SoCo - selling something that doesn't exist

A little while back, the good people at 300million asked me to write some copy for something that didn't exist.

As you may remember, there was a terrible fire in Edinburgh in 2002, which gutted part of the old town. Perhaps most famously, it destroyed the Gilded Balloon, host of many a star comic turn at the Festival.

Well, the area is now being revitalised with an ambitious new building, which will connect South Bridge with Cowgate. So 300million, rather brilliantly, have called it SoCo. I wish I'd had something to do with the name, but they did it on their own. Which is a bit troubling.

However, they decided to let me join in when it came to the advertising and construction hoardings. They were a bit stumped about how you talk about something that isn't there. And the form of which, at the time, hadn't even been decided.

My answer to this riddle was to write some of my own - lines like: 'If you think there's nothing here, you're not looking hard enough' and, 'You can walk past it. But it's not there'.

300million and their client, the developer Whiteburn, both went for the riddling route in a big way. As you can see above, ads are now appearing in the Estates Gazette, and there are flyposters up in Edinburgh.

You can read more about the development on bbc.co.uk and the Edinburgh Evening News site. There's also a video clip about the development on Scotland Today's site (PC only, I'm afraid).

The project has recently been featured in Design Week (left). Hopefully there'll be more to tell as the development progresses. Watch this space.