Audio Branding

“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 ...

“I think people forget that. I think they forget that there’s a person behind the music and that they need to share that with their audience now more than ever, because if people hear your song and they like your song, they’re gonna go down a rabbit hole. And if they can go down that hole and come across you being genuine, being authentic, actually showing vulnerability, they’re gonna fall in love with you. They like the music, and...

“I said, ‘Well, uh, my team and I would love to see the video,’ and the woman at Lost Highway said, ‘All right, let me pop a VHS in FedEx, it’ll be there tomorrow morning.’ So, we watched the Johnny Cash Hurt music video and once we’d wiped a tear out of our eyes, I got on the phone. I said, ‘Retta, put us in, coach. We want to play.’ And the rest is history. It was and remains still the most iconic music video of an artist doing a...

“But if you think about it, like if all 360,000 of these, like, law firms, not lawyers, law firms had their own brand out there, who’s gonna rise to the top? The ones who are producing content that provides value, and then the ones who are producing content that has some good production value, and are the ones who are producing content that has some good entertainment value. ‘Cause I think that’s the third leg. Because right now, j...

“I don’t care what I have to do, they are not going to ignore me. So I would get up, I would walk around the room, I would stand on a chair in the middle of the room, I would shout, I would run, I would scream, I would kick things. If I was mad at the Devil, I would kick something. And if I was happy for Jesus, I would run around, woo hoo hoo! And I mean, people would just come out and be like, ‘Wow, I’ve never really seen anybody ...

“That brings up a whole other point, which is the power of a voice’s quality to bring a brand to life. A lot of clients are, like, just hire voiceover and just have them say the copy. And it’s just, like, there’s a place for Gilbert Gottfried and there’s a place for, you know, John Lithgow. And I’m not saying we would use either of those, but you know, if I’m doing a commercial on a cancer care center, I would never have Gilbert Go...

“And one year, Ariel [Detergent] was, like, you know that 95 % of the people in India still think laundry is a woman’s job. And Ariel was just, like, gosh, that doesn’t seem like it’s, this was 2017 or ‘18 at the time, [and] they’re like, that doesn’t seem right. Like, it’s, haven’t we all moved past that? So they created a campaign they called ‘Share the Load.’ And what they did is they went out there and they advocated a hashtag,...