraim,
Tunbridge Wells
Kent
TN4 8AE
Or email us: inspiration@remedycreative.com
Copywriting tip number 1 – copy editing
Whether it’s a huge annual report or a short internal memo, there’s an art to writing sharp, succinct copy that people will actually read. For sake of argument, we’re writing 100 words or so for the home page of a brand new website for Smythe & Smythe, a fictitious insurance company. The following processes should help:
1. Stop staring at a blank screen
Get something down, even if it’s just bullet points in no particular order. Something to form the basis of the content.
2. Know your tone of voice
This is critical. In this instance, let’s say the client wants to come across as confident and professional.
3. Who are you talking to?
Let’s presume that Smythe & Smythe want to appeal to Financial Directors and other decision makers of large multinationals.
4. What do you want to achieve?
In this case, we’re welcoming someone to a new website and quickly getting across the essence of who Smythe & Smythe are and what they’re about.
5. Structure
Once we have an opening gambit and pay-off/call to action in mind, we can start to construct some logic to the story.
For sake of argument, we will have an intro that welcomes people to the website and an outtro that encourages them to get in touch.
This may well change as things develop, but as with the bullet points, at least we have a starting point.
6. Save everything
Every draft could be ‘the one’, so don’t save over them. Copy and paste and then keep tweaking to your heart’s content.
Draft 1 – it may be over-long, but it’s got pretty much everything you need
Smythe and Smythe – Your future in safe hands
Welcome to the new Smythe and Smythe website.
With over 1200 employees in 14 European countries, we are Europe’s biggest commercial insurer.
Smythe and Smythe is the number 1 commercial insurer in Europe, and with 125 years of commercial insurance experience, working with the likes of Fred Bloggs, Joe Public, A N Other and Thingumybob, you really couldn’t be in safer hands.
Since our original CEO chairman, Sir Cecil Smythe, started the company in 1886, we have been guided by two core principles – integrity and excellence. You will find that we constantly strive to meet or exceed our commitments to our clients – no wonder we were voted number 1 for value and customer service at the Euro–Insure awards 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2011.
In our new site you will find the Smythe and Smythe blog, downloadable resources and an invaluable online quote tool.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if there is anything you would like to discuss regarding your commercial insurance needs.
So, now it’s time to get the hatchet out.
Draft 2
Smythe and Smythe – Your future in safe hands
Welcome to the new Smythe and Smythe website.
Smythe and Smythe employs over 1200 insurance specialists and provides commercial cover and consultancy for some of the biggest organisations in Europe.
Since our incorporation 1886, we have been guided by two core principles – integrity and excellence. No wonder we were voted number 1 for value and customer service at the Euro–Insure awards 2011.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if there is anything you would like to discuss regarding your commercial insurance needs.
Now’s the time to be honest with ourselves. Is there anything crucial missing? Does it flow? Is it in the right order? If the answer to all of these questions is ‘Yes’, it’s time to look at tone of voice. Smythe and Smythe is the biggest in Europe and our tone of voice is ‘confident and professional’, so maybe, we can afford to be a bit ballsier…
Draft 3
Smythe and Smythe – Your future in safe hands
For 125 years, Smythe and Smythe has been guided by two core principals – integrity and excellence. That’s why we’re the largest commercial insurer in Europe.
And this year, we picked up our 7th annual Euro–Insure award as ‘number 1 for value and customer service’.
Want to know more? Please have a look around our website or get in touch.
If you’ve got to this point and you’re still not sure, read it out loud. Does it sound right for your brand? Another great tip is to forget about it and give it the ‘overnight test’. But, if deadlines are looming, ask colleagues what they think. If you’re the only one who likes it, don’t be afraid to tear it up and start again.
So, in summary, get all the salient points down; be ruthless with your editing; save every version; and finally, don’t forget your tone of voice – it could be the one thing that makes your brand truly unique.
Oh, and definitely don’t rely on spell check!
Strategy + creativity + pizazz + chemistry = success
It’s a bizarre process, you get the team whipped up into a frenzy of activity. Everyone’s buzzing, working into the early hours. The big idea is put in front of the Creative Director, he gets into a huddle with the account team who start foaming at the mouth with excitement. The studio is cranked up another gear; producing layouts, mood boards, mock-ups… what ever’s needed to hook that juicy new account.
All in all, it’s a highly charged process. All hands to the pump, beers and pizza at midnight, hysteria at 2.00am and crashing in the boardroom just as the sun comes up.
But the real fun is to be had at the pitch itself.
I once had the pleasure of pitching to a marketing big wig from Napolina. I had to present a TV script for tinned tomatoes that involved a tongue-in-cheek Italian operetta, and poor old muggins had to play the parts of both tenor and soprano. It was the kind of script that could only be performed with molto gusto.
So after the pre-amble and recapitulation of the creative brief, I sucked in my gut and belted out a sub-standard Rossini number at the top of my voice. I was in the zone, eyes tightly shut, convinced of the creative genius of the script. I got to the final flourish and was just about to take a bow, when the client looked at me, completely devoid of emotion and said – “is no good… next”. Thank heavens I hadn’t gone to the trouble of wearing a fat suit and cummabund.
No doubt, if it had been up to the late, great Peter Marsh, it would have been presented in the Royal Opera House on horseback.
Peter Marsh was famous for his flamboyant pitches. When his agency, ABM, pitched for the British Rail account back in the 70′s, the clients, including chairman, Sir Peter Parker, arrived at the agency and were pretty much ignored by the receptionist, who told them that Marsh would be down shortly. Half an hour passed as the increasingly irate client sat in a filthy reception filled with half-empty polystyrene coffee cups and dirty ashtrays.
