Realise the Potential was the engine. The thinking was simple – an Amex card shouldn’t just help you pay for life, it should help you live it to the full. One idea flexible enough to span the full customer relationship, from acquisition to loyalty, across every card tier and every market. The same brand gear, different ratios. Aspirational for Platinum. Warm and generous for Gold. Quietly confident for Centurion.
Five years of campaigns meant five years of learning what the brand could and couldn't carry. What made it feel premium without feeling cold. What made it feel generous without feeling cheap. Every brief was a chance to find the edge of the voice and push it a little further.
Then Ogilvy partnered with Coley Porter Bell to evolve the platform and I moved from writing the brand to defining how the brand writes. Working alongside their team, I co-authored the global brand language guidelines, the document that would govern how American Express sounded in every market, in every language, at every level.
Tone of voice principles. Messaging frameworks. Copy dos and don'ts. Worked examples. The kind of document that gets handed to agencies in Singapore and Chicago and has to make sense on first read. From a single voice, to a system for a thousand writers.
From writing the brand to defining how the brand writes. Five years of work that ended up shaping how one of the world's most valuable financial brands speaks to its customers. Not bad for a day job.
