Stew Redwine (00:16):
Ad infinitum is the award-winning podcast solely focused on audio ads, the creatives who make them and or the latest thinking that informs them how the space is evolving. And my favorite part, a roundup of recent audio ads with Analysis by yours truly, stew Redwine and each episode's guest, but for the final episode of season two of Ad Infinitum, we have a special treat in store for all Yeee Mighty Chief Audio officers. Today we're diving deep into something that's been dramatically undervalued in advertising pretty much for all time, which is Sonic branding. Only 16% of advertising is remembered and correctly attributed. That's across the board, but here's where it gets interesting. Sonic brand cues deliver seven to eight times better branded attention than ads without them. That's a massive increase in what is a problematic space that only 16% of advertising is remembered and correctly attributed.

(01:14):
There is a incredible power when it comes to sonic branding and it's not just another asset, it's not just something else to do. It's not an afterthought because sound is processed in exactly the same part of our brains as emotion and memory. Long story short, when we hear, we feel, and we remember and the numbers back this up, 64% of listeners feel a stronger pull to brands with a cohesive sonic identity, and we've seen here at Oxford Road 13% higher response rates for shows running Sonic branding and it jumps up to 30% when brands commit to heavy sonic branding versus light or none. Our sense of hearing and the way that Sonic branding interacts with it delivers fame, fluency, and feeling in reverse order. The brand makes me feel good. The sounds make me feel good, the brand is fluent. I understand it, I understand it's the brand that's communicating with me and fame.

(02:02):
It comes easily to mind and sound is a shortcut to all of that one Fortune 100 company called Sonic Branding, the most leveraged item on their balance sheet that came from the Add Infin item episode where we featured Joel Beckerman from Made Music talking about branding with your eyes closed, which is what really began in a sense, the journey towards this episode where to really unpack this, we've brought together nine experts. Nine is a good number. You've got the nine writers of the NAS goal or the nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Here we've got nine Sonic branding experts including Gina Eisha, who we worked with to produce this episode from the writing to the interviews and putting together the initial edit, Gina Eisha of Dreamer Productions and the host of Sound and Marketing podcast, check it out. Then we have Roger Show, Germond Dallas Taylor, Colleen Fahe, Joe Soer, Joel Beckerman, Steve Keller, Walter Wara, Jim Reeks, Lisa DeStefano, and Chelsea Campbell. You're gonna hear from them throughout the episode as we explore the state of Sonic branding. Enjoy this special episode of Ad Infinitum. Take it away. Gina Eisha, owner and founder of Dreamer Productions and Sound in marketing, learning and host of sound in marketing and my friend, enjoy.

Announcer 1 (03:26):
You can read along with me in your book, you will know it is time to turn the page when you hear the chimes ring like this,

Jeanna Isham (03:34):
Sound and branding go together like a wink and a smile. It's been a part of marketing for hundreds of years and global culture for thousands. We just haven't been paying very close attention. Before the days of TV commercials, radio and print ads, marketing happened by speaking modern media and the printing press weren't around yet and the average person couldn't read, so they shouted orang what they were selling or telling the world about hot dogs. Get your hotdog. As early as the Song Dynasty, there were records of peddlers in Pay King using distinctive calls and songs to notify people that they were coming down the road. Different peddlers sold different things, so these calls told the people if they even needed to step outside their door. This was a big deal. As the streets of Pay King were a tangled mess back then, just walking to the nearby seven 11 was not so easy to do. Flash forward to modern days, these distinctive calls still exist. Roger show Urman VP of Integrated Partnerships at Song Trader remembers a similar story from his childhood

Roger Sho Gehrmann (04:36):
In Tokyo, the sound of street vendors that would go past the house. Either they were selling these roasted sweet potatoes or they were selling sweets like mochi and they'd be kind of saying the product out loud as they walk down the street.

Jeanna Isham (04:51):
If you think about it, have you had a similar experience? What about this one? One could say this would be an example of a sonic logo.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (05:01):
A sonic logo is usually something that is short, maximum up to a couple seconds long, very distinctive. It could take the form of a melody or a sound effect or a spoken word or a phrase,

Jeanna Isham (05:13):
But we'll come back to that. When you hear these calls, you instantly know where you are, what the message is, and whether or not you are interested. Sonic logos like these way back when examples and sonic branding in general is one of the oldest and most appreciated forms of storytelling. Think of bird calls and animal sounds for a minute. Even there, you've got a story. As David Attenborough says in the Netflix documentary secret world of sound. For some animals, sound is the key to their survival. They warn when there's a predator close, they tell their friends there's food, they make come hitter sounds and back up sounds. The most dangerous sound in the wild is no sound at all.

Dallas Taylor (05:58):
Sound is one of those things that keeps you mindful and present and it reveals itself in every passing microsecond and that's a really powerful thing.

Jeanna Isham (06:08):
That's Dallas Taylor, host of the 20,000 Hertz podcast and creative director at Defacto Sound.

Dallas Taylor (06:14):
Things come alive when sound is added and everything becomes much more vivid. It almost feels like the picture has been colored just by adding sound from a storytelling standpoint that certainly happens just by adding in sound. It brings personality and character to this visual icon that then represents this whole entity behind it.

Colleen Fahey (06:37):
It can help heighten emotions, guide people to understanding what the story's about and how they should feel about it.

Jeanna Isham (06:45):
That's Colleen Fahe, us managing director at C Soul and Co-author of the book Audio Branding using Sound to build your brand.

Colleen Fahey (06:53):
You have something about to happen and you can build anticipation with the sound. Then something scary happens and it suddenly you can make it more stressful and a little bit more dissonant and then a solution arrives and then suddenly there's a glorious moment of success. Sound can amplify, especially music can amplify and guide your feelings around all the parts of storytelling and make it much more satisfying and much more emotionally complete.