Disgusted with their treatment, Parker and his team made for the door. As he stood up to leave, Peter Marsh appeared and announced, “This is what your customers have to put up with every day, now let’s see how we can put it right.” The client was impressed and ABM won the account.
Peter Marsh was the grand master of the big pitch, some of his more triumphant moments included:
• Hiring a brass band to parade outside the agency’s offices to impress a marketing director at Honda.
• Tearing off a dinner jacket to reveal a white, sequined suit, in a pitch to Woolworths. Even though the client was impressed, he still needed reassurance that ABM was big enough to handle the account, so requested an office visit. Marsh agreed and to seal the deal, showed them around a larger agency owned by his friend, Rodney Millard.
Big pitches, of course, need equally big budgets and things have changed dramatically since the 70′s. However, there’s still a lot more to pitching than just showing off your creative skills. Ultimately, as the saying goes, ‘people do business with people’.
Andrew Gillespie, the group director of marketing operations at Barclays sums it up beautifully. “It’s not about us testing whether you can do it – it’s about us testing whether we can work with you.”
A bitterly cold December morning in 1999, I was nursing a terrible hangover and looking for somewhere warm to while away a few hours before my flight home. The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow was a welcome distraction.
I picked up a map and wandered into the first gallery – a lofty stone and marble space, with imposing stone columns; the kind that makes people feel smaller and noises sound bigger.
As I flicked through the catalogue, I began to get that unnerving feeling that I was not alone. I spun around and got the fright of my life. Standing quietly behind me in the corner, was a large, dark and imposing figure. Mr Crow, with his human male body and a crow’s head, complete with sharp beak, was watching my every move. His muscles tensed, he looked either ready to take flight or fight – it was hard to tell which.
I have to confess that in my fragile state, the sculpture shocked me out of my skin and I screamed. To be honest, it was more of a yelp than a full-on girly scream, but amplified by the room, it attracted the attention of both the receptionist and the security guard, who both ran to my aid. When the security guard saw me next to Mr Crow, he helpfully said, ‘You’re the fourth one this weekend, wait ‘till you see the rest of them’. The exhibition, ‘Prose and Cons’, was my first encounter with the work of British sculptor, Nicola Hicks, and I was hooked.
Hicks was born in 1960, studied at the Chelsea School of Art and subsequently at the Royal College of Art. When she was 24, she was spotted by sculptor Elizabeth Frink and offered her first solo exhibition at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London.
Hicks’ fascination with the animal form was a little out of step with the London art scene at a time when ‘contemporary’ meant abstract and conceptual. Her early work examined the relationship between humans and animals but there has never been anything ‘comfortable’ or ‘cute’ about her work. Energetic charcoal drawings and life-size figures modeled and cast in straw, hessian and plaster – some real creatures, some imagined. Drawings threatening to leap out of the page, sculptures ready to get up and bound away by themselves.
Technically, her work is impressive – she combines her understanding of weight, movement and balance with skeletal and anatomical structure. Even her drawings appear to be constructed around invisible armatures – drawn from the inside out.
Over the past three decades, Hicks has achieved worldwide acclaim, contributing to collections across Europe, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. In later years, after the birth of her son (in her studio!), her focus widened to include purely human forms, works often inspired by her own experiences of motherhood.
But what I love most about her early work is the way in which she combines the essence of what makes animals animal, with those qualities that make us human. Hooves, horns, beaks, teeth and claws mixed up with menace and vulnerability, despair and loathing, loyalty and aggression. Hicks isn’t trying to create faithful reproductions, but works that have a physical presence of their own, creatures that are both animal and human. They are strangely familiar to us, and maybe that’s why so many people find something in her work to relate to.
“Animals are the stuff of life. When I make a sculpture it’s done because I have something to say about my experience. My only experience is living. Maybe it’s because we are a little less familiar with beasts that I’ve chosen to use them…
“The most precious qualities that humans have are the ones what we share with animals: the qualities we are deeply in touch with subconsciously and maybe totally out of touch with in our conscious state.” Nicola Hicks
I am looking forward to seeing her next solo exhibition in the Autumn. ‘Aesops Fables’ will be on at the Flowers Kingsland Road gallery in London from 14th October to 19th November 2011.
http://www.flowersgalleries.com/exhibitions/4245-aesops-fables/
Charities are often extremely complex organisations. Take Mencap for example, one of the UK’s leading charities for people with learning disabilities.
So just how complex could Mencap be? Well, here goes, they run…
– The Learning Disability Helpline – a telephone helpline, community- based advisers and online information
– Education and learning – Support for school leavers into adulthood
– Support services – including brokerage, family support, specialist care and a carers network
– Housing – helping people with learning disabilities to rent or buy their own homes
– Jobs and training – several schemes to get people into the workplace
– Leisure and sport – everything from adventure challenges, to national sporting events.
Not to mention ICT skills networks, health information, music events, work with young offenders…
So try marketing that lot: ‘Mencap the charity that helps people with learning disabilities by doing this, that and the other, not to mention…’
Mencap solve the complexity of their offering by focusing on their main mission. In a nutshell, they help people with learning disabilities. Whether you are young, old, have a learning disability, are a family member or a professional in social care, the positioning is simple:
We support people with a learning disability to live their lives as they choose.
This translates into a very powerful and authoritative strapline – The voice of learning disability
The same principal of focusing on a core proposition, allowing all services and products to sit underneath it, works equally well for the likes of Macmillan, Barnardos, Shelter, Mind and Unicef. Of course this approach may not work for every organisation, but the general principal of communicating your message as simply as possible is always valid.
So, if you are responsible for marketing a charity and you are staring at a muddled web of diverse services, audiences and propositions; take a step back and distill everything down to the essence of what your organisation is, why it exists and what it believes in. Or better still give Remedy a call and we’ll help you.
