Nick Asbury
@asburyandasbury
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Creative writer for hire, corporate purpose critic, realtime poet, songsmith, humorist, one half of Asbury & Asbury.
North of England
Joined March 2009
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Pinned Tweet
Thoughts on Writing:
Realtime Notes in
@IrishTimesBooks
Perpetual Disappointments Diary in
@nytimes
Songwritings:
Art & Writing:
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Probably reflects badly on me as a human being, but I really want this business to fail now
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Paragraph 6 of an article that somehow got written anyway
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The Nation's Prayer 2014. Now available as a prayer card.
http://t.co/rKiWGcMVnJ
http://t.co/iRHCAlpEuq
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On graphic designers. Mark E Smith/Austin Collings, 'Renegade'
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My hot take on Nike is that it’s all about the headline. My hot take on John Lewis/Waitrose is that it’s all about the endline. The ability of copywriters to turn big thoughts into short, memorable lines is still the most magical part of advertising.
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Nick Cave continues to do something extraordinary over here
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How to outflank everyone else on the march
(pic from Guardian)
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‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ A line that deftly employs the rule of three, uses rhythm and rhyme as a mnemonic device, and couches a clear directive in five simple, everyday words. And yet still somehow it’s a terrible line.
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Actors who look exactly the same in every movie poster. Brilliantly observed.
http://bit.ly/fUDGVJ
/ via
@jondennis
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Surprised that Amazon’s Christmas ad is being billed as either Turkey of the Week (Campaign) or ad of the decade (System 1 / The Drum). Before seeing the commentary, I watched it and thought it was pretty generic and didn’t inspire much strong feeling either way.
I welcome…
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Just posted this long read about brand purpose. Thanks to all who have subscribed.
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Pancake day shout out to the Clarks maple syrup poet-copywriter.
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The last words of Trump’s last 20 tweets – feels like lots of his signature tone is in that last word.
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So here is the full Jungian reading of the John Lewis ad that you know you need.
The Venus flytrap is consumer capitalism. By the end, it is vomiting out presents to an acquisitive family who were queasy about allowing it into the house, and now feel guilty about shoving it out…
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So the logo cost £50k in the strictly bullshit sense of having cost £7k
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GODDAMNIT! Kit Gammell's dad is problematic oil tycoon Bill Gammell!
And I believe his brother is Mike Gammell, founder of Days non-alcohol beer!
He can lend you more than a tenner Kit!
Gen Z, you are being played!
To the streets!
Probably reflects badly on me as a human being, but I really want this business to fail now
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First look at some work I’ve been doing with
@CD_and_Co
for
@AntarcticSF
Trying to find a visual and verbal language for talking about climate in a way that cuts through and evokes hope rather than despair. More on LinkedIn.
#Antarctica
🇦🇶
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hapless
hancock
app-less
hancock
witless
windsock
bobbing
ballcock
halfcocked
halfwit
dithering
dipshit
gurning
gobshite
good grief
goodnight
#realtime_notes
no.1788
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Every naming job I’ve done is like this. ‘The one you hate the least’ is a reasonable goal.
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I think of this as 'Mock the Week' copywriting, where the writers walk up to the mic and riff on a given theme. But as a punter, it feels like walking in halfway through and wondering what the set-up is. Wait, is this about Uber doing trains? How does that work exactly? Can you…
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Weird irony that ‘long copy ads’ now live on mainly as a visual aesthetic. Everyone knows the right typefaces and layouts to use, but no one knows how to write them.
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Might as well as have a classic Twitter logo row about this one. Yes, technically they're keeping the dead lion on the classic tin, so they'll retain the world record for oldest unchanged brand packaging. But they're dropping / modernising the lion for the plastic tubes &…
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Repost of a heartfelt poem for Boris Johnson. Seeing as it's (open air quotes)
#BorisDay
(close air quotes).
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Never sure how well this stuff goes over on Twitter, but I’ll repost it from Instagram anyway – a response to the trump tweet from a writer
#realtime_notes
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Lots of thoughts about this – the brilliantly humanising effect of a mistake, the humdrum day-to-day relationship of writing and design – but the main thing is I’m surprised the copy started out even longer
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Shout out to Nick Ashby
"Purpose didn’t create most of the great brands and ads. Creativity did" writes Nick Ashby in his new book which examines how brand purpose intoxicated the marketing world, and the negative impact he feels it has wrought
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Asda and Sainsbury’s in advanced merger talks. Now checking all my domain names.
#realtime_notes
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Ryanair is like the control in a ‘consumers are demanding more socially responsible brands’ experiment.
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I have helped spread some emptiness around the world: my work here is done 🥰
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Staying in any hotel these days is a full tone-of-voice immersion. Would pay a small premium to stay in a toneless room.