Jeanna Isham (07:24):
If we are going to sell anything, we have to tell a story, but not just any story. A branded story. Stories are how we build relationships and trust with a thing like products and businesses. Sound stories help us to remain present in what's happening right there in that moment alone.

Dallas Taylor (07:45):
Storytelling through the voice is something that our brains love. Something that you want to lean into biologically,

Jeanna Isham (07:53):
Why is it that sound stories are so delicious for our brains and why is it so important to incorporate them into the customer's brand journey? For this, I went to Joe Sour, a quantitative researcher focusing on the impact emotions have on consumers' preferences and choices.

Joe Sauer (08:11):
Think about how you became aware of a brand in the first place. Odds are sound was accompanied with that awareness. You either saw an ad for it that included a sonic logo or a voiceover or some catchy music or word of mouth from a friend or a family member or a colleague.

Jeanna Isham (08:28):
This isn't by accident. At least a few marketers out there make these sounds on purpose as we'll get into later. Although the cat isn't completely outta the bag yet, branded sound has been found to be specifically impactful when it comes to getting into the consumer's brain fast and here's why.

Joe Sauer (08:46):
Our brains are essentially lazy. They like to avoid working as a survival mechanism. The more brain hour or brain processing I can conserve for higher order processes, the more likely I am to survive, and so our brains use things like mnemonics and hints and heuristics to draw conclusions.

Jeanna Isham (09:03):
Over time, that sound becomes familiar, which is when it really kicks your brain into gear.

Joe Sauer (09:09):
When something is very, very familiar to us, it tends to generate a stronger emotional response than exactly the same sound the first time I heard it when it was unfamiliar.

Jeanna Isham (09:20):
Now you have a familiar brand story, a double whammy of brand equity.

Joel Beckerman (09:26):
It's certainly one of the wonders of music and sound to be able to create stories.

Jeanna Isham (09:30):
That's Joel Beckerman, CEO, and founder of Made Music.

Joel Beckerman (09:34):
How do you get a story across in two and a half seconds or three seconds or at most three and a half seconds?

Jeanna Isham (09:40):
Good question.

Joel Beckerman (09:42):
If you look at Bach or Beethoven, there were certain examples of things that they would do over and over again. A lot of it was about tension and release if you feel a certain set of tension and then a release from that when you're no longer feeling the tension, that's a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can also talk about the colors of the sounds. There are specific kinds of sounds and chords and melodic content that we all kind of have in our collective memory. Some of those things go across cultures. There's the pentatonic scale. Create a melody that's in pentatonic scale. You can tell a story that actually is consistent throughout the world,

Joe Sauer (10:21):
A global reach, hmm, instantaneously. It's primal, it's automatic and triggers our emotions and our instincts before we even realize it, and that's what really makes it such a powerful tool for grabbing attention and evoking an immediate response, but over time, with maximum exposure and usage in the real world, they come to encapsulate the essence of the brand in this little tiny soundbite instantly recognizable, instantly memorable and trigger a whole range of neural associations with that brand.

Announcer 1 (10:54):
That was the end of the story,

Jeanna Isham (10:55):
So now we have a familiar brand story that can touch a global community and reach us within seconds while also triggering a neurological good vibey connection. Pretty spectacular when you think about it, but not all sound is good sound if you're not careful, sound just becomes noise. It's important to follow the research.

Joe Sauer (11:15):
When we test sounds using neuro metric research methods, we can quantify how good or bad a sound really is. Naturally occurring sounds tend to generate more extreme responses than any composed sounds do or engineered sounds,

Jeanna Isham (11:30):
So what's the range between these good and bad sound responses?

Joe Sauer (11:34):
The strongest positive emotional response is actually the laughter of a baby and the strongest negative response is scream of pain and those are the the extremes of the good bad spectrum. When you're composing sound odds are the emotional response that gets triggered will be somewhere along that spectrum between a scream of pain on one hand and a baby's laughter. On the other hand,

Jeanna Isham (11:57):
Just like with our visual logos, we want to repeat these branded sounds and songs so that they can be memorized, so beware of screams. Repetition helps with customer recall. We've been doing this for years. Remember the alphabet song and we'll come back to that too. The important thing here is to find a good sound and find ways to repeat it in a non annoying way because humans recall and associate these sounds fast like in a second much faster than what we see.

Joe Sauer (12:27):
When a sound wave enters our ears, it's converted into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel almost instantly to a part of our brain that's responsible for interpreting sound. When we see something light enters our eye and it's converted into electrical signals in much the same way, but these signals have to go through multiple stages. It typically takes about 30 to 40 milliseconds longer than sound processing three to four tenths of a second doesn't sound like a long time, but in neurological terms, in brain processing terms, that's an eternity.

Jeanna Isham (13:00):
The quickest way to get a consumer's attention through sound is through pneumonics, also known as sonic logos.

Joe Sauer (13:06):
A sonic logo is a short distinctive sound or a series of notes that really represents a brand,

Colleen Fahey (13:13):
A motif that runs through your sonic identity.

Joe Sauer (13:16):
The visual logo is made up of a color, an image, a font, a sonic logo similarly is made up of different sonic elements, so timber pitch interval and so on. When they're initially used, try to reflect the desired brand architecture.

Colleen Fahey (13:32):
People begin to recognize it from repetition,

Steve Keller (13:34):
A distinctive sonic asset that does for your ear what a visual logo does for your eye.

Jeanna Isham (13:44):
That's Steve Keller. Audio Alchemist and Sonic strategy director for studio resonate at SiriusXM Media.

Steve Keller (13:51):
When you hear it, you think of the brand.

Jeanna Isham (13:53):
However, operating off of just one element like the Sonic logo isn't enough because the beauty and difficulty of sound and music is that it's fleeting

Dallas Taylor (14:04):
Sound is something that doesn't exist exists and then it's gone just floats off into the air.

