A selection of photos from some famous film sets. Look away now if you don’t want to ruin the movie magic.
Psycho
2001: A Space Odyssey
Nightmare On Elm St.
The Two Towers
Planet Of The Apes
Kill Bill Vol 1
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Is Music Really A Brand Asset?
Each time a brand uses sound it is (in some way) influencing the perception of the consumer. But it’s doing even more than that. Whatever the context, genre, artist or channel, that sound is generating either an asset or liability for its overall brand equity. Investment in music should never be seen as just an additional cost. It’s about creating lasting brand assets – increasing long-term profit from a customer by engaging with them on a completely different level.
Going beyond market research
Brands invest heavily in market research for visual assets such as packaging and logos but when it comes to music, the focus becomes vague, often based on what the consumer ‘likes’ or ‘remembers’. But using my favourite track an advert doesn’t necessitate my being attracted to your brand. In fact quite the opposite! To establish true understanding of a consumer’s response to sound we need break this research down into more specific, relevant elements. Only then can music helps brands drive purchasing behaviour and increase their value both emotively and financially.
Measuring the intangibles
Calculating the impact of the invisible has become an intrinsic part of evaluating a brand’s success. Interbrand’s inclusion of ‘intangibles’ as a key part of its overall assessment for its annual 100 Best Global Brands report demonstrates not only that it can be done, but that it’s a crucial tool for measuring brand value. On the surface, the idea of generating metrics to measure a consumer’s response to music can seem an unlikely concept. But it’s something we at soundlounge do every day of the week. Once achieved, it’s hard to question the value of investing more in establishing music assets – whether to encouraging consumers to spend longer a shop, engage with an ad or inspire brand loyalty online.
Adopting new business practices
Creating sound assets starts with adopting new business practices. Brands need to allocate more resources to music and introduce systems that allow for comparison of costs against market rates, potential savings, process optimisation and best practices. They need to understand how money is allocated to finding and acquiring music and question who is in charge of the overall process. Small changes to the process of purchasing music will see brands will enjoy increased customer and staff satisfaction as well as more effective marketing communication. Sales, productivity and brand value will increase, along with a measurably improved ROI. Most importantly, brands will develop even longer lasting relationship with their customers.
Why We Buy Music
A new study has revealed what happens in our brain when we decide to purchase a piece of music. By using MRI scans, scientists at McGill University have highlighted activity in a certain region of the brain known as the ‘nucleus accumben’, which known as the ‘reward centre’ of the brain. This area was previously found to be associated with anticipating food, sex, and money so scientists have been surprised to find that listening to a piece of music activates the same part of the brain.
The scientists at McGill played the volunteers excerpts of music choice and were allowed to purchase the songs that they liked in an online music store. However, the participants were not sitting at a computer while this process was going on – they were lying in an MRI machine while having their brains analysed. The scientists observed that nucleus accumben was ‘lighting up’ depend on how much the participants were enjoying the music.
With music being abstract and food being a necessity, scientists from the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto are questioning why the same part of the brain becomes active in two different situations? Dr Valorie Salimpoor explains that anticipating the next sound in a music track what triggers this activity. The study also found that this region of the brain interacts with the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that stores information about the sounds and music we have been exposed to. In other words, the brain assigns value to music through pleasure. Researchers are further questioning if they can find an explanation on why people are drawn to different styles of music, by analysing their brain activity.
So clearly music can be a powerful emotional trigger when used effectively. This is something advertising agencies and brands have understood for some time, but can now be more easily understood and so hopefully applied even better in broadcast advertising – music is becoming less of a co-star and is taking more of a leading role!
Inspired!
Inspired! is our regular pick of webfinds that have inspired us recently. We hope you enjoy them.
Above is a short film by Kevin McAlpine, using an experimental process of printing out still frames from videos and using them to create these transistions.
‘Duet for Leaves & Turntable’ – the title says it all really! Created by Diego Stocco.
In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to a graduating class. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. His life advice is some of the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education. The video was made by The Glossary.
Inspired!
Inspired Welcome To Inspired!, our latest selection of webfinds that have inspired us recently.