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In descending order of likeliness that you will ever do these things
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Prefer not to share how I got here, but I’m currently browsing former advertising slogans for Chewits. All 💯
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‘30 days hath September’ always reads like a nice copy idea that has been ruined by February’s lawyers.
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One change I'd like to see in all awards schemes: a period of two years from launch before you can enter any 'for good' project. See if it does some good and show you're in it for the long haul.
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Macclesfield unveils plaque to Ian Curtis. Peter Saville will like those curtains. via
@stephenpdmorris
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The Lloyds campaign seems like the 'control' in an effectiveness experiment: what happens if we keep the massive media spend the same, but dial the messaging / creative / content as close as possible to zero?
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Asbury's Law: As any online ad discussion grows longer, the probability of someone saying "Well we're talking about it, so it worked!" approaches 1.
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I can’t take this any more. The new Stella Artois brand line is ‘Be legacy’.
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It’s become a fairly reliable pattern that the decent businesses are the ones who never mention purpose on their website
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Some news...
After 3 years, 5 months, 5 days and 2,113 poems, I believe I have finished
#Realtime_Notes
.
There will be one last book and it is available to pre-order now.
It has been a wonderful journey through the weirdest of times.
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Surprised RNIB went with this – whole point of alt text is to describe without editorialising, which shows respect to the reader and leaves them free to read in their own metaphors and meanings. It's a service to the reader, not a knock-yourself-out creative writing assignment.
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Some late-night sloganeering efforts using an innovative bulldog-clip-assisted flipchart system for agile sloganeering, copyright Sue Asbury (creative commons)
#trumpukvisit
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Sadly not a promo for
#disappointmentsdiary
but wish it was (video by
#parallelstudio
via
@outstarwalker
@howells
)
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Gargling, gurgling, goggling, guttering – from Wilfred Owen’s draft of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ via
@PMason00
@ByLeavesWeLive
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Apple’s 1998 homepage – reminder that all that tone-of-voice stuff was around pre-Innocent.
http://t.co/wgfPIFdzmq
via
@gray
@Mat_LB
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New post from Thoughts on Writing: an eight-part essay on the importance of cognitive empathy (the skill of perspective-taking) in advertising and other forms of persuasion.
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Idly looking up European equivalents to ‘having your cake and eating it’ – Hungary and Portugal win
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Lots of these campaigns around in recent years, but something feels off about them.
The reality is almost certainly that a pattern of under-investment, rising fares and poor service has led to more isolated staff and frustrated customers. (1/4)
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Guardian descriptions of Bulb customers—unnecessary shade thrown at Clare.
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My unrealistically specific idea for a Bic Pen ad in a poetry journal
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Everyone saying 'everyone needs to calm down about the WHSmith rebrand' needs to calm down!
First, if it's indeed a very public testing exercise across ten stores, then part of the point is to get a reaction. It's part of the test! If everyone shuts up, or tone-polices those who…
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Ad campaigns often go wrong when agencies don’t think about how one execution will look when divorced from the rest of the campaign. Should be a name for it – the Lost Sheep Effect maybe.
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Six years ago, I created a bot called
@botconference
Every three hours since then, it has been tweeting quotes from a non-existent perpetual advertising conference. I believe it continues to deliver more value than
#CannesLions2022
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Long post in which I cheekily suggest how the
@guardian
‘Since you’re here’ ads could be more persuasive
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Really great to get this opportunity to write about 1000 days of Realtime Notes – The Guardian is the place where many of the poems have started
#realtime_notes
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Excellent – brilliantly observed piece of writing for a big brand.
#dwa19
Up next is the Writing for Design category… and it’s Twenty years of welcomes for The British Library by Tom Sharp from the
@poetryofitall
who takes the gold! Well done!
#DWA19
#DWAwards19
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Great paragraph about design and disability, from here:
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Extract from the Brexit Dictionary – would quite like to produce this in full
#brexitmeansbrexit
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Shout out to me for rhyming ‘Huw Edwards’ with ‘who read words’ last night. (Poem about BBC’s slightly odd news coverage lately.)
#realtime_notes
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For anyone interested, I started the decade by blogging about all the 'Mr' shops on Britain's high streets, in the guise of Mr Blog. Probably the funniest and funnest thing I've done online – should do it again one day.
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Anyone interested in language should follow
@Anthony_Etherin
– here are four recent poems to save me retweeting them all.
They somehow find a lovely lyricism even in the most extreme formal conditions – like those weird luminous creatures that survive in deep sea trenches.
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Nothing wrong with copying popular memes for an ad – there’s a certain skill to it, and I'd be happy to have done it. But I’d also mention in the tweet and press release that it’s not actually my line, because it just seems weird not to.
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Saving this for the next person who says the secret to life is a positive mental attitude
#perpetualdisappointmentsdiary
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