Jeanna Isham (14:10):
The logo needs to play into something bigger, something branded and branding doesn't happen in siloed spaces. This takes us to the all-encompassing branding element that we call sonic branding. There are a lot of feelings on the truest definition of sonic branding, so much so that I've never found just one definition, so I asked my interviewees for their definitions and I found some common threads.

Joe Sauer (14:36):
Sonic branding is essentially using sound in a very deliberate and strategic way to either reinforce or build or extend a brand's identity

Steve Keller (14:48):
To bring a brand top of mind.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (14:51):
Sonic branding is the audio encapsulation of visual branding

Colleen Fahey (14:55):
Instead of in colors and type faces and logos. It's done in music, sound and voice.

Joel Beckerman (15:01):
Sonic branding covers the entirety of music and sound that you would hear across a brand, both branded and on brand music and sound. The components, the elements, the way that those elements are used in a smart way. Really strategy first

Joe Sauer (15:17):
To focus on any one element is actually to miss out on the full range of benefits that sonic branding and sonic identity can bring to your company.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (15:27):
Just all about creating a cohesive and intentional sound or soundscape or melody that reflects a brand's essence and values.

Jeanna Isham (15:36):
I took this opportunity to consolidate my guests definitions into one big, all inclusive one. They've since approved and have given their blessing. This one crosses all the t's and dots. The I's Sonic branding is the strategic and consistent use of on-brand sound that evokes emotion, enhances recognition, reflects brand attributes, reinforces values and shapes the overall brand identity and for the final word, let's turn to Stew Redwine, head of creative at Oxford Road and host of Ad Infinitum, AKA. What you're listening to right now,

Stew Redwine (16:16):
Sonic branding is simply the expanded answer to the question, can they recognize your brand with their eyes closed? Let's say it's yes. Then Sonic branding expounds on that. Yes. How do they recognize you with their eyes closed?

Steve Keller (16:32):
1 8, 7 7, 805 8 8

Announcer 1 (16:39):
Oh oh oh farmers. I'm just so happy I got more like a good neighbor.

Jeanna Isham (16:57):
It's about committing to your branding, finding those sound attributes that connect with your brand, owning them, believing in them, and acting on them over and over again. It's the same as with a visual logo. Eventually you just have to commit and go for it. Here's Steve's advice on the ideals. When creating that good sonic strategy,

Steve Keller (17:14):
It should be congruent, memorable, distinct. It should be flexible to adapt to different use cases. It should be appealing, it should be likable, it needs to be ownable, not just in the sense of you are owning the sonic space, but in the sense of you're owning the assets themselves, you're owning the intellectual property, the copyrights of all of these, and then ideally you are consistent in the application of those across multiple channels and then you think about how you can bring them to life in experiences and you codify them in some type of a style guide that becomes part of your brand book. Again, reinforcing consistency.

Jeanna Isham (17:57):
Although sonic branding may be a semi new word, it is in no way new. The concept of sonic branding has been around for a long, long time. I think Roger wins for the strangest birth of Sonic branding. Example,

Roger Sho Gehrmann (18:10):
Sex workers used to wear a certain type of sandal that would make a certain type of sound as they would walk along the stone laid streets of ancient Greece. That is probably the first ever recorded intentional branding of a, I guess a line of work.

Jeanna Isham (18:29):
Joel mentioned battle cries.

Joel Beckerman (18:31):
Well, sometimes it was to strike fear into the heart of your enemy. When you just think about horns that were blown at the beginning of a battle or something, that specific sound might be owned by a particular tribe. It's a very

Steve Keller (18:46):
Ancient practice. Historically, there are tribes or communities that used certain songs or rhythms to identify themselves and that's more of the natural practice of sonic branding and we've continued to see it used through history to brand everything from goods and services to communities, political parties and anything else that you can think of that you can associate a sound with.

Jeanna Isham (19:17):
Although all these examples are good and there is no right answer. I have dubbed Dallas' as the winner, which he tells me he stole from Stew Redwine,

Dallas Taylor (19:27):
Your name and it's happened billions of times. It's a sound that labels you that you learn really early that that sound means

Jeanna Isham (19:35):
Me and then we get into a little bit more modern day-ish.

Joe Sauer (19:38):
The earliest examples of sonic branding were really in the twenties and thirties in the radio era,

Jeanna Isham (19:45):
So if we've been using sonic branding for so long but not calling it that, what did we call it?

Joe Sauer (19:50):
Radio ads were really miniature art forms. The birthplace of the jingle was radio advertising of the 1920s.

Jeanna Isham (19:59):
We called it a jingle. The jingle was Baby Sonic branding and we loved it. It's

Roger Sho Gehrmann (20:05):
Intentionally designed to be catchy and memorable. It's in service of promoting a brand or a product or a service.

Steve Keller (20:12):
Usually it contains the name of the brand in it.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (20:17):
You can recall it easily or you can sing along to it easily so it can create kind of a lasting impression,

Steve Keller (20:23):
Repetitive designed to get into your brain and keep you singing it long after you're not hearing it.

Joel Beckerman (20:29):
They were super effective in their time. They sort of went out of a style for a little while and now we're starting to see them creep back in

Jeanna Isham (20:35):
And although they may seem interchangeable, it gets a little more complicated.

Colleen Fahey (20:40):
Jingles were popular when commercials were very long 60 seconds, even 30 seconds where you had to develop a verse and a chorus and now you can't go on and on and on with your music. You have to find ways to be more telegraphic or to put it in the background of something else you're saying.

Joe Sauer (21:00):
When you think about the impact of the growth of TV in the sixties, seventies and in through the eighties, we started to see jingles be transformed into much shorter form sonic logos.

