Roger Sho Gehrmann, the VP of Partnerships at MassiveMusic

0:08Claire:Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency, Red Setter. I'm Claire Blythe, co-founder of Red Setter. In this series, I'll be speaking to more people who are shaping the world of design, finding out how they discovered that design was a thing you could base a career around, and how they got to where they are today. So this week I'm recording live from Canned Lions with Roger Show-German, the VP of Partnerships at Massive Music. So Massive Music brings together music and tech to enable brands to reach audiences through the power of sound. They work with brands such as TikTok, L 'Oreal, Colgate, Philips.

0:48Claire:Roger, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining me and thanks for using your amazing place in Cannes. It's really lovely to be here. I'm very happy with the place that we're in. I'm glad it was, it's the right space for us to have this conversation. So normally I would start by talking about how you first got into what you do. But I feel that with the sound emphasis that you have and the sonic branding, it needs a bit more explanation for, it's like brand design generally needs explanation to people that don't know it exists. But the sound side of it, I feel is like a step further.

1:25Claire:that if you don't work in that industry, you don't know it's there. 100%. So sonic branding, it's the act of communicating emotional and brand values through the power of sound. So what does that mean? That means like attaching a piece of music or a voice or any kind of audible thing to what would be considered a brand. So, you know, typically when people talk about brands, they talk about visual design. You think about the colors of a brand, the shape of the logo, maybe the motion of how a logo appears on a piece of video. But if you think about it, if you think about any piece of video content you've ever seen, most likely that logo is associated with a sound or there is a piece of music, intentional or not, that is there.

2:17And some of the best brands in the world have figured out that having a visual identity also tie with a piece of sound that is consistently used and strategically used really helps cement that brand into your head. So that's sonic branding. And, you know, when I talk about it, often people ask, oh, you know, what are some brands that have good sonic brands? and it doesn't take long to just like rattle off a few and people instantly understand that like oh i'm actually remember a lot more sonic brands yeah than i think i do um so who would you say who's the the the you know the gold standard obvious ones uh like bum bum so that's the netflix sound yes um it's which is the mcdonald's one of course um and and like like those are the ones that constantly come up some of the more subtle ones is like the sound of a coke can opening and that was like associated with coca-cola as like their unofficial uh sound i didn't know that for a long time um in the world of automotive audi uh has a heartbeat sound which kind of goes audi and they have a tagline um that they have used and not used depending on which part of their brand journey that they're on um so that's one that's another one that's a very well known the tiktok one which i have to mention which is the one that uh our company is responsible for is the sound that you hear at any the end of any tiktok video that was like exported out of tiktok yes so whenever you've seen it on any other platform you hear that sound at the end so the logo comes up and then you hear that's the one yeah which is you know it's heard by literal billions around the world yeah but yeah those you know it's the sonic branding is more ubiquitous than everyone thinks um you just often don't even realize that it's there until you you kind of go back to your memory and it's like it's recalled it's recalled through that sound definitely yeah

4:28Claire:i think it's fascinating that's the it's that step further which was why i think it needs more explanation but yes let's talk about how you got into it and yes where did you start when you were a kid i assume you didn't know that sonic branding i did not okay well tell you what i didn't know that sonic branding existed as a kid but i i was one of those children that would incessantly repeat jingles so really i grew up in australia and there's like a bunch of jingles from when i was a child uh there was only australians would know this but there was a product called aeroplane jelly and there was a song that would go with it i like aeroplane jelly and apparently as like a three-year-old i would like just sing that non-stop around the house yeah and as well as a lot of ads in the 80s that i i grew up with in australia that all had music and sound associated it was that more of a thing then i can think of like my childhood in the 80s i can think of loads of advertising jingles whereas i can't it was now it was i think the heyday of jingles um when you look into the history of it it definitely like it started in the 1930s and it was very big on radio then it went away with the advent of television and then in the 70s of 80s they really came back and i think a lot of that is also ties in with the kind of birth of the music video so around the time that like music on tv was an exciting thing in the 80s advertising started to like switch back to using a lot more music yeah and jingles became the thing yeah so i was you You know, I was always singing jingles apparently too much to my parents.

