To Be Visible Is To Be Valuable

Vikki Ross writes brand voices. Not campaigns, not taglines. The actual rules that decide how a company sounds when thousands of people are all trying to speak as one thing.

She also spent a year deliberately trying to be less visible. That’s where we started.

You’ve been doing this long enough to say no now. What does the roster look like?

I’ve got much better at saying no and managing my time. I’m working with Range Rover right now and I just finished working with a TV brand over here called ITV. In the early days of working for myself I said yes to pretty much everything, because I found the whole thing so nerve-wracking and uncertain. But working that hard has served me well for now, in this weird time where no one really knows what we’re doing with AI. The quiet times are covered.

A lot of people come to me and say “just take over social.” That’s where we usually start. Do you ever get the same thing?

I don’t think being social guy is a bad thing, because brands seem to only think about social. They think it’s the only way to keep up with culture or talk to people directly. But my clients don’t really talk to me about social other than in guidance. How would copy look if we were to write a social post. The job I’m doing for Range Rover is quite traditional. I’m writing emails to customers.

Last year something changed for you around being visible. What happened?

Last year I decided I didn’t want to be visible anymore. I don’t like putting myself out there. I know people won’t believe this, but I find it really uncomfortable and really awkward.

So I thought, right, I’m not going to do the stuff I don’t like doing anymore. I’m not going to post all the time. I’m not going to do the talks. I’m not going to do the podcasts. And I had no work.

That’s how I learned that to be visible is to be valuable, because people are lazy. Unless you’re right in front of them, they’re not lying in bed thinking about you. Whereas if you pop up on their feed, they go, oh yeah, she does brand voice, let’s get in contact.

The other thing Greg Hahn said on your show that’s also true for me is be known before you’re needed. Loads of clients come to me saying we’ve been following you for years, we just didn’t have the project yet.

For anyone who hears “brand voice” and isn’t sure what that actually means, define it.

Traditionally it’s been more confusing, because it’s usually been called tone of voice. What it really means is how brands talk. It’s what a brand says when it shows up in any consumer journey or touchpoint.

When a brand thinks it has one voice but talks in different tones of that voice, it actually ends up with different voices. The whole idea is to have one voice, so you’re always recognised and remembered and feel familiar.

So when a brand says to me, we think we need a tone that’s more active and energetic in out of home, more attention-grabbing, but we also need a softer, safer, more reassuring tone in customer service, I always stop them. That’s where you end up with different voices, because you’ll have different departments working in those different areas with those different voices. And the whole problem you came to me with in the first place, which was to make you sound like one brand, comes right back.

Who’s actually doing it well?

Virgin and Nike are the two I talk about the most. They have different parts of the company in different parts of the world, talking to so many different types of people, often using different agencies to talk on their behalf. And they still do it with one voice. Some companies can’t get communications out in one voice when they’re all sat in the same office with each other. So Virgin and Nike are really quite remarkable.

I am worried about Virgin, though. They have such a strong personality and voice, and they’ve had it for years. They’re known to be flamboyant and fun and flirty and fancy. I don’t know why F-words always come to me when I think of Virgin. Fabulous.

I have a real soft spot for them, and I think that’s why I’m so worried about them. Last year Virgin Voyages put out a press release saying they were using AI to write their comms and they were really happy with the outputs. They shared some of them, and I read them, and that flirtiness and fabulousness and flamboyance had gone. The copy could have come from anybody. I think that’s a real shame if that’s where Virgin are going.

But that’s not on AI. That’s on the people judging the outputs.

When a client tells me the AI draft is “pretty good,” I cringe. Do you?

I mean, it is pretty good. And if you don’t have a super critical eye, you don’t know that it could be better. Everything can always be better. It’s having the appetite to push further.

So far I’ve not had a single conversation with my clients about AI. No one has asked me if I’m using it, what I think of it, or whether I could help them use it to implement their voice. I really value that, because I think it means the clients I’m working with value human creativity and craft.

But I am surprised. By now I’d have thought an LLM would be advanced enough to be fed a voice and then execute various communications in that voice on behalf of a company. I’m thinking about Jaguar Land Rover, where there are 44,000 people, give or take, who are all expected to write in the voice I created. They’re not all copywriters. They’re not all English speakers. They’re not all familiar with how to take a guidelines document and execute copy from the direction they’ve been given, as easy as I’ve tried to make it for them. So surely that’s the perfect opportunity to be training AI to do that for them. Maybe they are behind closed doors. But we haven’t had that conversation.

I’ve also read on LinkedIn in the last year, much to my joy on behalf of all copywriters, that lots of brands tried AI and realised it just doesn’t do what they need it to do. So they’ve gone back to bringing their team back, or bringing their copywriter partner back.

