Why a 12,000-word annual report was my favourite project of 2025

Most large organizations have to write annual reports. 

That’s a big story to tell. Everything that happened in a big, complex organization. All the accomplishments, all the impact, all the highlights.

But an annual report isn’t just a story about financial results and progress towards corporate goals. It can be deeply impactful. And in some cases, that story can be truly beautiful.

That’s the story of Edmonton Airports.

Last year, Adverb partnered with Edmonton Airports to write and design the organization’s 2024 annual report. It was a big undertaking—approximately 12,000 words of copywriting and nearly 70 pages of design. 

Edmonton Airports does so much more than fly people in and out of the city. The core challenge in writing the report was figuring out how to tie everything from passenger experience to real estate to capital projects to sustainability initiatives to people and culture…into one cohesive story. 

So we started by asking ourselves (and the client) what kind of story we wanted to tell, and developed a theme to guide our writing. 

As an aside, this is always my favourite part of a longform writing project—Tyler Butler and I have a highly predictable and (so far) very successful approach to theme development. We sit on a call for about two hours, throwing ideas back and forth and suggesting increasingly terrible lines of copy. I start thinking that this is going to be the one project where things DON’T actually come together. Then, one of us will yell, “I’ve got it!” and furiously write a paragraph or two. The other person adds a few tweaks, then we sit back and ask each other if it’s good. (It’s usually pretty good.)

Anyway, back to this report. The theme we developed, Propelling Tomorrow, is forward-looking and evocative. It invites audiences to consider the potential of the future—and the role Edmonton Airports plays within it. 

With the approved theme in hand, we began to shape the narrative. We treated every individual section of the report as a story within a story, reinforcing the theme with bold section titles and few lines of aspirational, thematic language. 

An annual report is much more than a list of accomplishments, highlights and milestones. It’s the defining story of where you are today, and where you’re going tomorrow. 

The printed report sits on the bookshelf behind my desk. It reminds me that there’s always a story to be found. And that telling that story the right way makes it even better.

That’s a beautiful thing.