6:04I was driving them crazy. And my mother reminded me of this just a few years ago. She's like, you know, this is what you used to like. You didn't sing regular songs.

6:12Claire:You just sang TV ads. That's so funny, isn't it? And, you know, and I realize now that it was just because, you know, TV was always on at home and that was what I heard. And these were all very hooky tracks that you just, they get, they're short, they get embedded into your head yeah maybe i had mildly adhd and i just had to latch onto that sound and repeat it anyway so i was actually that's i was reading an article the other day about house music and adhd and how it can regulate that totally a thing yeah it's really it's totally a thing i think about that a lot so anyway uh as a child i you know and also i you know i was definitely a kid that was very much into music my parents forced me to play an instrument that wasn't into which was the piano um and i did that for many years i didn't i didn't pursue it after that but i do realize that that definitely cemented some fundamental block in in my personality as a child because when i returned to messing around with with music software all the piano stuff came back and i was like oh i'm glad i know how to do this because it's still there even though i hadn't touched a piano in in many many years i was definitely understanding music and how it works yeah so i uh in i think around high school i became i was always someone who was like illustration i thought i was going to be a comic book artist i was really big into comic books um in high school and i thought i wanted to go to art school and become a real comic book artist which parents weren't super keen on um but they you know they they supported in me to try and pursue the creative arts that's brilliant I mean that in itself is fantastic yeah I think I was I was lucky in that my mother was also someone who she's Japanese and so Japanese culture comic books manga it's a thing yeah um so my mom was also someone who is very good at drawing um so we should draw together she reads a lot of comic books uh as well so it was something when i said i wanted when i would do this my mom was supportive my dad less so he's like that's not a real job that's what yeah if i had to tell my parents i wanted to do that they'd think i'd totally lost it totally yeah yeah my dad's someone that just cannot understand 2d illustration as an entertainment category at all he just doesn't it doesn't compute in his brain so i'm definitely got a little bit more from my mother's side there but yeah so they supported me I ended up getting into a university in Australia called the College of Fine Arts which has now got a completely different name called it's now the University of New South Wales Art and Design which doesn't sound anywhere near as cool as the College of Fine Arts.

8:59Yeah College of Fine Arts is good and that's in that's in Sydney Sydney yeah it's in the middle of Sydney and it's it's a really traditional art school but I was one of the first maybe with the first year of the second year of a new degree back then in the year 2001 which was the bachelor of digital media brand new degree which now when you think about I'm like that's a very silly name but it was their first attempt to create a digital focused degree within the school and what they actually just did was they combined a film degree and a media studies degree kind of together. Once we started it, it was like, oh, this is basically, we're doing film.

9:41Yes. And there was like a couple of - A kind of emotion and kind of do, yeah.

