04 · Cool Inc. · Food & Beverage · Saudi Arabia

Spago and Over Under can’t sound alike. I write both, on one calendar

Eighteen restaurant concepts, eighteen registers, one publishing calendar and one approval cycle.

Cool Inc. is one client with eighteen restaurant concepts under it. Each has its own personality, its own audience and its own way of speaking, and all eighteen publish continuously. This was never mainly a design problem. It was a voice problem and a scheduling problem at the same time, and both had to be solved every week.

Client: Cool Inc. — eighteen restaurant concepts
Market: Saudi Arabia — every concept account shown here is a .sa handle
My role: Account Manager, and Senior Account Executive before that
Scope: Instagram feed and Stories across eighteen concepts

Brief

Content across eighteen restaurant concepts, each with its own personality, audience and communication style. One client organisation, one review cycle, eighteen brands that must not blur into each other.

Decision

Set the register for each concept first, then write to it. Two concepts can share a calendar slot. They cannot share a sentence. Everything downstream — the brief, the shot list, the caption — follows from the register, which is why eighteen brands can run on one calendar without collapsing into one voice.

What shipped

A defined register per concept, then copy written to it. Ferdi’s “It’s not over till it’s over” and Spago’s restraint are the same hand, the same account and the same approval cycle.
All eighteen concepts held to one publishing calendar, so the client reviewed a month in one view instead of eighteen separate conversations.
Captions written in English and Arabic, switching register between concepts across one calendar.
Briefs written per concept — key messages, tone notes, direction — so design and production could execute without rework.

Spago by Wolfgang Puck arrives with a name that already does the persuading, so I cut the copy back and let the plating carry the post. Restraint was the decision — more words would have argued a case that was already won.

Les Deux Magots trades on a room and a history, so I wrote it unhurried and in the present tense — the hour, the table, the coffee — instead of running offers. Discounting is the fastest way to make a heritage bistro sound like everywhere else.

Ferdi is the concept that talks back, so I wrote it conversational and in the second person — “It’s not over till it’s over. Who’s up for a Ferdi feast?” An invitation works here where an announcement would not.

For Madeo the caption names the dish rather than describing the mood. An Italian menu is chosen by ingredient, so the copy’s first job is to make the plate legible.

Over Under sits at the casual end of the group, so the copy stays spoken and short and the grid stays food-and-drink first. The concept people pick without planning it doesn’t need a paragraph to justify itself.