Mummadadda knows that an image communicates many times faster than words. And the art direction tone of voice can set up your expectation of a brand and perhaps even inspire more affinity and loyalty. Over the years we’ve helped many young designers and art directors learn their craft, by being generous with time, experience and ideas.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The Art of Painting’ by Johannes Vermeer, 1665-1668.

Mummadadda has always found the tension between being half art director and half copywriter a fascinating battle. As Telly Savalas sings/says in his fabulous 1975 chart topper ‘…a picture paints a thousand words…’, but we still need images. The tension between words and pictures is eternal and joyously without a final verdict.

We’ve written letters for PMs seeking re-election, CEOs reaching out to shareholders, and poems that have motivated tens of thousands of previously apathetic staff. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword. So we keep one on the bookshelf, as a memento, but remember when we touch this keyboard that we are communicating with real people and need to speak their language.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘Magdalene with the smoking flame’ by George de Latour, 1640.

Mummadadda are highly experienced at unlocking levels of creativity that people didn’t know that they had, whether in small groups or in invisibly steering larger groups to creative territories that can be explored in more depth. The power of creativity, as a galvanising force in a team, cannot be over estimated. We’ve experience of reinvigorating cross departmental engagement in a brand, client side, or in reinvigorating whole agencies to the possibility of creativity. Knowing how to swiftly guide, capture and create early stage visuals, to bring a sense of tangibility, are key ingredients we use to get stuff done.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘Daniel in the lions den’ by Briton Riviere, 1872. Because great ideas should make you feel uncomfortable, and can be tamed.

Mummadadda knows that modern brands are not unlike you and me. We have many different voices, depending upon who we’re speaking with. It’s important to have light and shade and a playful as well as a serious side. Obviously the tone of voice in your annual report & accounts (projects which I cut my copywriting teeth in) will be very different to how you might talk to your younger customers on social media. Tone of voice is one of the many ways that a brand can practise the delicate art of dissimilating or assimilating from/with their competition. Getting that balance right is as crucial for a financial institution, or a brand with a royal warrant, as it is for a nothing to fear challenger brand. We can help you find the voice that is right for your brand.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The lute player’ by Caravaggio, 1596

Mummadadda knows that the ultimate aim, for any brand, is for its customers to say ‘I love XXXX brand, because it does XXXX for me!’

This isn’t as breathless and unintelligent as it might sound. Customers Aka. the public reward and choose brands and organisations that they feel make some improvement to their lives. This can happen at a marketing and campaign level, a product level, a customer experience level, and all should delight, inspire, entertain and enlighten. These are exciting times. As people who work in the communications and marketing business (if you’re here we assume you are too) we have an almost unprecedented opportunity to position our products and customer experiences to meet a much more demanding, but openly advocating market. If we do the right thing we earn nothing more brilliant than trust.

Mummadadda has experience of fostering this paradigm shift within brands and organisations - often uniting disparate business units and cost centres to mutual profit.

Painting on previous nav page: “Newton’ by William Blake, 1795-1805

For Mummadadda, a great buzz it is. To see those who starting their path finding connections to the creative force that within them is. Many young creatives trained have I, but no less excited am I when a picture like this one here is sent to me from an awards ceremony, when I am gazing at the stars from my telescope**.

*Chip Shop Awards 2017. Featured are Corryn Boyes, Mark Slade and Laura Wilkins.

**There is no magic or mystical force, just a belief that stripping away fear and making creativity fun, gets us to a more imaginative and entrepreneurial version of ourselves. Mummadadda has many years of experience unlocking this potential in agencies and within brands and organisations.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The boyhood of Raleigh” by John Everett Millais, 1870

Mummadadda know how people’s minds work. With a healthy dose of respect to Daniel Kahneman we know that, in any marketing strategy it’s important to sell the sizzle first and back up with the rational second. Create desire and then give people reasons to want to engage with your brand or organisation. If your brand can genuinely improve upon some aspect of their life you’ll go further. Knowing how to illustrate that journey and build a joined up on and offline coherent marketing strategy is something we have considerable success and experience in.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘An experiment on a bird in the air pump’ by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

Mummadadda knows that if your eye jumped to these acronyms then we know who you are, and how important these disciplines are. Maybe, in a card sorting exercise, the order you put them in says everything about your view of digital. But the thing that should always come first is the audience/the customer/whatever we should call him/her. Technology is only the rail that a brand rolls on. Over the years we’ve produced highly effective, awarded, but most importantly loved digital experiences for brands like Manchester City FC, The RFU, Ministry of Sound and The WWF, to name but a few.