Joel Beckerman (21:11):
I think there's more of a focus now on strategically using that jingle or strategically thinking about what the brief might be or how writers are sent in a specific direction, so I think it's a little more refined and a little bit more on that new era of deeper strategic thinking. Looking at measurement audience research, which was not really done quite as extensively back in the heyday,

Jeanna Isham (21:37):
Jingles became more than just cute and fluffy. They started taking on a more strategic tone. This is when things got interesting. Brands were attributing sounds to their identity and they were doing it consistently for decades and generations. On end,

Roger Sho Gehrmann (21:53):
The Swiss railway has a chime sound that is used to signal the arrival and departure of chain. That one apparently goes back to 1905. There's also a sound of the Royal Mail in the UK before note sound around the same time in the twenties.

Joe Sauer (22:14):
The MGM Lion, that is an auditory signature and it dates back to the earliest days of film production. They're still using it and it's instantly recognizable. If you hear that roar, you know that that's signaling that a

Dallas Taylor (22:29):
Movie is about to start. The NBC chimes the dung.

Joel Beckerman (22:34):
It was functional and it also came from what people had on hand and I think it was used tremendously effectively and continues to be tremendously effective with NBC for years and years and years,

Roger Sho Gehrmann (22:47):
Wherever there was something that was meant to be sold or an idea or a message that meant to be conveyed, there were creative people trying to make things to associate with those things, whether it was a color, whether it was a picture, whether it was a sound, so there's probably something out there that's older that just hasn't been documented.

Jeanna Isham (23:04):
People started calling it by name in the sixties. Back then it was used to describe branding in a radio context and then it sort of disappeared again.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (23:13):
It comes back up again. In the nineties,

Jeanna Isham (23:17):
Five distinct tones hit our ears. In 1994, bringing Sonic branding mainstream intel Pente processor Chip created a sonic logo,

Dallas Taylor (23:31):
Definitely like a chapter in the Sonic branding book

Jeanna Isham (23:36):
And everyone who had a TV in the nineties heard it about 10 times a day, possibly more.

Walter Werzowa (23:42):
It was pretty much the first big mnemonic.

Jeanna Isham (23:46):
That's Walter ua, owner and founder of Music, ver Newgen and Health Tunes. He also just happened to write

Colleen Fahey (23:56):
Intel was trying to find a way to describe a product that wasn't something you could see, smell, hear, touch,

Walter Werzowa (24:05):
You can't say what intel is In three seconds

Colleen Fahey (24:08):
They used a sound. They kind of sounded like the inside of a computer as you could imagine it.

Jeanna Isham (24:14):
I knew I needed intel inside even though I had no idea what a processor chip was, did or looked like, but music told me it was important and so I had to have it. Intel created

Colleen Fahey (24:26):
A tangible impression of their very intangible product,

Jeanna Isham (24:31):
So how did such a small hint of music make its way into the corporate zeitgeist and pop culture?

Walter Werzowa (24:37):
The task was we need some music for Intel. It's a very short piece of music and I've never thought of writing a three second piece of music before and I realized you can't even say a smart sentence. In that brief time and I tried to whistle melodies and think of melodies, everything sounded forced and not complete and thought this is just impossible. I looked again at the board and it had the tagline, Intel inside clearly in front of me and so thought, hmm, if this was a song, it'll be for notes because it's engineers and has to be almost in a Germanic like orderly, mathematical pom pom pom pom, very straight organized, even symmetric. They wanted to have the music as powerful, positive as possible but with no aspect of cultural emotions and so thought the fourth and the fifth is probably the most powerful open to intervals we need. It was not really composed, it was constructed and I think that's the strong idea behind it, that you construct those things and don't compose them with flabbergasted that somebody needs that little music. I was astonished how difficult it was. I was super surprised that we worked for three months or so on the sound. I was lucky to find a methodology to make it work, but a point where everybody could recognize it, whistle it, and every two seconds it ran somewhere. Then I thought, oh my God, this is impactful. This is huge.

Jeanna Isham (26:21):
All of a sudden a computer chip exploded into pop culture. Those five notes made a comfy cozy home in the back of our brains to be recalled at any moment. Then we kind of forgot again. Nineties advertising music wasn't exactly focused on long-term brand identity. They were in the moment

Colleen Fahey (26:39):
Strategic use of sound wasn't really as part of building a brand asset. I think it was more about supporting a story in a commercial.

Jeanna Isham (26:48):
Although marketers may not have been thinking too hard on sound strategy, they did realize that music was catchy when it was unique.

Dallas Taylor (26:56):
Marketers were playing around with bright neon colors that have no business being together, neon pink and neon yellow and shapes that were just very overt and that also extended into music.

Colleen Fahey (27:07):
People were picking a lot of classic rock. Everybody was using borrowed interest instead of building your interest in that brand itself and what made that brand distinctive.

Dallas Taylor (27:19):
Everything was just like radical and over the top and just loud and lots of yelling and lots of distorted guitars or synthesizers and just anything that would just like flash sonically to get your attention.

Jeanna Isham (27:32):
It was all very distinctly nineties, but not necessarily distinct brand by brand. The focus was on fast and loud and energetic. It's probably why we now have an attention span shorter than a goldfish.

Dallas Taylor (27:44):
That micro second attention span started happening significantly in the nineties. How can we orchestrate as much attention grabbing things second by second during an entire 30 minute program plus the advertisements? I think the nineties were the early equivalent to thumbing very bright TikTok videos.

Joe Sauer (28:04):
Sonic Burning has gone through a lot of evolutions. It evolved from the jingle to now the Twitch economies where attention spans are sub three seconds.

Colleen Fahey (28:14):
All of us have divided attention these days. It's called continuous partial attention and it was identified by Linda Stone when she was working at Microsoft.

