Brand filmScriptwriting & concept
Mackie's
Making Simple Delicious — a 30-second TV advert built around the moments people actually eat ice cream in, now airing on ITV.
Client
Mackie's
Scottish ice cream, made with real dairy cream
Our role
Concept & script
Ideation, storyboard, voiceover script
Format
30-second TV advert. Cleared for broadcast and airing on ITV.
Audience
Affluent women aged 25+, East Anglia
01The brief
Famous in Scotland.
Unknown on an
English sofa.
Mackie's is a well-established Scottish ice cream brand, known for pure flavour and real dairy cream. Online video had worked hard for them; now they wanted to move into TV advertising in England and take share in a new market.
The brief came with creative freedom and one condition: whatever we made had to capture the essence of the strapline, Making Simple Delicious.
02The concept
Don't sell the
ice cream. Sell
the moment it
turns up in.
Ideation ran off the two things the brand already owned: the strapline, and the commitment to real dairy cream. Several routes went to Mackie's; the one they chose was built on the meaningful moments an ice cream actually shows up in.
Comforting a friend after a breakup. Dessert at a dinner party. A summer BBQ. The simple joy of sneaking a spoonful straight from the freezer and standing there eating it.
Simple is the product claim. It's also the filming instruction.
If the strapline says Making Simple Delicious, the advert cannot be over-produced. That single reading drove everything downstream: a semi-documentary treatment, minimal staging, and a script that narrates rather than sells — honest, like the ice cream itself.
03The script
Written for
a voice, not
a page.
Short lines. One thought each.
Present tense, so every moment is happening now rather than being described.
No adjectives the picture is already carrying.
The claim lands once, late, when the audience has already agreed with everything before it.
Storyboard and voiceover script were written together, because in a thirty-second spot the words and the cuts are one decision. Each moment had to arrive, register and leave in roughly four seconds.
The script also had to survive Clearcast. Every claim needed substantiation and food advertising rules applied throughout — so the language was built from the start to be true as written, rather than written first and defended later.
Sound was scripted too: the soundscapes of a dinner party, a BBQ, a living room with the TV on. Half the emotion in the finished spot is carried by what you hear.
04The result
On ITV,
where they
wanted to be.
A cinematic, semi-documentary spot that conveys the genuine joy of the moments it shows. Mackie's were thrilled with it, and it is now airing on ITV — reaching an English audience and building on what the brand has already achieved in Scotland.
- Concept developmentMultiple routes pitched, one taken through to production.
- StoryboardShot-by-shot structure for a 30-second broadcast cut.
- Voiceover scriptWritten to the picture, and written to clear compliance first time.
- Sound directionSoundscape notes per scene, carried through post-production.
Production, direction and post were delivered by the film production team. Our part was the thinking and the words.