Painting on previous nav page: “The anatomy lesson of Dr Nicolaus Tulp’ by Rembrandt, 1632

There’s a lot of ‘song & dance’ knocking around when you hear the word ‘content’. We love to demistify things. Content is creative. Creative is content. Whoops, there. we said it!

There are many different types of content. As many as the various tasks it has to perform. Some has to be hyper relevant and come out trumps in search. Other forms of content are meant to fly and connect to audiences, having an organic and unpredictable life of their own.

Executing content to the correct fidelity for purpose, and achieving measurable success through it, is a Mummadadda super power.

We love the challenge of earning attention. Only if you’re genuinely creating ideas, stories and life changing revelations will you deserve to get millions of eyeballs on your content. Seeing 4 national daily newspapers each dedicate whole pages to a campaign is what we live for. It’s proof that there is a return on imagination, in spades, when you turn your guns to PR. And the clue is in the name - think about what will relate to your public. Think of them first and the results will follow. And media outlets will be only too pleased to be the conduit to that experience.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The (great) tower of Babel’ by Pieter Bruegel the elder, 1563

Data cannot solve everything, but it’s a very good starting point for telling a story. Mummadadda have the ability to look at the tea leaves presented by data and empathetically interpret them into a human story.

A good example of this is when we sat in a corporate box at Twickenham stadium with the England Rugby performance coach, a team of analysts from IBM and red hot UX designer called Tristan Peters. The brief was to see if the Opta data collected on players could be turned into a second screen entertainment experience that IBM could sponsor and co create with The RFUs digital design agency, Aqueduct. This process took place over 3 days with simple hypotheses being put to the performance coach, like, ‘DO England have to play a very different game against Argentina, than perhaps Tonga?” The answer was obviously yes, but then we had to identify characteristic of the game play and map them against historical Opta data. IBM were amazing at crunching this data and analysing it to test the hypotheses. And it worked. Not just for Argentina, but fro all of England’s competitors. We also created a visualisation of the game momentum with interactive turning points and highlights. Finally, we created a module which focused on the individual players and which ones would come into their own and be most crucial against different opponents.

The IBM Trytracker was a massive success and regularly appeared on broadcast TV coverage as a bona fide pre-match analysis tool for journalists and celebrity sports people. It still exists here, although the art direction style has changed. A testament to the power of empathetically interpreting data. And Mummadadda aren’t even rugby fans.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The fairy feller’s master stroke’ by Richard Dadd, 1855-1864

Mummadadda knows that having the idea is exciting, but only 50% of thr journey to getting it done. We live in an age where the most shared and shareable content form is video. We all love it. Keeping things short, snappy, entertaining and inspiring gets video content watched in its entirety and shared. Knowing how to plan out a storytelling arc in scripting and in storyboarding gives everyone a clear plan to agree on and to shoot to on the day. A good example is this video we created for Neilson Active Holidays as hero content for their Neilson Effect hub page. As well as planning and directing this shoot Mummadadda tracked down the manufacturers of giant pogo sticks, Vurtego in Santa Monica, got the pogo sticks powder pain coated in Neilson orange and picked them up from HM Customs. The end film, shot by Global Shots, is quite stunning and a lot of fun.

Painting on previous nav page: ‘The Raft of The Medusa’, Théodore Géricault, 1818-19.

Mummadadda loves to pitch. We love to help teams enjoy the process and go into the pitch knowing and loving the brand they’re pitching to, and to transfer that enthusiasm and energy. These elements win pitches. We believe that the process should be fun, memorable and an opportunity for everyone around the table to dream of possible. IN a recent pitch the idea that pulled together the whole team’s thinking meant that everyone, including the prospective clients, put on grey moustaches… we won and they still talk about it!

Mummadadda knows that today’s oil is yesterdays dinosaur. We started out in an era of typesetting that took a day to turn around, but leapt onto DTPs that could do it in an hour. We saw the writing on the wall for print mark ups when we’d made the leap from ‘above the line advertising’ to ‘direct marketing’. And when the awards ceremonies were celebrating ‘DM’, but less and less people were opening their M we leapt to digital. A ‘flash in the pan’ some said.

All of the media above, and some not mentioned, are all good tricks to have up your sleeve. But knowing when to deploy the right media for the message, to respectfully engage and entertain the ‘audience/customer’ comes with experience. Anyone for a ‘door drop’?