Jeanna Isham (28:23):
Our continuous partial attention is just our reality now. Our devices and technologies are just gonna distract us more and more as the tech gets cooler and better, but all is not lost. This is actually great timing to demonstrate the power of sound. Our sub three second attention spans are exactly where Sonic branding wins. We don't need to combat our short attention span. Remember what we learned about how fast and efficient sound is. We need to find our brand sound and communicate with it. Why borrow a sound when you can make your very own add something to this brand new world of the Fast and Furious.

Colleen Fahey (29:00):
What happened when Sonic branding appeared on the scene was that suddenly you weren't thinking about something that I can borrow from the culture, but what can I add to the culture, your brand in its best self,

Jeanna Isham (29:12):
And then a moment of accidental sheer clarity.

Jim Reekes (29:16):
My name is Jim Res. I am pretty well known for a couple of sounds. One in particular is and my camera. It's currently the Sound of the Mac doing a screenshot. It's also the sound on your iPhone when you take a photo.

Jeanna Isham (29:33):
Jim was the senior software architect at Apple back in the mid nineties.

Jim Reekes (29:37):
I was pretty much the only person writing the software for the audio at the time and I took it upon myself to get rid of the startup sound. I hated it

Jeanna Isham (29:47):
As a musician. Jim saw a real problem with the existing sound.

Jim Reekes (29:51):
The previous engineer who designed it mathematically created a perfect set of intervals based upon tritones, literally the most dissonant sound that you could think of. There was a cartoon called Quick Draw McGraw and he had an altered ego called El Kabong and he would hit you on the head with a guitar that sounded like all the strings around a tune and the Max Startup sound at that time was an L Kbo sound. I just had to replace it and I said about designing a sound that sounded like the Apple brand to me. I had no input from anyone and then it got released

Jeanna Isham (30:32):
And the rest is history. That sound is a great example of how you can put character and identity into a product and a brand. Now we are getting somewhere. This was beyond catchy and unique.

Jim Reekes (30:44):
A brand is the promise of your benefits. It's what I think. It's what I feel. It's what I have in my mind even without ever using or even experiencing your product, it's the promise of your benefits. You can help to convey that promise with colors, fonts, logos and sound,

Jeanna Isham (31:05):
Sonic branding, iconic and equitable. Jim shared his experience with friends

Jim Reekes (31:10):
After I created the Startup sound. I got to meet one of my great inspirations, Brian Eno. One of the things that he is greatly responsible for is establishing ambient music. We had a long conversation and I was subscribing to him how I had just did a composition <laugh>. That was a very difficult exercise of conveying an emotional response. Within two seconds, he thought it was a very interesting challenge. Microsoft finds 'em and hires them to compose the Windows 95 startup sound.

Joe Sauer (31:50):
After you buy something, sound continues to play a critical role in shaping your ongoing relationship with that product. That startup sound is purposefully designed to reinforce the feeling of having made a good choice.

Jeanna Isham (32:03):
Using music to influence, preference and choice was nothing new to one specific industry. They'd been positioning their auditory ROI safely in the back of our minds for decades. We all know them and just like the intel chip, we never think about them till we hear their sound. Any guesses

Dallas Taylor (32:23):
When you need insurance, you hear that jingle?

Jeanna Isham (32:25):
That's right. It's the insurance jingle.

Steve Keller (32:27):
They seemed to learn early on the power to produce some positive feelings to connect with culture and to make their brands be preferred by listeners

Jeanna Isham (32:41):
And that's why 20,000 Hertz did a whole episode about it produced by yours. Truly most insurance commercials go out of their way to give you a feeling of comfort and support. Think about the slogans like A Good Neighbors State Farm is there nationwide is on your side. Are you in good hands?

Dallas Taylor (33:01):
When you watch these ads, you're supposed to forget about copays and deductibles and premiums. Instead, you're supposed to feel like choosing this company means they're personally gonna have your back.

Jeanna Isham (33:14):
One way to do that is through a reassuring jingle. Another is through a warm friendly mascot, whether it's the Geico Gecko flow from Progressive or Jake from State Farm.

Colleen Fahey (33:25):
Because this is such a non-tangible service, personalization helps, so bringing a human or even a duck alac into the picture can help it become more concrete and tangible.

Jeanna Isham (33:43):
When jingles like the insurance jingle are done right, they are magic. We are farmers. Nationwide is on your side

Roger Sho Gehrmann (33:51):
Like a good neighbor, state farmers there

Jeanna Isham (33:53):
And last for a long period of time, but this only happens when you fully understand the point and the purpose.

Steve Keller (33:59):
Sonic strategy for me, that's blending sound science and sound art to help us make sound decisions.

Jeanna Isham (34:06):
This is what Steve calls audio alchemy.

Steve Keller (34:08):
In attempting to define what sonic identity was or a sonic strategy, I looked at this idea of the importance of blending science and art.

Jeanna Isham (34:18):
This is not something that we have to guess at. There are a lot of resources at our disposal to figure out this perfect blend to effectively emotionalize the sound,

Steve Keller (34:28):
Cognitive and auditory sciences cross modalism, psychophysics. Psychoacoustics really can help us understand how to combine sonic building blocks in ways that can more accurately target emotions that we're trying to evoke, make things a little easier to remember and associate to understanding the physiology and how we're wired and how we can use sound to hack our other senses.

Jeanna Isham (35:01):
All of this extra work is worth it. Music that matters makes money, but this doesn't happen all by accident. Sonic KPIs are real and measurable.

Steve Keller (35:14):
A Sonic KPI is a way that you are looking at measuring the impact of your choices of sounds and how you use them on brand perception and behavior. So when I think of sonic KPIs, I usually think of them in three categories.

Jeanna Isham (35:30):
Number one, consumer perception.

Steve Keller (35:32):
That could be related to identity and emotional connection, the salience or the recall of the brand. That's all related to perception.

