Defining & Refining Voice for AMC+ Social Launch

Challenge: AMC+ is a streaming service that was launching with no voice history, a cross-functional team of writers who’d never met the brand, and a portfolio of properties (each with its own rabid fandom) that the parent voice had to sit above without flattening. I was tasked with creating a parent persona that could draw in new fans without alienating old ones while also playing intelligently with existing properties without stifling any of the property teams’ creativity.

Owned vs. Directed: I owned creating the voice and persona for this client expansion within a scope where we were already the agency of record. From ideation through pitch, I developed how AMC+ would tell their story on social.

Approach to Voice: My approach to voice starts from a simple conviction: a voice isn’t a vibe. It’s a set of decisions a writer can check a sentence against. So I define voices by their edges, because “what we’re not” is what someone actually consults at 11pm on a launch night. I build personas instead of adjective lists, because a character can be improvised in and a word cloud can’t. I write the rules all the way down to the line with every principle demonstrated in a real sentence, never left as an abstraction. And I treat register as the senior skill: one voice, modulated by room, so the brand sounds like itself whether it’s reassuring a consumer or teasing a fandom. The test of the work isn’t whether I can write the voice. It’s whether the voice still sounds right after it leaves my hands.

Outcome: The voice system shipped as the social section of a 70-page launch playbook and governed a cross-functional team’s output through launch.