We don’t like to get into protracted theoretical chats about grammar in our workshops. We’d much rather look at a piece of fantastic communication and let it do our talking for us. We used this extract from The Merchant Of Venice to convince a room full of senior civil servants that they should do away with flowery adjectives and pompous abstract nouns, and use strong verbs to drive their messages home instead. The animation highlights the verbs in Shylock’s famous speech. To borrow the current vernacular, it’s verbtastic. training
Archive for December, 2011
Training promo area
Monday, December 5th, 2011Don’t ever wish me a ‘Happy Xmas’
Monday, December 5th, 2011I’m no Scrooge. Au contraire; I’m a complete sucker for the whole festive thing. I start sentimental weeping about five minutes into It’s a Wonderful Life and I don’t stop until well into the New Year. I count the days until December 25th in ‘sleeps’. I pray for snow. I watch for reindeer.
Irregular regulations?
Monday, December 5th, 2011A gift for anyone in financial services: wince at our specially-regulated Christmas ad from DFSA.
The word on the street
Monday, December 5th, 2011Words are everywhere. In our heads, in our hearts, in songs and on TV. We like words, love them in fact. They can make us smile, make us angry, make us sad. This one made us LOL.
Our work with
HMRC
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Imagine this. You’re 48 years old, you’re married with three kids and you run a medium sized manufacturing business. A few years ago, it was thriving. But recently you had to lay some people off to keep things afloat. Work is trickling in and cash flow is poor. You can just about afford to pay the wages this week. You should really be at home by now, but you’re still sat at your desk at the factory. In front of you is a brown envelope. This is all you need.
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Our work with
PruProtect
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
PruProtect is a business that never stands still. They’re always looking for new ground to break and new ways to address people’s needs. But even they surprised the market when they launched seven new products on one day in 2010 – something that most insurers would struggle to manage in a decade.
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Our work with
Halifax
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
In a perfect world, everyone who buys an investment product would know how different it is to a savings product and how they should use it. However, features like ‘instant access’ allow, and can even encourage, some confusion between the two. Halifax Building Society had discovered that customers were taking money out of their medium-long term investments before they’d become profitable for either Halifax or the customers themselves.
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Our work with
Lloyds
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Malcolm McClaren once said that ‘stealing is a glorious occupation – particularly in the art world.’ That was the ethos behind Stand Up With Words, an event that we first ran for a 40-strong internal communications team at Lloyds Banking Group.
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Writing promo area
Friday, December 2nd, 2011The National Association of Pension Funds asked Quietroom to turn their fifty-minute information-packed presentation into a fifteen-minute film that would entertain people and get them thinking about their future. So we decided to create the world’s first comedy about pensions. It tells the story of a pensions expert who’s constantly undermined by the people around him (any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental). It’s since been adopted by organisations as varied as HSBC and Belfast Harbour Authority.
writing
Brand language promo area
Friday, December 2nd, 2011There are brands. There are super-brands. And then there’s this brand. You can imagine how cringingly gloatful we were when santaclaus global enterprises invited us to hew from our raw imagination their brand guidelines. Frankly, we wept. People liked it so much we ended up talking about it on national radio, and about 100,000 people saw it online. If you weren’t one of them, now’s your chance to see a bit of it on video. And you can read and download the whole thing here.
