...It’s Super Effective! The year is 2020 and the entire world has gone to hell, come back and thought “Oh that was nice, let’s visit again”. And among much more important things, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a full stop on advertising talks and conferences.

But as a means of keeping us all entertained and inspired, ISOLATED Talks was founded. And all in the name of a good cause, raising thousands for Samaritans right when it was most needed. It was an honour to be invited to contribute a talk alongside legends of advertising such as Rory Sutherland, Rob Campbell, Dave Trott and Vikki Ross.

Tone of voice means a lot to us. At Jim Writes Stuff, we’ve spent over a decade developing our skills in this field. A tone of voice should excite the senses in the same way your visual brand identity achieves. It should be distinctive, just for your brand. And it must be able to evoke the right thoughts and feelings in your copywriters so they may understand it and actually produce rich and compelling copy that is on brand.

It harks back to the days when we would be sitting in advertising agencies and be handed a tone of voice guide that we’d be completely unable to make sense of. What’s worse is that they would often come with snide comments from the creative director and complete derision from surrounding copywriters. Rather than just being honest with their clients, agencies would more or less throw the tone of voice in the bin and try to make it up as they go.