Jeanna Isham (35:43):
Number two, behavior

Steve Keller (35:45):
Lingering time in a retail environment, how fast or how slow you want consumers to move sales and how you are choice of sound or how you're using it in advertising or in the marketplace could produce sales or engagement with the brand In another way, maybe looking for information with the brand, maybe it's tied into a particular opportunity to click on a link that's served up with uh, digital auditory pieces of advertising.

Jeanna Isham (36:17):
Number three, equity

Steve Keller (36:19):
Here, I think of two things, brand equity as a whole and is your use of sound actually helping to build into the brand equity, but there's also KPIs for equity that could be related to the sonic assets themselves. Sonic logo that you can trademark and copyright or a brand anthem or particular pieces of sound design that may be proprietary. The more you use those, the more you build equity that can be collateralized in other ways. Think of a brand thinks about KPIs in each of these areas and thinks about how is my choice of this voiceover or this piece of music or this sound design or this audio channel going to serve these KPIs that I have that probably ladder into larger KPIs for the brand. Overall, it really does have an impact.

Jeanna Isham (37:15):
Using sonic elements again and again teaches the consumer to remember you through sound learning. This way is not new to us. Recognition through repetition has been happening since we were two or three years old, give or take a few months

Walter Werzowa (37:28):
Like the alphabet song. When you have kids and you would not teach them the alphabet by saying just remember A, B, C, D, <laugh>, it wouldn't work, but if you sing the song to them, they have it in five minutes.

Jeanna Isham (37:43):
This same repetition works when it comes to brand recognition,

Joe Sauer (37:46):
The sound is much more than a marketing tool pre-purchase. It's that red thread that runs through the entire customer journey from that first impression. When we become aware of a product to long after we've purchased and used a product,

Steve Keller (37:58):
It brings back these memories. The physiology is triggered. Again, we have the association with the brand. The more we hear it, the more familiar we get, the more familiar we are with something, the more we tend to like it and that just becomes this loop that reinforces these memories. Music and sound and voice. Really powerful memory triggers

Jeanna Isham (38:20):
With a little bit of foresight and the right creators on board. Brands could use sound as part of their marketing toolkit. It would be building blocks for all their audio touchpoints and believe me, there are now a lot of touchpoints.

Joe Sauer (38:33):
Branded audio cues in customer service such as the music or sounds that play when you're on hold. The unique notification sounds that apps make even something as simple as a distinctive sound when you get a message from the brand, an order confirmation, a delivery update,

Joel Beckerman (38:46):
You've got mail A brand might be involved in creating products, hold music, corporate meetings, sponsorships. It might show up in a way that would not be expected. There's digital content, social media and podcasts, things like TikTok, I've seen it now. It's kind of a whole new realm where branded music is showing up

Jeanna Isham (39:12):
And the list goes on and on and on.

Joe Sauer (39:16):
All of these sounds reduce frustration, make interactions seem more seamless, more enjoyable, and essentially enhance brand loyalty. These things create a sense of continuity and connectedness. A

Jeanna Isham (39:28):
Red thread of continuity that runs through your entire customer journey means familiarity, a sense of welcomed predictability. Jim used this idea of familiarity when he landed on the camera click sound for Apple.

Jim Reekes (39:42):
At the time, digital cameras were just coming about. They were using like beeps and buzzes and clicks and all of these little melodies because the digital camera made no sound, which is why I very oppositely did something. I used what was expected, which was like the most unexpected thing.

Jeanna Isham (39:59):
That familiarity is compounded. When you own that sound, it gives you that much more control and ability to transmit brand intent through a sound.

Lisa Destefano (40:08):
You can't leave anything out of your quiver, a triggered moment in a sonic logo. I think it's an opportunity that many people overlook as being able to recognize and own it.

Jeanna Isham (40:18):
That's Lisa DiStefano, former VP of brand marketing and creative at Home Depot. They turned that red thread orange. You might recognize this, it's the orange song. Using borrowed interest exclusively makes your music message less vivid and it takes away your ability to play.

Lisa Destefano (40:37):
When people use licensed music, often people have another reference. That's why people use it. It gives you a feeling of connectivity to a certain moment, a memory. We created that and that energy and now we get to rip on our own work and own it and be able to play with it and manipulate it, you know, engage with it and leverage it.

Chelsea Campbell (40:56):
The sonic anthem, which is gritty, it's powerful. It feels like it's moving you forward.

Jeanna Isham (41:02):
That's Chelsea Campbell group creative director at SiriusXM.

Chelsea Campbell (41:06):
That song makes me feel like getting stuff done. It feels like a ballad that you could work to, that you could accomplish something to.

Jeanna Isham (41:14):
It's not just that it's catchy and on brand, it's that they owned it literally and committed to its congruency

Chelsea Campbell (41:21):
Commitment as important, if not more important than the individual assets themselves is the brand's commitment to using them over time, but deploying them across multiple marketing channels and reinforcing these elements of the brand through tv, through audio advertising, through social. That's how you create a strong brand sonic ecosystem.

Jeanna Isham (41:44):
One brand working hard on building up their sonic ecosystem is MasterCard. Its branded sounds are used in both digital and physical stores to help improve the customer experience.

Colleen Fahey (42:09):
They have led the way in making people think of their brands more multisensory than just visual and the biggest sense that they leveraged was sonic at the payment terminals, their commercials, they're reproducing it in different types of music from different countries.

Jeanna Isham (42:28):
Most recently, they've even developed a haptic logo for customers to feel while making purchases on their phones.

Joel Beckerman (42:35):
The strength of that identity is the consistency. That's the hero and that's what makes it work.

Jeanna Isham (42:41):
CMO, Raja, Raja Manhar has been a huge supporter of sonic branding and sensory marketing over the last few years. Raja and the MasterCard team even released an album with tracks all inspired by its sonic identity.

Walter Werzowa (42:53):
Can you play that?