9:45Claire:And there was like, and some emphasis on other digital creative art software. Like we did a little bit of a Pro Tools. So there's a little bit of audio editing in there and various other multimedia software packages back then, all of which are like things that people don't use anymore. macro media director and yeah and like it's i was i remember being so into it at the time and thinking this is all going to change the world like none of that exists anymore flash animation yes all of that so i you know got into art school realized very quickly that i was not as good at illustration as i thought i was and i started how did that feel that must have been it was actually really really it really caught me off guard because you you grow up being the drawing guy it's like i was always in every school that i that i was in i was always the kid that drew and and i was i always thought i was good at it and you know i i remember at 16 i you know a couple of pages of a comic that i wrote got it published in a compilation and everything so i always thought like I was good enough and then in first year uh drawing class in college I was like I am the worst person in the class wow that's a big part of your identity yeah it was it was like this whole identity thing was taken away from me and then when we were doing life drawing and much more traditional um illustration lessons I realized that there was also this from an academic point of view what is considered high art and low art and the type of art that i was good at was low art that's crazy isn't it that grading system but you get it now like i get it i 100 i 100 understand it and i understand why it's taught like that and in rightfully so my illustration professors at the time were trying to break me out of my idea of like you can't just draw dc comics and marvel comic style stuff and was driving me towards if you like drawing muscular men in typhine outfits you should probably try and look at the masters and it's like because those artists they they modeled their style on the masters so like i you know i did i gave it a really good go and and you're talking about renaissance yes renaissance art and like just even like learning techniques that just weren't like traditional pencil and then ink which is what i was doing at the time but I you know I very quickly realized that like I just wasn't at the same level at everyone else that was at you know within this art school because this was all the best illustrators and artists from around the country and that was a big hit to my confidence and took out my sense of identity a lot but I did love being in art school so like that was still like I still felt like I'm in the right place but I think this isn't my special this is my thing yeah and I started being more interested in the digital stuff that we were doing since it was a digital degree I was definitely someone that dabbled in messing around with building computers and playing a lot of video games and hacking video games and things like that when I was uh when I was a teenager so like a lot of the computer stuff came very naturally to me I found that stuff easy when we were doing things like flash animation and you know coding and macromedia director that stuff was really easy so I felt like oh that stuff I was like top of the class no worries about this but I still had trouble trying to figure out what my my specialty or my niche was yeah um and you know I finished the degree where it was an interesting one because I think we all came out of that degree with varying different skill sets a couple of people went off to work in the film industry um i think two guys out of my year that graduated moved to the u.s ended up working one of them work at disney still works at disney now one of them works at pixar um so like some some guys like really went all the way out and made it a lot of the rest of us kind of came out not sure where we should be going career wise and i think the majority of us because of at the time there was this kind of promise back in australia that there was going to be a big hollywood oh australia was going to become the second hollywood was okay yeah was this yeah so you had lots of investment there was there was for a moment a lot of investment from u.s film companies in the australian market and they made a few movies in australia notably like the matrix trilogy yeah but then after that it just yeah classic movies But then the industry just changed because I think the tax breaks changed or the exchange rate wasn't working out.

14:32But they kind of packed up and left. And like there was there was no industry. There was no Hollywood number two in Australia anymore. So a lot of the people came out of our degree, didn't know what else we could do. And the majority of us started working at advertising agencies. Yeah, that makes sense. so getting into advertising was maybe the like it was kind of the perfect transition from doing a degree where we you know did a little bit of film editing we did a little bit of illustration graphic design you know sound design everything when you go into an advertising agency you need a wide amount of skill sets as a creative so that very quickly was like oh cool this is this is something i can do i'd never there was no intention from the beginning to be like i want

15:16Claire:to work in advertising so how did you how did you find out about your mates doing it and how did you get their attention as well oh that's a really good it's still competitive yeah i so the traditional thing for advertising creatives because you definitely get the type of guys that like really wanted to do advertising from the beginning they might have studied a more advertising focused degree yeah build up an advertising portfolio they go to portfolio nights they go and show off their stuff to agency to try and get recruited as juniors i didn't do any of that i because i wasn't interested in advertising at the time i was more interested in creating skate videos and graffiti videos this is 2003 so it's like very much of the moment we definitely so i at the time i was uh living in a spot in sydney called surrey hills um and the house that we lived in had a little garage that kind of came out to a back alley and we had turned that garage into basically a kind of studio a couple of macs in there um we had a bunch of camera equipment that we were just mostly just going with our friends to shoot skate videos and that's so cool take videos of like guys you know doing graffiti in spots they really shouldn't be doing it but it was a lot of fun at the time definitely but doing like through that and just kind of the the friendship groups that that we had at the time um and like posting this stuff on very very early youtube caught the attention of just a couple of industry people in advertising particularly not the big advertising agencies but some of the smaller ones that were starting to focus on what would you know back then was definitely not called user generated content, but just like interesting new things that people were doing digitally online.

