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The Sound Of You | Chapter 5: Why us?

So, who is going to help you find the Sound of You, and professionally roll that out for your brand?

Music companies, with their post-production history, don’t usually think in terms of brands … and regular Branding & Marketing Agencies, when it gets the critical bit, outsource the music to composers who haven’t been part of the process.

We have a different approach.

Hum has had a twenty year long multi-award winning history of channel branding and audio branding.

We have both the experience, and the expertise, to comprehensively address the needs of companies coming to terms with the exciting possibilities of audio branding.

Instead of tacking sound onto the end of old media, we can weave it into the DNA of your brand.

The Sound Of You | Chapter 4: The science bit

What we know about sound, sensation and the human brain has changed … we all know how powerful music is, but now we also know that a combination of audio and other media can have an effect greater than the sum of the parts. We can provide you with the evidence on request but here’s an interesting taster.

The radical chef Heston Blumenthal conducted a quirky controlled research project with Oxford University at his restaurant, which concluded that playing the sound of the sea to his customers made his oyster dishes taste better.

This kind of research into multisensory experience shows that the brain lights up so much more when it experiences two or more senses being stimulated together rather than one.

The combination of new technology and neurophysiology research findings opens up the possibility for new immersive environments for sound, both in place and in time.

So, instead of just producing an audio logo, we can create an audio river that runs right through your consumers’ experience. And we call that: Soundtracking the DNA of your brand.

The Sound Of You | Chapter 3: More Case Studies

And to go a little deeper, here are more examples of how Hum has created audio branding, and just how varied it can be.

In the case of Exxon Mobil’s ‘We’re drivers too’ global campaign, we went in a new direction to help unify their diverse commercials and audio. Instead of a 3 second ‘Intel’ moment, we wrote a longer 11 note tune, suitable to be woven into any underscore for any commercial. The tune was sent to arrangers around the world and used across media for every kind of score in every territory, from the US to the Far East.

And sometimes Audio branding is simple, if it’s about the movies, you do the movies.

And with Italian channel La7, we created a piece of live rock’n’roll, remixed every which way to define a young confident channel. And just for the record, it’s a 7-note theme, played in 7 beats to the bar.

Some brands’ audio is made memorable by simply being entertaining.

And some brands are not multi anything, they just have just one location and one place to be heard.

The Sound Of You | Chapter 2: Here’s one we made earlier

Here’s a good example of what we’re discussing. A few years back, BT made the step from telephony into broadband and mobile. Suddenly, BT was a broadcaster … an entertainment channel, across different platforms and in different media.

Hum worked with BT Vision for its launch, creating, firstly, a piece of music with a highly recognisable sound signature embodying their brand values of a trusted and familiar technology company.

We made sure that it had the sonic qualities to work on a mobile, on huge speakers for a launch at a conference or on PC speakers and TV systems for home.

But then we had to differentiate the message for different strands and services, such as BT Vision’s children’s channel, their sport channel, their interactive services and their music channel.

So we can see how BT’s graduation into new areas of technology demanded a unified approach to their audio. This metamorphosis of need clearly applies to all sorts of areas of industry.

So if you are a magazine and you now have an iPad app, you’re not a paper product anymore, you’ll have animated, moving content. Effectively, you’re a channel.

Readers are now viewers and when they open that first page on their iPad they will want to know what the sound of you is, every bit as much as the look of you. And there’s no textbook to work from, each brand and every project needs to be figured out from scratch.

For example, for The Prince’s Trust – with their values of hope and inspiration, we’ve created an uplifting theme that’s designed to unite the diverse groups of people that work within it – volunteers, donors and staff, as well as project outwardly to the media. Since our first airing at the Celebrate Success awards at the Odeon Leicester Square this year, we’re building to rolling out a programme which will encompass these presentations, provide a suite of scores for their films, as well as conventional idents, music on hold and for other audio touchpoints. We believe they are the first charity to adopt such a forward-looking approach to Audio.

By contrast, we branded Irish Road Safety with: a song.

The song seeped into the Irish public’s consciousness, becoming iconic audio strongly associated with the tragedy depicted. By releasing the track as a single, utilising music fans’ space on iTunes and YouTube, it brought a much wider music audience back to the campaign, building an automatic trigger to more careful behaviour on the roads, saving lives.

So whether it’s a nice warm feeling, an inspirational uplift or a shiver down the spine, audio branding can be uniquely powerful.