No Media’s approach has been honed over many decades of cross-industry experience in editorial, reporting and analysis, foresight, branding, design, publishing, and media production.
Most of our engagements entail a hybrid mix of methodologies and expertise areas, but largely involve some combination of research, sensemaking, and strategy with editorial and creative work across a variety of media, from print and digital to podcasts and film/video.
Often that means getting our hands dirty making things—from stand-alone or ongoing editorial projects like books, magazines, and websites to rigorous behind-the-scenes research and guidance produced as strategic reports, brand stories and guidelines, ethnographic studies, and other less traditional outputs, such as films and design fiction prototypes.
Our interest isn’t just in how things work in major Western cities, but lived realities and complex systems across the globe. We’re driven to understand peoples and the cultures and systems that sustain them, from infrastructure and markets to public institutions, helping to make better sense of a world gripped by transformational change.
Our work usually involves a combination of two or all of these work areas:
Through research, rigorous analysis, and creative thinking, we help organizations better plan for the implications of future transformation and assume a role of leadership within their sector, in times of constantly shifting challenges.
Our clients ask us to help them paint a true and critical picture of their current and longer-term operating reality, both inside and outside the organization—whether that means garnering specific insights about their audience, internal culture, and evolving business context, or taking a broader, full-spectrum approach to strategy.
Often this means unlocking and articulating an organization’s unique internal expertise and connecting it with the people who need to hear it. To do this effectively, we map the public conversation surrounding your knowledge area at relevant scale (from global to hyperlocal), understanding stakeholders, strategies, platforms, gaps, barriers, and opportunities.
We also handle user and stakeholder research on a human level—understanding motivation as a nuanced and lived concept, not a simple matter of personas and demographics. We help you understand their existing level of trust and engagement, and how they can be reached, not just for communication but for interaction and genuine mobilization.
Sample offerings:
—Landscape analysis
—Stakeholder analysis and audience understanding
—Foundational research reports
—Internal culture and risk analysis
—Narrative platform assessment and gap analysis
We identify and articulate the story of what an organization actually does, who it does it for, how it does it well, and how it can do it better.
We translate often complex research or niche expertise, or highly specific sector knowledge, into clear, accurate, and memorable communications, whether it’s for the general public, clients and partners, impacted communities, industry, funders, or policy stakeholders.
We dig deep into the research and bring together internal stakeholders, experts, and knowledge keepers. We identify the clearest and most compelling narratives embedded within their work, communicated and shared without compromising the integrity of its core.
While this work is often for public facing purposes, we also apply creative approaches to strategic research and foresight. Using practices such as speculative design and design fiction to translate current knowledge into deep engagement with future implications, we help today’s teams better incorporate discussions about the ramifications, seen and unseen, of their ongoing work into everyday decision-making. We also identify received wisdoms and assumptions within an organization or team that can be challenged and questioned through careful deployment of engaging content and materials.
Sample offerings:
We work with individuals and organizations in bringing narrative, brand, research-driven, documentary, and other creative projects to life, adopting an intensely collaborative approach whether the end result is in print, digital, or film/video.
We’ve conceptualized and co-written books intended to illuminate the work of practitioners from the worlds of art, design and ethnographic research; launched new magazines and online editorial platforms; and helped clients refine their approach to producing newsletters, podcasts, and other media. If, as a company, we like to stay purposefully small, it’s because we enjoy getting our hands dirty making things. We build and enhance media properties and teams, setting them up for success over the long-term, backed by ongoing strategic and editorial support.
We help our partners find the story they have to tell and that audiences will want to experience, and create at a high standard of originality and quality.
How are you different?
We’ve produced a lot of great things over the years. Magazines and websites and books and podcasts and videos and other things that we’ve loved making and audiences have loved consuming. We came together because we recognized the unique value of our experiences in creating things that we care about, traversing the independent, mainstream, artistic, and commercial worlds. A lot of it also has to do with how we ask questions and listen to people, then flesh out our understanding with extensive research. As No Media has grown and evolved, we’ve come to appreciate just how much our experience can also help organizations with their bigger issues, beyond simple content production.
We have no patented magic methodology for extracting wisdom, regardless of commercial or creative context. There is no secret sauce. We simply combine the best of rigorous research and critical thinking learned through many decades of ethnographic, journalistic, and documentary work. We also draw on what we’ve learned over careers of extensive travel and work in extreme,remote, and often politically or socially challenging contexts.
When I hear the word storytelling, I reach for my…
Sure, sure. Every agency talks about storytelling, but we’d like to think we understand what it really means and how to express it and work with it on a human level. We help our partners figure out their true story; rather than starting with our own opinions, we talk deeply and we listen. Through those conversations, we map out human motivation, and the right way to respond to it. Regardless of industry or challenge, this same approach holds true, and enables us to rapidly develop deep and reliable understanding of previously unfamiliar areas.
Can you help me with my thought leadership content?
Absolutely. But not just to throw content out into the world—we want to work with you to figure out your particular expertise. There are things you know that nobody else does, and we want to help you share that. The world doesn’t need more hot takes. Let’s find the conversations, and ways of approaching them, that only you can change.
Do you have the capacity to take on our project?
We have a carefully cultivated network of trusted and experienced collaborators that we engage on a per-project basis, including globally respected designers, coders, writers, researchers, strategists, and production partners. We’re careful to only take on projects that we’re confident will have great outcomes for clients, partners, and audiences. We’re not here to rack up billable hours on stuff that nobody needs; we’ve had those jobs and we didn’t like them. We expect our clients to take us as seriously as we take them.
Are you a branding agency?
At heart, no. Yes, we have worked with trusted design partners to launch or remake brands and all their accompanying collateral, but we don’t pretend that branding is our focus. Definitely, the work that we do often provides either the direction and building blocks for branding projects, or their creative outputs.
Why call yourself No Media?
Consider it a symbolic protest against the state of things. Over the years we’ve witnessed misguided initiatives burn through good money, and great ideas that have fallen by the wayside, or ended up the same as everything else, for lack of sound planning or vision. Fortunately, we’ve also seen some truly inspired work that has pushed at the boundaries, and we’re proud to have been party to some of it.
Why should I work with you?
We’re really quite nice. We’ll tell you what we think, but we won’t bully you or drown you in bullshit. We know what we know and what we don’t, which is why, when called for, we put an emphasis on research and listening closely to our partners.
Is there anything you won’t do?
We’re not a content marketing company. We generally don’t do piecemeal content for existing properties, though we do continue to write for a range of publications that matter to us. If you want SEO-driven, keyword heavy content with a focus only on immediate numbers, that’s fine! There are plenty of people that can do that for you and we can even help connect you with them.