Audio Branding

“And we got a new Beatles song. I can’t believe we’re talking about the Beatles…. But John Lennon recorded a really corrupted vocal before he tragically died, and it was just kind of there because of some stem separation tech that is only possible because of machine learning. They were able to clean up the vocals, fully on board with the John Lennon estate and the remaining Beatles members, and there’s a few others, but this is int...

“If you’re watching any video on how to get started on content for your business, for public speaking, anything like that, the microphone is always the number one thing, they say. And that should be a cue. It’s not the phone and it’s not a video camera. They say use your phone to get started, but buy a better mic and there’s a reason that this matters so much to people.” – Nikolaj Kloch

This episode is the second half of my co...

“If you don’t make the video with audio in mind first, that’s the difference between, you know, a 14% click-through rate versus, you know, a 2% click-through rate. And a lot of people don’t tie those two together, that it matters. It’s something that people should be focusing on with a lot of time and energy.” – Nikolaj Kloch

This week’s guest is a videographer, content creator, and former aerospace engineer who helps speakers, entr...

“[What] a lot of sonic branding agencies aren’t aware of is that sonic branding can also be used as a tool to address a concern that the client might have. So, for example, a new competitor has come in and now they feel dated. Okay, let’s write a sonic branding that’s based around being modern. Okay, they’ve had a big knock on trust, like I mentioned before, with a data breach. This is a great opportunity to write a sonic branding ...

“If you imagine a company has a ten million dollar marketing budget, right? And then you imagine they have a sonic logo on every single TikTok ad, Facebook ad, YouTube ad, all these new media where the majority of the traffic’s coming from now. If they can increase conversion rates marginally, they can have a huge difference to their bottom line. And it’s one of those things where, because sonic branding, once it’s done, once, and,...

“And they had people that had either the escalator going up on the right-hand side or you could take the stairs, and each stair played a different key on the piano. More people took the stairs than they did the escalators because it was more fun. So, they did something they hadn't done before that was better for them. So, it all wraps up beautifully, and was such a fun campaign. And again, it didn't have to cost a lot of money. The...

“If you're going to be doing a commercial, for example, for BMW, where people are spending a lot of money on a Seven Series and it's a luxury car, but then you hear the TV ad or the radio ad or wherever you're listening, and that sound isn't recorded at the highest quality. Like, your logical mind might not pick it up, but if it sounds a little tinny or it's too much of an echo, you pick that up, and that really does build into the...

“The brief was ‘we want to sell some more train tickets to Germany, where you can go to Berlin for a techno party, you can go to Hamburg for the opera, have a famous opera in Hamburg, or you can go to Munich for the beer festival.’ And we made this audio journey with sound, and you definitely can hear, ah, now we’re in Berlin, it’s the opera, and now we go to Munich. So yeah, we can play with that. And the client just also loved th...

“If you can see that your product is selling better with better sounds, and it gets better reviews Actually, I saw a car review that scored the car better just because the sounds were better. He didn’t talk about how fast it could go, how fast it could brake or how many airbags, he talked about the user experience. A car today is a driving iPad on wheels. So, all these sounds here, I got so stressed from these beeps and boops, sudd...

“If it’s stock music, unless you’re paying, like, some libraries have exclusivity, but most of them don’t. So that’s what I always say to clients, like stock music. You might hear that Joe’s ice cream shop also has the same music that you have. And you’re Chrysler – I keep saying Chrysler, but whatever, a big brand. A good example of an audio branding that we did was the Rogers. That was huge, and when we first did that, it was for...

“We did one for Mercedes, which again was very unique and very simple. It was about this guy Raymond who had never tried ice cream before. And it was a great commercial, and it talked about Raymond never having ice cream, and he waited, and he would watch other people have ice cream, and then one day Raymond decided to have ice cream. And then all of a sudden it cuts to a Mercedes logo. And then the last ten seconds, it was for Mer...

“There’s a quote from a famously terrible person, Thomas Jefferson, who said – I don’t particularly like him or a lot of the things he did, but I do agree with this, I do agree with this specific quote. ‘I will study war and strategy so that my children may study science and maths, so that their children may study art and poetry.’ I’m sure I’m butchering the exact quote, but the sentiment is there. Why are we creating robots to do ...

“If you have a screen that goes very bright white or if you have a screen that goes very dark, people can deal. Their eyes will adjust, or they’ll just accept that. But if you have bad sound, people will leave. They’ll turn off the movie. If they have to be adjusting the volume, if they have to adjust the volume of a video more than like two times, they’re very likely to leave. If the sound is just, like, bad audio and they can’t u...

“And then his youngest daughter, who’s six years old, comes up, and she’s into gymnastics and she’s kind of cartwheeling around the room while everyone else is playing. And then, ‘All right, she’s going to play you a song.’ And she comes up, and she’s all full of beans, and then she sits down and she plays the most somber Debussy song. And it was, like, there was so much soul in what she played for a six-year-old. I’m like, ‘whoa!’...

“Chick invited me to go to this jazz club in Soho called Ronnie Scott’s in London. And it was, like, two o’clock in the morning – I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s gonna be open.’ I did not know who I was dealing with. It’s Chick Corea. He just makes a call, it’s open, and they’d set out three pianos in a room facing each other. And we walked in this room, we sat down, and Chick could play a few notes. Herbie had joined in, I’d joine...

“I have a regular chat with a friend of mine in New Zealand. He’s a tetraplegic and a musician, so he invents his own music instruments that he can play with his limited motion, and he can send me his instrument over MIDI to where I am across the ocean and we can play together and we can have an engagement. It’s not possible for him to come to see me in Europe. It would be so expensive, and a lot of work. So, you know, thank God th...

“So I’m in Chicago, I’ve quit my job, I’ve almost run out of money. You know, you’re young, you don’t care. And I met Robert, who’s now my co-founder. He had mixed a CD of mine a couple of years before through friends of friends. So we meet up, have a beer, and then he’s like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m spending all this money on IT every month,’ because he was a sound engineer. And he’s like, ‘But we’ve got this thing called the internet,...

“Listen, I got unbelievably lucky with YouTube, and I don’t know why. I still really, I mean, I know why in theory, like, people have been like, well, ‘You provide XYZ,’ but I don’t know why I get to do this. Like, I know that I have certain qualities that lend themselves to my strengths, that lend themselves to this medium, but it’s completely and utterly luck. Putting out good videos, having a high-quality camera, a high-quality ...

“In February of ’21 I just randomly started. I just filmed a video, and I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ Well, it was February 11th, and then February 15th we were on our way to pick up my dog, my puppy at the time – she was you know, nine weeks old – and I started getting notifications on my phone and I was like, ‘Oh, weird, I must have left some somebody, like, a comment on YouTube or something.’ And all of a sudden, I look and I’m ...