17:06And -

17:07Claire:Trying to tap into that sort of youth culture and all that kind of thing. So that was kind of what led me to making content that was more advertiser focused because we had one guy at a very small agency that liked some of the skate videos that we were making. And he was like, hey, can you do that again? But you guys need to be carrying these beers in your hands. so it was like very early attempts at like viral marketing yeah so we're playing around with that and it was you know literally we're just shooting the videos and making sure the six pack of beers were in the background did you make much money through that was it it was it was peanuts but at the time we thought it was great because it was like definitely you know here's a few thousand dollars go make some videos and we're like we're getting paid and they're giving us free beer to just make skate videos but we you know quickly realized like there was a lot of fun it was a lot of fun to do that agency gave us a little bit more work um similar to that and probably only took about six months before my housemate and partner at the time and i decided like oh we should we should make this our thing like we should we should really focus on no one else is doing it um so we we started making more content like that we started reaching out to other smaller digital agencies and just sending us stuff you're like hey we we make stuff like this we're making like some music videos for some some small bands at the time as well uh so it was kind of like combination portfolios of like here's some music video stuff and here's some beer ads that we made we did this ad for a torch brand um there's a torch manifest like a hat a flashlight as they call them in the u.s called ever ready dolphin and the i think ever ready yes that's Right.

18:50So they had one product, the Dolphin, which was the whole idea of it was like, it's unbreakable. You can't break this torch. Yeah, you can. We definitely could. But we made a whole bunch of videos of us like throwing it off a building or sending it downstairs and driving over with a car and making just ridiculous videos of how unbreakable this torch was. and there was like it was i think it was a very small budget that we were working with for that one because it was just literally just throwing torches in places that they don't belong and um

19:26Claire:that campaign did very very well it was like a really early viral hit campaign um for the agency that we were friends with at the time and that was the one so that was the one that like was stood out it took was taken really seriously and not long after that uh the company that commissioned us on that asked us to come join them they essentially bought out my company like because my you know we had set it up as a small business at the time and I got acquired by this agency that's a really smart move it was it was it was great I realized later in life that I'm like I should have been asking for a lot more money yeah because I didn't know at the time um it was essentially you're in worth I suppose no I don't know idea no idea so but it was you know essentially it was our first real jobs because up till then we'd just been doing kind of contract work the videos and making club flyers uh you know just just a lot of like basic club yeah club lights that was so much fun amazing and like menus for restaurants just it was just kind of you know odd job design work yeah um and then we got hired through the acquisition to to this agency and i suddenly had the title of creative director and i'm like i don't know what a creative director does so it yeah that was like my first step into a real role at the time the the company that i worked for that acquired us was a what they called a digital agency that was doing a kind of mixture of web design and when i say web design it's kind of like like big enterprise web design hard-coded stuff so what year was this this is this would have been 2006 or seven something like that so digital is a very yes area at that point as well yeah it was it was it was totally you know that anything that was on television was like seen as like real advertising and then digital was like this kind of new frontier yeah and it was a real wild time because like was when probably i would say that web design was the most interesting because people were doing really really wacky things with it and this agency was like that they really wanted to be known as being like a real digital uh specialist agency and doing interesting experimental stuff so we were doing things for like we worked with johnny walker uh to build this uh online experience that was like gonna promote um one of their new products and what we ended up building was like something that was similar to a do you know the graphic adventure games of like the 80s like leisure suit larry i do i do not know okay leisure suit larry was a very very uh risque graphic adventure game from like uh the 80s from a company called sierra okay i remember sierra yes it's like it was one of those games like you kind of like point and click your mouse and like look at things and do things and leisure suit larry was like the adult one and it had very adult themes but our pitch to johnny walker was like Like, oh, we can make this game where it's like you have to like get into the Johnny Walker club.

22:34But it's not easy to get into. So you have to like do these like illicit things to try and get in. And it's amazing that a company like Diageo approved that at the time. Because I think about it now. I'm like, this game would never be approved. But they did because it was low risk at the time because it was digital only. And that was seen as like people that were on the internet were like it was new. It was cutting edge. You were expecting to see weird stuff. So we were doing real fun things like that as well as doing more serious things. We were building like websites for government services.

23:12One weird one that we did, which was a long, big part of my life, was like building a battlefield training simulator for the Australian Defence Force. Wow. Which I feel very strange about later in my life. But at the time, I was like, this is so cool.