First up is ‘Charge’, the latest Samsung Smart TV commercial directed by Romain Gavras. It’s a high-speed chase scenario with a series of cinematic characters (police cars, Roman soldiers, Maori warriors, cheerleaders, gangsters, and a dinosaur!) running down a windswept beach, still all under the control of the Samsung customer.
This music video,’Back To Me’ by Joel Compass, is one of the best we’ve seen in quite a while. Directed by Ian Schwartz & Cooper Roberts and inspired by the film, La Jetée (a 1962 short film by Chris Marker composed from a series of still images) The video is part photo shoot and part cinema. Watch it first and if you want to know how it was created, you can read more about it here.
Inkscapes is an interactive drawing performance designed for the 120 by 11 feet video wall at the InterActive Corps (IAC) building in New York. Three artists draw on their iPads to create new content every time the piece runs. The narrative is guided through the dialog between performers and the giant screen, which evolves and transforms the drawings over time.
U2 Producer Creates Maserati’s Brand Sound
Italian luxury car brand Maserati have just this week embarked on a world tour to promote their new model, the Quattroporte. The tour is made particularly interesting due to the heavy emphasis placed on music. In fact the whole thing hangs on the relationship between the brand and sound.
Last year the Italians teamed up with innovative English speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins to provide their buyers with a top-notch music delivery system. In November, their Seven Notes marketing campaign launched a concept that took the seven distinct notes audible from the Maserati engine and gave them to esteemed producer Howie B (Bjork, U2), who turned them into actual music tracks. The results speak for themselves.
The ‘Seven Notes World Tour’ sees the Anglo-Italian collaboration develop into a live experience, enabling much greater engagement with consumers. Not only will there be multi-sensory experience showcasing the two brands, in each city of the tour Howie B will be performing the original music and will be supported by local DJs. So while the branding remains strong through Howie B’s musical engine tracks, each event will be tailored culturally to the consumer.
Coke’s Brand Sound Finds A Fan Base
The music industry has developed an increasingly fruitful relationship with crowd-sourcing over the course of the last decade. Both financially, with crowd-funding websites such as Pledge Music providing bands with much needed capital, and creatively, with projects such as Graham Coxon’s 2012 video for ‘What’ll It Take’ in which his fans were the stars.
The newest slant on crowd-sourced music content gives fans the unlikely opportunity to shape a new song by a major artist, including writing some of the lyrics. The project, called ‘Perfect Harmony’, sees Coca-Cola, American Idol and Carly Rae Jepsen combining to give fans the chance to shape the ‘Call Me Maybe’ star’s new song. By shunning previous American Idol contestants for the global currency that Jepsen provides, they hint at the scale and ambition of the project; this is not a gimmick.
Ultimately the fan contribution is limited to multiple-choice so creative control remains in the most part with Jepsen and her team (more on that later…). Even so, the fans are made to feel like they’re part of the song; they’ve invested their time and opinions in the creative process and so their connection with the artist is strengthened. Already the song seems destined to be a hit and it’s not even finished yet.
The exciting bit here though is the brand strategy, and in particular the sound branding on which it hinges. First off, the voting system engages consumers on a repeat basis, inviting them to return to the site week after week for the next vote. Coke’s branding is an unavoidable presence on the site so this continued involvement facilitates a much stronger relationship between brand and consumer, aided no end by the association with the popular singer.
But here’s the really clever bit. As we know, Jepsen and her team have held on to the creative control, but significantly it was also shared in part by Coke. Just as they did with K’Naan at the World Cup in 2010, and in many other instances since, the drinks giant have woven their brand theme into the song’s melody. In doing so they’ve branded part of the memorable and emotional fabric of the song and installed Jepsen as an all-singing, all-dancing, brand advocate. It’s the sonic equivalent of getting her to dress up as a Coke bottle in the video.
