My Friend Jack

Today I visited the London offices of Jack Morton Worldwide. They are one of the very best experiential agencies around and I just wanted to post a few quick observations. Full disclosure: I would love to work with them - they are a good bunch of smart, friendly people. New business goals aside however:

1. JMW is a business that undertakes the most complex tasks in brand marketing. They design and create immersive brand experiences: they put brands in live spaces, let people feel them, push and pull them around and test them. They demand of their audiences that they are engaged physically and emotionally. What other agencies even try this?

2. For a business that has used music for many years as a part of the brand experience, it is amazing how poorly the music industry has served them. There has been no focus on the creation of long term assets, no unifying processes or standardised pricing. Why does the music industry think it is so special as to avoid such megatrends as ROI measurement and industrialisation?

3. If more clients really understood the potential that the brand experience agency offers, they would fire their ad agencies today and divert the budget. The new paradigm; from passive consumption of messages to active participation in a brand's purpose is too compelling to resist!

DJ

Sonic Branding 2.1

This looks like the next in a series...where I am going to slowly tease and reveal how the next gen of sonic branding businesses need to structure themselves to achieve success.

Now, I am not so arrogant as to believe I know everything about everything but I do believe I have specific role in this industry - that is to make all the mistakes first, spot the patterns and help lead us all to a more mature, open and successful future as an industry.

As an aside, I am sorry I was not able to attend the first industry gathering that the IABA put together last year. I hope that the success of the event means there will be another gathering this year. Anyway...

Today's nugget of information, which will join with other nuggets in weeks to come and build into a handy model for the industry:

Composers, musicians and sound designers are all free spirits and should be treated as such. Do not try to standardise, homogenise, industrialise or centralise your relationships as a sonic branding business with the 'talent'. What you can do is use the wonders of the Internet to lower your transaction costs with 'talent' and create what my friend Ian Thomas would call a 'value web'.

It is possible to automate collaborative working among musicians, composers etc (anyone remember the YouTube Orchestra or Bowie's early experiments?) and my business is currently successfully running a globally distributed roster of 'talent' delivering single client solutions via online platforms. We do this without forcing single processes on the talent but by giving them the tools to operate iteratively, in their own time but towards a single goal.

To conclude: Talent cannot be homogenised, nor can the creative processbe standardised but it can all be targeted effectively at unified goals and deliver against the objectives of a sonic branding business.

Subtext: You may have noticed the 'commas' around 'talent'. These are here to signify that just because these people call themselves talent does not mean that they are the only talented people in the business. I value a talented accountant as much as a sound designer.

Subtext II: The implication of this view of 'talent' as an unwieldy and non-standard group of individuals is that you should never, under any circumstances, look to take on 'talent' on an employee basis. I have tried it, occasionally with success but it never works out long term for the business or the individual. Much better to leave the 'talent' freelance/contract. There you go, I have just saved the sonic branders thou$and$ and the 'talent' endless angst at being corporate slaves.

More to come...

Sonic Branding 2.0

So here is a clue to what we are up to at Cutting Edge. And though full disclosure on this blog is never going to happen, I do feel that it is time to share.

There are some major trends in the world of sonic branding that I have been noticing over the last 11 years (yes, it is that long since I founded my first agency) and each of these is reaching an interesting point at just about the same time. Let me expand, one trend at a time:

1. More audio-enabled touchpoints

When I started out, we had TV, radio, cinema and some music-on-hold as our major ways to use sound to affect a brand audience.

Now? Well every retailer puts a proper sound system in, every person you meet owns a digital media device (iPod or whatever) every brand has a website and delivers rich media content. It's a rich playground for the sonic brander.

2. Less power concentration in ad agencies

Don't get me wrong. I support the ad agency model and don't agree with those who feel it is doomed. Big, creative hubs will always be relevant to big, corporate entities. That said, a little less focus on the 30" TV spot as the flagship medium for brand communications has allowed sonic branding to gain traction where none would have been possible 10 years ago.

3. An outward-looking music industry

So they are not 100% there yet but they are getting better. When we all turned off the tap of cash to the record companies a few years ago some of them (and more and more now) realized that they had to look elsewhere (brands?) for revenues and opportunities. Would any major label have seriously talked sonics a few years ago? I was derided in 2000, in 2010 there is a desire (if not yet a clamour) to understand what this is all about.

4. Maturity in the sonics industry

Those of us who have made it this far are just about figuring the right business model. It's not online, it's not pure consultancy, nor simply tactical execution of a client's needs. The model for sonic branding splits into 3 parts...and they will be the subject of my next post!

Meanwhile, I am interested in hearing from anyone out there who wants to join Cutting Edge in London or New York. I'm still hiring!

DJ