We've been seriously impressed with Surreal for a while. The activations, the collabs, the general tomfoolery. But at the heart of all of it is really sharp copy and a voice that very few brands manage to pull off consistently. John Thornton is the person behind it. Comedian, former Innocent copywriter, and four years into what is clearly a very fun job. We sat down with him to get into all of it.

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Does every brand need its own voice, and if so where do you even start?

“Not to shit on my own job, but I don't think every brand needs its own voice. Do Hula Hoops sound any different to Pringles or Skips or Quavers? Do they need to?
You def need something distinctive – preferably several things - and copy can be one. And if you want that, I think you need two things:

You're a comedian and a copywriter. How has comedy helped you with writing for a brand?

“They're basically the same thing tbh – just one requires you to crowbar in more sales messages and discount codes.
Comedy needs you to sweat over the purpose of every word, and every sentence. It needs surprise, it needs to keep someone's attention, and needs to get a reaction. All the same stuff with a brand.
Maybe the biggest overlap is you don't need everyone to like it – as long as some people love it. Over time, you'll find your audience. I do a show at Edinburgh called "guess the weight of the bird". It's about birds. And guessing their weight. It's niche. The people who think it sounds fun turn up and have a great time. The people who think it sounds like dogshit don't turn up, which is good, cos I don't want them there.
I'd much rather something a little marmite, that everyone feels strongly about – good or bad - than something beige that no one has any feeling towards altogether.”

You've cultivated an audience that genuinely looks forward to your content. Ideas like shooting your founders in their underwear or filming with Adebayo Akinfenwa, the world's strongest footballer, clearly resonate. Where do your best ideas come from, how do you know when you're onto something good, how do you measure success from a campaign, and what's the secret to going viral consistently?

“Having ideas: I bloody wish there was a magic formula for good ideas, but most of our process involves throwing large quantities of shit at the wall and hoping one log sticks. Then over time you try and find techniques to make the logs stick more often.

One technique I like is to focus on something small, and blow it up big (vs trying to cover everything). For instance, we launched granola last year. Surreal rhymes with cereal. It doesn't rhyme with granola. So we ran with that tiny nugget and changed our name to Surrola, just to talk about Surrola Granola.

And if all that fails, I just stick a picture of a dog on my post or use comic sans and it usually outperforms all the shit I've spent months on.”

Surreal has collaborated with Gymshark on a product and shared a billboard with Monzo. You're a cereal brand playing with huge enterprises. How do you think your brand identity and tone of voice opened those doors?

“We've probs done a dozen partnerships, with big and small brands. With most of them, we've made the first move, and usually the thing that opens the door is the idea. Having a really clear thing we're proposing. If we go in with just the vague desire to explore possible territories for brand overlap blah blah blah – it doesn't go anywhere. People are busy, they've got more important shit to worry about.
When we go in with something we've thought through from beginning to end, that's as closed to finished as possible, and that requires absolute minimum budget and complexity from them – then we have a much better success rate.
Good ideas are free. But good ideas are also priceless. So if you can go to someone with a good idea, where you've already done all the work and they basically just need to say yes… that makes it so much easier to get buy in.”

Surreal is 5 years in and a very different business to when you started. How has your thinking on brand voice evolved with it, and how do you keep your brand identity as you scale?

“Our copy hasn't evolved very much tbh – we were happy enough with it after year one, so that time has been spent evolving other areas instead. We did a big packaging project last year, for instance.
Is our copy perfect? No. Is it good enough for now? Probably. Right now our time is better spent finding bigger and better ways to push our brand – working with talent, collabing with brands etc.
Keeping our identity is probably more of an upcoming challenge, vs a current one – the team's still small enough that it's the same people working on it as before, which makes it quite easy. If we bring in more people, that's when we'll need to codify and quantify and other-words-ending-in-fy so people know what good looks like. Our brand guidelines are so out of date they're essentially useless, but that's a tomorrow problem.
We prefer doing the doing vs perfectly spelling out our rules for how we do the doing.”

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