I sent a CEO one of my templates recently and he wrote back that it was clearly written with AI.

That’s a funny one. On the one hand people are looking out for copy that looks generated, because there are the tells that we’ve all identified now. And there’s some enjoyment in someone saying to you, I can tell that was AI. It’s just a weird conversation to be having.

I’ve always thought that while AI is here and we can’t ignore it, we can still celebrate and support each other and look after the humans who are potentially losing their jobs while everyone goes wild over this new technology that isn’t ready for us to use in the way we should want to.

You’re not a fan of personal branding. Why?

Two reasons, I think.

One is that I’m so busy creating a brand identity for an actual brand that it feels like something that only exists in marketing and advertising. You could argue that executives have to market and advertise themselves, so why wouldn’t they make a brand of themselves. But to me that feels like living up to something you’re not, creating something you’re not, when you already exist in the world and you have done for all of this time. You already have your own character and your own personality and you know how to walk into a room and talk and represent yourself.

That’s not to say a shy person doesn’t need support with that, or backup. But curating a personal brand feels like a lot of work for something that already exists. And something you then have to live up to and be conscious of, when you might be in a scenario where you have to think fast and can’t control everything that comes out of your mouth. If in the back of your head you’re thinking, is that aligned with my personal brand, that just sounds very difficult to me.

I try to frame it less as construction and more as a reveal. Does that land any better?

I get the need and the conversation and the intent and the objectives. And I do think it’s worth writing down what you want to say and how you want to say it, if you’re trying to attract a certain audience and be perceived in a certain way. But that’s just being you, and if it helps to write it down, then do that.

When people ask me how I’ve curated my personal brand, I’ve always said that I haven’t. I’m just me. If there’s any strategy behind how I show up on social media, it’s just to stay in my lane. I won’t be posting what I had for lunch or what I thought of something on TV, unless it’s related to my job. I love my job, and I mostly work on my own, so I love going onto social media and talking about it and sharing things I’ve read or seen or think, and having conversations with others.

When you identify the things you are interested in, you can be interesting to the people you want to attract. And if you want to call that a personal brand, then okay.

Do you ever have to talk yourself into hitting post?

Sometimes I really have to take a deep breath before I post something on LinkedIn. What used to be a place for constructive conversations has become somewhere you have to brace yourself for having an opinion, because you know someone is going to come into the comments with an “actually” and then their opinion.

Everyone has different opinions. But sometimes those opinions come at you as an attack, and you have to think, am I going to be ready for this today, can I deal with this today. Sometimes I think it’s not worth it, so I’m not going to post.

Thankfully I’ve got much better at ignoring the people who just want to have an argument with me. I’ve been on social media a long time and I’ve learned that I don’t owe strangers on the internet an argument. I’d rather go and read a book.

It does take work, and I guess I’m just used to it now. But for people who are new to this way of presenting themselves, it can be really scary and daunting, especially if you do get attacked.

My whole strategy is pointing at things I find funny. When Sydney Sweeney was having her moment I posted a picture of myself in a jean jacket and said I was the Sydney Sweeney of LinkedIn. The comments were not kind.

Were you ever on Twitter when it was lovely Twitter? Your Sydney Sweeney post in a denim jacket would have been brilliant there. That was the place to have fun, and people would take it the way it was intended.

It’s hard to be sarcastic or have a sense of humour on LinkedIn, because the algorithm is so strange that unless people have been following you for a while and know your personality, they just see it and come in so hot with what they think of you personally, or what they think of the campaign. And you didn’t even ask them to do that.

It’s amazing how much the thought leader space has grown recently, and it’s mostly being led by people with very little thought, I would say. There are a lot of people using AI to share an opinion that maybe isn’t even theirs.

And I always think that if a post starts with “this is a masterclass in,” then it’s absolutely not a masterclass. And it’s by somebody who has no experience in the area they’re claiming to know.

What do you do with the people who show up looking for a fight?

The good thing about social media is that you do have control over your feed. The block button is very freeing. So is deleting someone’s comment if you just don’t want it on your post.

I know it sounds a bit like I’m trying to police how people behave on the internet. I’m not. We choose to show up on these things, and we don’t have to be a target.

My approach is the opposite. When someone comes at me I reply with something very earnest and warm, and they can’t handle it. There’s one guy who comments “I’ve never engaged with your content before” on every single post, and I keep telling him he must secretly love me.

You’re the James Blunt of LinkedIn. I hope you take that as a compliment, because it’s intended as one.

Do the Virgin exercise on yourself. What are your words?

It’s hard, because I’m always so busy creating a brand for a brand that I’m always out of that equation. I just don’t think of myself this way.

Curious. I’m feeling really curious right now. I’ve been going to lots of conferences and talks and reading loads of articles.