23:28Claire:Well, yeah, true. you'd see it more as the gaming side exactly because we felt like we were building a real-time strategy video game yeah um which was you know officially released by the military and it was very fun at the time i think back in and now i'm like i worked for the military industrial complex that is i don't know about it there was a fair bit of work also weird in the space of subversive cigarette advertising what's subversive so cigarette advertising for cigarette brands that was not official so is this at the point where cigarette advertising was banned yes they needed to get ways of getting into right so a very i'm not going to say which company it was but a very prominent cigarette advertising or cigarette company yeah which is still a very prominent one at the time um had contracted our agency through another company this is how they kind of get around it.

24:22Claire:So you actually have a company that's a secret advertising agency to get into people's heads when it's been banned? Yes. Wow. So it was, it was subversive advertising. It was very strange the way that they went about it. But the idea was that we would create content that had the cigarette brand in the content. So it wasn't obviously advertising. It was kind of like product placement within other content. So like, for example, if I saw a movie when I was, I don't know a teenager in the 90s and someone smoking Marlboros I then it's that to start smoking Marlboros which happened which we would say that's a real thing that is a real thing um they I think the cigarette brands were masters of that yeah back in the day but we we did stuff like that which the company eventually stopped doing because the company the employees kind of riled up against and they were like I don't think we should be doing this kind of work wow um I I didn't mind it at the time, but I do, I do remember it like build the company a lot of money.

25:19Claire:Yeah. But it was really kind of this advertising wild west where we were just doing, every project was so completely different and we're coming up with ideas on the fly. And the amount of like really, really strange ideas that got approved and we went ahead and did was a lot of fun. The sad thing is like most of this stuff doesn't exist anywhere anymore because, you know, it was on the internet. it now those links no longer work you can use the wayback machine and like you can find some of it but like all the images don't load and yeah um i don't think anything has been really kept on on hard drives or backups anymore so i feel like there's like a good yeah it disappeared yeah a good 10 years of my uh life there's mostly doesn't exist anymore which is the i think the sad thing about that is the early 2000s uh internet internet stuff internet design stuff so yeah that's uh this is a getting to a long way to get to sonic branding and what was next how is that it's but can see how it all builds into yeah so so after doing that kind of fun internet advertising stuff i did a lot more traditional advertising stuff because a lot of the work that we did with the digital stuff was getting a lot of uh recognition and prominence we won a bunch of awards raised the stock of us as individuals made us easier for for us to go and do contract work at the big agencies yeah so i you know i worked in a few of the bigger agencies around australia uh doing more traditional advertising work but the funny thing was i think that the while i call it more traditional advertising work it was also going the other way like our digital work was melding with with what tv advertising was becoming social media became a thing um a bunch of the advertising digital agencies at the time rebranded themselves as social agencies and and you know social campaigns became became like the thing that a lot of advertising agencies wanted to say oh yeah we do social yeah um so they started hiring people like me who had done a lot of digital work to experts in the field or whatever you want to call it yeah so doing that doing a lot of uh advertising for the bigger companies um i think i got to this point so probably like in eight or nine years into my role of a creative in advertising that I felt like I was hitting a creative wall in that.

27:47And again, now that I'm retelling this, I realized why it was. It was like, it was a lot of fun doing all the cutting edge digital stuff at the beginning. And then once we got to the point where I felt like we were just like coming up with the same campaigns on social for different brands over and over i felt i did start feeling kind of creatively depleted yeah and uh there was this club of creative directors at the time we used to have this thing called creative social and a bunch of us would get together once a month and would talk about interesting creative stuff at the time i realized this group of people were the same people that had different company names and different tumblr titles every half year so it It was like this musical chairs game.

28:31Like, oh, is this what I want to do for the next 20 or 30 years of my life?