The result goes further than this multi-sensory brand presence on the voting site though. Jepsen will perform the finished article during the final of American Idol in May and while Coke’s visual logo will be nowhere in sight, the brand will still have a presence through sound. The level of recognition and brand attribution is of course going to be key to the success and it’s highly likely that Coke have the research to back up their methodology. Once that’s settled, the value of this form of sound branding is almost immeasurable. When fans around the world sing along to their new favourite Jepsen (which they’ve ‘written’), they’ll be singing along to Coke’s brand theme, creating an association with the soft drink that mimics the bond they feel with their favourite pop star. Suddenly, Coke has fans.
Coke and music appears to be a match made in sound branding heaven. So what next? While Carly Rae Jepsen’s fan base is big, she’s not to everyone’s taste. So, as they did previously with K’Nann, Coke can perform the trick with another artist who has a different fan base. And then again, and again. But what happens when fans become wise to the strategy and turn against their favourite artist for selling out? Is increased involvement with their idols enough to outweigh the corporate mark left behind? Though with the stigma of ‘selling out’ becoming a thing of the past, will people even care? What we can be sure of is that Coke are leading the way in brand sound strategy and the example they’re setting surely means that others will follow.
Mad Men in 2013
With the return of ‘Mad Men’ to our TV screens, we thought we’d share these graphics created by the stock image site, Shutterstock. They’ve imagined equivalences between the 1963 and 2013 and how the characters would be portrayed through a series of objects.
Will The Harlem Shake Kill Sampling?
Anyone who has visited YouTube’s homepage within the past month, will most likely have noticed a video with the words “Harlem Shake” in the title. With around 40,000 “Harlem Shake” videos uploaded – these videos are very hard to miss. Thanks to the new viral dance craze, where people dance as crazy as they can for about 30 seconds, producer Harry Baauer Rodrigues’ track “Harlem Shake” climbed to the top of the billboard charts. Directly after the dance craze went viral, the song received 103 million views on YouTube in one week. Unfortunately, the success of the “Harlem Shake” has put Baauer in a difficult situation.
The two main ‘hooks’ used throughout the track have been taken from other songs without the consent of the either artist. “Con Los Terroistas”, the sample that starts off the song, is actually a part of Hector Delgado’s 2006 single “Malades”. The most notable hook, “Do the Harlem Shake”, is part of the track from the group Plastic Little and was rapped by Philadelphia MC Jayson Musson in 2001. As soon as the song became a major hit, Baauer was contacted by representatives of each artist about his failure to license either of the samples. The samples are vital to song’s success, and both Hector Delgado and Jayson Musson feel that they should have been approached – as well as paid for the use of their music. Rodrigues was honestly shocked when his underground club track became such a phenomenon, as his track went for the most part unrecognized for almost a year.
One musician appropriating another musician’s music for their own use, began as early as the 1940s with advent of Musique Concrète but it wasn’t until Hip-Hop in the 1980s, that sampling became part of the musical landscape. Sampling was always an illegal process, however it wasn’t until 1991 that the first case was brought to federal courts, when Rapper Biz Markie and as his recording label suffered the consequences of sampling music without licensing. The law on sampling music is still a legal minefield, and any musician who attempts to use the ‘Fair Use’ clause when using samples, should be extremely cautious, as no one can be sure what qualifies as Fair Use until a case goes to court. For example, when The Verve used a sample of an orchestral version of “The Last Time” by the Rolling Stones in their song “Bittersweet Symphony”, they actually licensed the music correctly. However, the rights owners claimed that the Verve had used “too much” of the music, which sent the band to court and the rights owners winning the case. On the other hand, mash-up artist Girl Talk has successfully used the Fair Use clause when sampling other artists’ music. This issue was superbly covered by Laurent LaSalle, in his documentary RIP: A Remix Manifesto, below.
If “Bittersweet Symphony” had not been a worldwide hit would the rights owners have intervened? – probably not. Most music rights owners pick their battles carefully and if the artist isn’t making any money from the sample use, the recording labels usually turn their heads. However it’s not only musicians that need to be cautious when it comes sampling. Anyone thinking of licensing a song for use in advertising tv or film, must also be aware that if a track contains one or more samples, then licensing permission is required from all the musicians sampled – a potentially very slow process. So the next time you’re thinking of using a particular song in a film or advertising campaign, it might be an idea to go to the website Who Sampled and see if your chosen song is listed!