The Sound of You: Chapter 2

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.