Whalebone & Greenstone

Founded in 2010 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Whalebone & Greenstone began with a specific conviction: that in a fragmented media landscape, the most powerful communications are built not on press releases or campaigns, but on the stories people actually live and the places they inhabit. The agency’s founders saw that traditional PR often treated audiences as passive recipients of messages, when in reality, people co-create meaning through their own experiences and communities. From its office at 139 De Ruijterkade in Amsterdam, Whalebone & Greenstone set out to build a practice that treats narrative as a collaborative, research-driven process rather than a top-down broadcast.

A Strategic Narrative Agency Rooted in Research

Today, Whalebone & Greenstone operates as a strategic narrative agency with a distinct methodology they call "storymaking & placemaking." This is not a tagline but a core operational philosophy: the agency believes that stories and places are mutually constitutive. People shape the stories of a city, institution, or brand, and those stories, in turn, shape the people who engage with them. Because no single entity owns a story or a place, Whalebone & Greenstone approaches every project as a collaborative effort. Their work begins with experience research—deep, qualitative and quantitative studies of how large public and private audiences actually perceive and interact with an organization’s narrative environment. This research informs everything from narrative discovery and design to full-scale production.

Services: From Narrative Discovery to Impact Narration

Whalebone & Greenstone’s service offering is built around a full narrative lifecycle. They do not simply write copy or manage media relations; they design the underlying story architecture and then produce the assets that bring it to life. Their core capabilities include:

• Narrative Discovery: Deep research into existing perceptions, cultural context, and stakeholder stories to uncover the authentic narrative potential of an organization or place.
• Narrative Design & Production: Crafting and executing multi-platform storylines, from transmedia productions for large public audiences to brand narratives for institutions.
• Impact Assessment & Narration: Measuring how stories affect audiences and then telling that impact story back to stakeholders, funders, and the public.
• Branding & Advertising: Aligning visual identity, messaging, and paid media with the discovered narrative to ensure consistency across all touchpoints.
• Strategic Storytelling & Marketing: Applying narrative principles to marketing communications, ensuring every campaign is grounded in a coherent, research-backed story.

This combination of research, design, and production means Whalebone & Greenstone can handle a project from initial insight to final output, whether that’s a public awareness campaign, a place branding initiative, or a multi-year transmedia production for a government body.

Who Benefits from Their Approach

Whalebone & Greenstone’s methodology is particularly well-suited for public institutions, governments, and non-profit or non-governmental organizations (NPO/NGOs) that need to communicate complex ideas to large, diverse public audiences. These clients often face the challenge of building trust and shared meaning across fragmented communities—exactly the kind of environment where storymaking and placemaking thrive. The agency also works with private sector organizations that understand the need for a narrative grounded in genuine audience experience rather than aspirational messaging. For any client, the value of working with Whalebone & Greenstone lies in their insistence on evidence-based narrative: they do not guess what story will work; they research it, design it, produce it, and then measure its impact. This makes them a strong partner for organizations that want to move beyond surface-level PR and build lasting, meaningful connections with their audiences. Based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Whalebone & Greenstone brings a distinctly European, collaborative sensibility to global communication challenges, blending strategic rigor with a genuine respect for the communities they help serve.