Creative audio branding and visual interpretation

Posted by Tom on March 25, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
Categories: Audio Branding
Tags: , , ,

Bright Rubiks | C/O mattyp_ @ Flickr

At PH Audio we’re in the business of making music and voiceovers that fit a company’s image and brand. Sounding right for callers is critical and has lasting effects. I found an interesting piece of writing on ‘creative synaesthesia’ which brings me nicely onto this post: creatively, how does a company develop an on-hold marketing production or create an audio brand that fits with their branding?

Artificial synaesthesia for audio branding – an overlapping of senses

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, you might see colours when you hear a particular sound.

But ‘artificial synaesthesia’, as it’s coined in the article I’ve linked to above, can help businesses to understand how consumers perceive brands. By artificially recreating and understanding how people take meaning from a particular word or sound, it’s then easier to create the most effective combinations of voiceovers, content, style and music. Ultimately, you want to be able to positively reinforce brand values in the mind of the consumer. ...read more

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us

Posted by Peter on March 22, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
Categories: Audio Branding
Tags: , , , , , ,

Why time on hold is the right time for audio branding

Posted by Matt on March 17, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
Categories: Audio Branding
Tags: , , , ,

Students in Sound Design | C/O vancouverfilmschool on Flickr

Companies spend a lot on symbols. On symbols that people associate with their name.

It’s kind of reductive, but in the simplest terms, advertising is about making an effective symbol that carries a full brand message. That’s why the Nike ‘Swoosh’ logo equals athletics. Equals running. Equals gold medals. Equals you running faster.

Advertising is about making a large concept into a picture. Reducing sentences and paragraphs into lines and squiggles.

It’s been about that for hundreds of years. About graphic identities carrying brands.

Now, of course, we’re producing much more than logos. We’ve got the internet, for one – we’ve got the viral videos and the microsites; the discussions across social media and becoming a company’s fan on Facebook. Now, businesses are creating fully branded ‘user experiences’.

But in the last century, we also got ways to produce better sounds, and faster. We have studios and microphones. And as this medium has grown and gone digital, so too have the agencies (we’re one!) who specialise almost exclusively in audio branding – not graphic-based branding. And on commercial radio, telly, the internet, businesses are using these agencies to compete for the most memorable sound. ...read more

A dispatch from the MD’s office | Can a product sell itself?

Posted by Grant on March 15, 2010 @ 3:03 pm
Categories: Audio Branding
Tags: , , ,

AUDIO PACKAGES

I’ve recently been spending time out in the field watching our Business Development Team sign up new clients – it’s truly fascinating, and I’m sure psychologists would have a field day in such an environment.

Watching how they interact, how they exchange information, and how our potential clients respond to their presentations, will never get boring. So with this post I’m sharing my personal observations, and questioning the notion: can a product really sell itself? Or indeed, are F2F meetings intrinsic to the sale and the building of successful supplier-client relationships? ...read more

Audio Copywriting | Part III: Tell It Straight – Words Your Audience Really Want to Hear

Posted by Amy on March 12, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Categories: Copywriting
Tags: , , , , , ,

Faith and Jargon | (c) subsetum @ Flickr

You’ve heard it all before:

We need blue-sky thinking. I’m talking about pushing the envelope, going forward, let’s touch base soon.

Translation: corporate waffle that, in reality, could be said in half the words. Just another way to say, “We need big ideas, so give me a call”.

Anyone who watched Heston Blumenthal’s attempt to resurrect Little Chef last year will no doubt remember the chief executive’s constant wittering about ‘blue-sky thinking’. The phrase alone is irritating, but when used in the context of menus and motorway services, it simply became absurd. You can watch the evidence here.

Finished cringeing?

Well, in this post, we’re looking at why these kind of phrases have no place in external communications. ...read more

What a bunch of phonies…

Posted by Mariela on March 9, 2010 @ 5:50 pm
Categories: Fun & Games

For the managers at Carlisle’s Department of Work and Pensions, the best way to cope with the additional workload caused by yesterday’s Civil Servants’ strike was to instruct the remaining staff to impersonate answering machines. It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. ...read more

Breathless: producing the perfect voiceover

Posted by Mark on March 8, 2010 @ 3:35 pm
Categories: Audio Production
Tags: , ,

Passage | Photo (c) Monkeytime @ Flickr

Mark Griffiths, one of PH Audio’s dedicated Sound Producers, offers his take on a small but critical element of voiceover editing.

My job is to take people’s breath away.

I edit voiceovers for a living. One of the main tasks is to remove all the breathing sounds.

Voiceover artists’ voices get compressed in the final mix. This has the effect of making all the quiet parts of speech louder. It’s one of the studio techniques that gives that extra oomph to the voices of radio announcers and pop singers.

But if you compress a voice track with the breaths left in, the breaths are amplified. These noises, which are normally so quiet we don’t notice them in normal speech, are boosted to the same volume as the words.

It makes the speaker sound like the Elephant Man.

So I get rid of them. ...read more