Jeanna Isham (42:56):
10 artists from all over the world integrated the MasterCard Sonic logo into their custom built songs inspired by the sound. This album demonstrates the vibrancy of sound branding usage while also supporting up and coming artists from all different cultures and countries. McDonald's is another great example of branded sound. Their sonic identity has been building up their brand equity for decades.

Dallas Taylor (43:24):
That started as a really interesting Trojan horse type of marketing where they got Justin Timberlake to make a whole song called, I'm Loving It.

Jeanna Isham (43:33):
After JT fans fully embraced the song as his, the truth was revealed, surprise, I'm loving. It was actually McDonald's in disguise and it's been around for over 20 years. It is constantly reinventing and adapting itself.

Dallas Taylor (43:49):
You could put it in any sort of instrumentation or voice. I believe even just any language to say I'm loving it, it could be adaptable into virtually any country and I think that's brilliant.

Jeanna Isham (43:59):
It remains relevant and on on-brand to Mickey D's all over the world.

Joel Beckerman (44:03):
I think it's one of the gold standards. You know, it came from a jingle in and of itself was really a good solution, but if people had just kept banging that exact version over and over and over again, it would've gotten tired after a while, but I think the reinvention of it that's consistent with the particular messaging or the particular way that a communication is being brought forward. Just the fact that it's done in so many different ways and each one of them sort of has some kind of an element of a brand personality of McDonald's. I think that really makes it a complete home run,

Jeanna Isham (44:41):
But everything has room for improvement.

Joel Beckerman (44:43):
The one downside is it really only works in advertising. There are so many others now and I think more as we moved into digital and products and activations, the less that becomes sort of relevant in those other touch points.

Colleen Fahey (44:57):
McDonald's might be better off if they had one sound that always came home to and then let everybody play one consistent recognizable element, but they have a wonderful, welcoming, casual friendly sound that as far as a melody works very well for them.

Jeanna Isham (45:15):
If you want a fuller story, check out the 20,000 Hertz podcast episode. I'm loving it. Great breakdown. Another company using Sonic branding in a clever way is Coca-Cola. They don't have a sonic logo per se, at least not one that they've stuck with, but they do have a strong branded sound. Their highly immersive sensorial experiences are supported by their highly strategic sound design.

Colleen Fahey (45:44):
I think they do a magnificent job of making the sensory aspects of their brand come to life through sound.

Jeanna Isham (45:52):
When you see a Coke ad, you hear it too.

Colleen Fahey (45:55):
They have the opening of their bottle sound that makes you feel the refreshment and you can hear the pouring liquid. You can hear the bubbles just like their visual imagery where it's so sensory. They're always emphasizing the sensual aspect of their brand. They do it very well and with great discipline through sound.

Joe Sauer (46:15):
That process of classical conditioning where the Koch brand always appeared in advertising associated with this sound creates a familiarity of the two together, the visual logo, visual identity, and the sonic identity.

Jeanna Isham (46:28):
Do all these sounds sound different than a Pepsi or a Dr. Pepper? Nope. In fact, that sound you heard is actually a Shasta Cola. I recorded Tricha.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (46:38):
I'm the prank war champion

Jeanna Isham (46:39):
Mud. It doesn't matter. Coca-Cola attributed that sound to its brand first.

Joe Sauer (46:44):
The sound of a cap coming off in the soda fizzing is not unique to Coke, but they own it because of the heft that they've put into the marketplace to associate their brand with that sound.

Jeanna Isham (46:55):
Coca-Cola embraces the senses to the nth degree even though a lot of creativity is happening. No brand that I know of has fully explored every audio touchpoint and every opportunity for branded sound, yet not too surprising. Since new technology and social media platforms are hitting the market constantly, new forms of sound and marketing and branding are being invented and defined every single day.

Colleen Fahey (47:22):
There is an increase in engagement with Sonic media in general. Podcasts have exploded, streaming radio has changed listening behavior and also the use of smart assistance and voice activated technologies.

Jeanna Isham (47:38):
We are moving forward fast when it comes to voice tech, voice AI in particular. I know that AI raises all sorts of ethical questions and we'll get back to that in a little bit, but for now, let's focus on how incredible of an opportunity this is. From a creative standpoint,

Roger Sho Gehrmann (47:55):
It's amazing because it just means that you'll be able to, or you can now generatively, create voices on the fly that sounds basically natural.

Jeanna Isham (48:05):
On the less controversial side of things, we have voice assistance and boy did we get used to that fast. It's not all about screens anymore.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (48:13):
It's inevitable that we start moving away from a society that's completely glued to screens everywhere and putting screens in everything.

Colleen Fahey (48:22):
I think that voice technology may have been a big factor. People could talk to devices and they would say, tell me the news. Tell me the weather, and then they would still keep talking and they'd say, give me some music, or put on WVEZ. There was podcasts becoming so popular. Audio is very good at getting attention, much better than all the things that are trying to get into your eyes.

Jeanna Isham (48:50):
Brands are exploring the possibilities within their smaller ecosystems as well.

Joe Sauer (48:55):
Some brands have developed exclusive sound experiences for customers, for loyal customers, for high value customers, things like audio content that's only available after purchase. Balenciaga has created a song that actually is able to be unlocked and downloaded only based on a QR tag on their shirt paired with one on the receipt. These are sounds that are focused on deepening that emotional bond and making you feel like you're part of a community. It cuts to the core of the human experience, a sense of strong positive emotion and belonging.

Jeanna Isham (49:25):
This is just a new take on theater of the mind.

Chelsea Campbell (49:28):
We can use theater of the mind to paint pictures in people's minds, to transport listeners to far away places.