If I was your client, would you accept that?

I would. I tend to think in archetypes when I’m working with someone. Some clients act like news reporters, blazer on, here’s the latest in this space. Others are the mad scientist coming up from the basement with smoke over their shoulder going, look what I made. You do a version of that with brand teams.

Sometimes there’s a workshop where you’re trying to create a character to represent the brand, and you’re asking all sorts of weird and wonderful questions about what that character is. Sometimes people look at me like I’m absolutely nuts, because we’re talking about a business. Other times people really like the opportunity to be creative.

I’ll admit I find it a bit cringy for some reason. But the one that always sticks in my head is Sky Atlantic, the TV channel that launched over here around 2012 as part of Sky. It was the channel you couldn’t get anywhere else, and it showed all the HBO shows. Mad Men, Game of Thrones.

I had a really fun exercise with the Sky Atlantic brand team on what the character would be, and long story short we got to Don Draper. However cringy I find the exercise, or however weird others might find it, it’s really useful. Because when you come to write on behalf of the brand you think, well, what would Don Draper do. What would Don Draper say. And when it’s a character that well known, you can adopt it quite easily.

How do you get people who don’t think that way to play along?

Like I said, some of them think I’m nuts. If they’re not used to creative thinking and I’m asking what their brand watches when it goes to the cinema, they say, what are you talking about.

So I have to be resilient and keep the conversation going, and then people join in. Creatives are used to that sort of conversation, they’ll chime in. And then the non-creatives who at first thought it was weird start to relax and think, actually, this is where I get to have fun, because otherwise I’d be on a call talking about the business forecast.

It’s always useful to come armed with lots of examples and be ready to prompt people, because there can be deathly quiet introductory periods where you have to get people to trust you and want to join in.

Any other way in when they’re not getting it?

Treat the person like a person in real life rather than in business. Everybody goes to a shop. Everybody likes a brand or chooses something because of how that brand talks to them or treats them or behaves.

So when I’m going through examples I try to take people out of their world, so they’re not thinking about it in a work sense. I get them to think about when they go to the grocery store or the doctor. Or when they’re walking down the street and there’s a billboard they maybe haven’t even noticed. Or what they’re watching and how a streaming platform might speak to them.

Suddenly people say, oh, I didn’t even think about it that way. Which is kind of amazing, because brands are talking to us all day, every day.

What did the Range Rover process actually look like?

We didn’t have to do workshops the way we’re describing. The job was all four vehicle brands at once, so I was creating a voice for Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar. And they’d done years and years and years of strategy before they even came to me. Their brand worlds were very defined and established.

So when I came on board, it took shape as me speaking with representatives from each vehicle brand one on one. How do you think Range Rover should talk to its customers. How would you describe Range Rover as a brand. What are its drivers like. What sort of thing do you think they’d want to hear from a brand like Range Rover.

With Range Rover in particular, everybody was very fond of how it has always spoken. Years ago the classic adverts had this wonderful, sophisticated wit, and there was a real appetite to bring that back. So that one was easier.

How do you keep the writing from going stale?

When I haven’t been reading books for a while, it’s harder to write. The words don’t feel as readily available. My vocabulary doesn’t feel as broad. There’s a huge difference between writing having read and writing having not.

I also do exactly what you do and go for a walk, and I’ve factored that into the phases of a project. Stepping away and having some quiet time is where ideas come, or fall into place, or connect with something else, or build on something.

So I’ll take a brief, do all the interviews, make loads of notes, have lots of ideas, and then if I can, I’ll leave a week or two for my mind to just work things out. And then I come back and I’ve got it.

I used to be a really quick writer. I’d throw things down and get there quickly. Now I find you’ve just got to trust the subconscious, because it’s doing the work for you even though you’re not sat at your computer.

What brings you joy in this work?

I really love my job, and I realise I’m very lucky to be able to say that, because not many people can.

I get to go behind the scenes of these brands we all know of, and I get the honour of creating a voice for them. What a gig. I mostly work with entertainment brands, and I love TV and film. When I worked at Sky full time I was often going to premieres and previews and screenings. I just couldn’t believe my luck.

Last one. For an executive who wants to get their voice out there, where do they start?

Find the people and the categories you connect with or want to be part of, and engage. Start conversations. Find the communities you want to play in.

And if you’re not comfortable posting at first, just start commenting or liking things. You’ll start building an audience that way, and eventually you might feel ready to talk to those people too.

Twitter told me a while ago that social media is meant to be social, and I’ve always thought of that. My husband asks why I reply to so many people who comment on my posts. Because I’m being social on social media. And I respect that people took the time to engage with what I said.

Listen to the full conversation with Vikki on Chief Brand.