Jeanna Isham (49:35):
The fact that no one has this powerful audio first and audio only social figured out yet should be exciting and liberating. Your brand could come up with something completely new and wildly different that no one else has ever heard, and you could be the first one to do it. Maybe audio only and social audio sounds too new or big. Let's step back for a minute and think about mascots and spokespersons. Have you considered your brand voice, literal brand voice yet? It could be as simple as casting the right personality. Think of flow from progressive. Progressive was the first to offer online

Roger Sho Gehrmann (50:12):
Quoting

Jeanna Isham (50:13):
Or Jake from State Farm

Roger Sho Gehrmann (50:14):
Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.

Jeanna Isham (50:17):
These actors' voices are now so synonymous with the brand that your brain automatically goes there when you hear them. Sometimes it's the way the brand's name is spoken or the CTA is delivered. The rhythm and inflection like or 1, 8, 7, 7. As we've discussed, multisensory experiences are a big deal. We don't experience things one sense at a time.

Colleen Fahey (50:44):
You can hear a sound from behind you or from beneath you or from above you. You don't have to be looking at it. It's very easy to take in when your attention is divided.

Jeanna Isham (50:55):
That holds true for both personal and brand experiences.

Joe Sauer (50:59):
We can shut our eyes, but we can't close our ears. We're always reacting to the sounds that are going on around us, even if we've shut out other senses in the process.

Jeanna Isham (51:09):
I'm about to use a big word. Stay with me psychoacoustics. This is the study of how sound affects us within our environment.

Chelsea Campbell (51:18):
Sound design impacts our perception of the world and environment. As we move and hear sounds around us, we can use psychoacoustics to impact our listeners perception.

Jeanna Isham (51:29):
Maybe your industry or brand isn't so sensory. Maybe you can't incorporate every single sense every single time, but it doesn't mean considering them isn't relevant.

Roger Sho Gehrmann (51:38):
We are constantly multisensory beings. We can't switch off most of our sensors most of the time. We're always looking at something or as hearing something. We're always processing these things constantly and singling those out as like individual things is something that we do when we talk about them and we write about them, but we experience these things all at the same time.

Jeanna Isham (52:02):
When it comes to building our sonic identity specifically, there are two basic elements to pay special attention to.

Steve Keller (52:09):
Congruency and consistency are the two basic elements of any sonic branding approach. How these assets are used, how they're combined, and how we think about the consistent use of them over time. The more congruent your sound is with other parts of your brand and your branding, the more it will amplify that experience. The other piece is the consistency. You can have some congruent choices, but if you're not consistent with those choices in all the places on the consumer journey, then you're losing impact of actually building a brand. It may just be a collection of sounds that maybe they fit together sonically, but without that consistency, it's not going to build those memory devices that you need.

Jeanna Isham (52:59):
So and that's a lot of stuff. Let's recap. We've learned sonic branding is beyond just catchy and fun. It's meaningful and incredibly functional.

Steve Keller (53:11):
When we're talking about sonic identity, it's more than just a compositional exercise. It's more than just sound design.

Jeanna Isham (53:20):
It's powerful, memorable, and incredibly persuasive. It's versatile, unending, and constantly being reinvented. It's a must have in a brand's toolkit. So with all this possibility, why hasn't sonic branding caught on? Personally, I believe that the biggest reason is education. We've been staring at the standard visual branding, failing to notice anything else, but when we do take the time to notice sound, we realize that it has been on the brand's journey the whole time.

Joe Sauer (53:52):
Sound is really an integral part of the entire customer journey. Every step of the journey influencing how people perceive, feel about and interact with a brand from start to finish.

Jeanna Isham (54:02):
You don't have to be a sound designer or a musician or a neuroscientist to understand that sound matters.

Joe Sauer (54:09):
The tone of voice in a customer service agent,

Jeanna Isham (54:11):
Hi there.

Joe Sauer (54:12):
The sound of the product itself, the ambient music that's playing during your shopping experience, whether that shopping experience is in a physical store or even online, the sounds that the app makes when you go to pay for a product. All of those sounds have an impact on how you feel about the transaction that you're undergoing, whether it's shopping or buying, and how you feel about the brand or the product that you're shopping for or that you happen to be buying.

Colleen Fahey (54:37):
When people begin to hear and recognize and trust the sound it's adding to the brand value that you have in the marketplace.

Announcer 1 (54:50):
That was the end of the story.

Jeanna Isham (54:51):
We now have centuries of case studies and research to draw from incredible technologies to make our branded sounds as unique or familiar as we want, and more platforms to utilize than we know what to do with. If there was only one thing to draw from this episode, it is this sound and right is a brand's best friend

Joe Sauer (55:12):
Like the brand saying, welcome to the experience every single time you use it. That is essentially the holy grail of marketing and product experience these days.

Jeanna Isham (55:21):
Sound done wrong. Come on, is a brand's worst nightmare. Thank you to Roger Show, Urman Dallas Taylor, Colleen Fahe, Joe Soer, Joel Beckerman, Steve ler, Walter Zu, Jim Reeks, Lisa Deano, and Chelsea Campbell for helping tell this story in the most complete way possible.

Stew Redwine (55:43):
And a ton of thanks to Gina Eisha for the hours and hours of scripting, interviewing, and editing. And thank you to Zach Han mixer and sound designer of Add infinitum for working with Gina and myself in putting this all together. And of course, thank you to our producers, Ezra Fox and Kaitlyn Spring, without whom we would not have ad infinitum. And check out Gina Aisha's other work, her podcast Sound in marketing is fantastic and there are not a ton of resources out there when it comes to how does Sonic Brandy work? How does sound and marketing work? So check out her podcast, sound and marketing. Thanks again, Gina Eisha, and to all Yeee mighty chief audio officers out there in the words of Daniel M. Jackson from the preface to his book Sonic Branding, which I highly recommend, quote, I hope you enjoy learning about this new and exciting discipline and that you reward the world with more and more better sonic branding for years to come. I couldn't agree more and remember to have fun making the ads work.