28:35Claire:Yeah, not settling in that kind of. I just felt like I needed a change. And I jumped on the first opportunity that came my way, which was a music company called Pandora, which at the time, if you're from the US, you would know it was the world's first music streaming company, like legitimate music streaming company. They called it Pandora Internet Radio originally. and this is pre-spotify yeah um it was the the first company that was doing like 24 hour music streams on the internet that were had the correct radio licenses yeah um and they had expanded to australia uh at the time and there was a role for the creative director slash uh head of design and i was like that sounds cool music company i have no idea what i'm going to do there but i yeah i applied yeah and uh my boss after i got hired was telling me um afterwards the reason i got hired and it was the way i applied so i applied to that role by making a video about myself which completely felt incredibly normal to me at the time because like yeah that's what i was good at expressing myself through like a medium like that um and i made a people would send a normal cv exactly yeah i did i also did send the cv but i sent this video first and it was the video was essentially me just making my case for like why i think why i think i would be a great lead for this company yeah and it was a bit tongue-in-cheek and it was a little bit not taking myself too seriously but i was just trying to like get my personality across and the team liked that video so much that they reached out and had me into coming for an interview you and it turned out they hadn't even looked at my cv so it was the it was the video only and that got me in to have the conversation with the md i do i will never show anyone because i find it very embarrassing but i do still have it i am it's very funny i think uh but yeah i that i got the job after meeting the md and i ended up working there for a really long time it was uh seven years by the end of the run.

30:48And, you know, well, the job started in Sydney, but it actually moved me to the US. I moved to San Francisco. The company was kind of really going through this immense change. Like when I started, it was when they were expanding the company internationally. They went from being a internet radio company to an on-demand music streaming service like Spotify, because that was the competitor that came up at the time. There was like mergers.

31:13Claire:like spotify just to get everyone signing up to listen to streaming music it wasn't on the commercial side at all yes and it was uh and it was advertiser like ad supported was the bottle they were they didn't have a subscription model at the time but they were really good at like selling the media media space on it the company went through like several acquisitions at the time as well and it's just like a lot of change in in seven years so i kind of really saw this rise and fall of the company ultimately got acquired by a company as well called SiriusXM. It's now still SiriusXM and the product is still similar somewhat.

31:49I went in to be the creative director, but I ended up running a team that was originally like a production team that did everything. So like we were a design and production team that did everything from creating the ads that ran on the platform for the brands to updating the corporate website to making presentation slides for the CEO. Like the team, yeah, we did everything. It was just, we were just kind of like a, we will do anything for you creative team, which was great because everyone loved what we did. And we had a big team of like a lot of people who had a lot of talent in different areas, but it occurred to me that we had a lot of people on the team that had a music and sound specialty because where we were, it was in Oakland, California, which is right next to San Francisco.

32:42A lot of musicians in the Bay area. And because it was a, you know, internet music company, it was, it seemed to be attractive to local musicians and artists for their day job. So a lot of the guys that worked on the team were, you know, award-winning artists and releasing records or producing records as their kind of night job. And then coming into work at Pandora during the day oh wow okay which was super cool and like these are some of the coolest people that that i ever met and i couldn't help but think that like we weren't making the best use of everyone's talents yeah and having come away from this world of advertising agencies as i called myself back then like an i'm an agency refugee i've like left the world of agencies yeah but then i kind of thought hey maybe i can turn this team into an agency and then it because it just it did felt like something that would be better for the team to do more interesting work and there wasn't anything like that anyone was doing with no one yes i and as far as i could see at the time there was nothing else like it and the company at the time was also very empowering from the bottom up it's like if you had a plan and an idea the company would generally be like let's try it out you know you want some resources go for it um so i kind of pitched this idea of like rebranding the team turning us into a studio that was like more advertiser focused yeah and instead of being a team that at the time you know we used to take requests from from advertisers and like you know make ads for them we would then instead pitch concepts and pitch ideas to the advertisers you know so we could like really take advantage of the audio format and do something really interesting because at the time the a lot of the ads that we used to run on pandora just sounded like regular radio ads that were just running digitally so they sounded like the traditional radio spot which in

34:33Claire:America has a very specific style yeah um they'll do it you know so there was a lot of like over the top sound effects and it's like trying to get your attention yeah and in the medium of digital radio which is like mostly listened to on headphones it's very a personal experience it's very it's a very different headspace from listening to a car radio or just like the radio in the background yeah i just never thought about ways of listening to radio and exactly so it's like when you think about like like a car radio you'll be you know listening in the background the volume is probably a little bit down you're listening with two or three people in the car you're probably having conversation so you to have someone notice your ad you have to really be over the top yeah which is why like you know traditional fm radio has that over the top style to try and get your attention but when you're listening to a music platform like pandora or spotify or these or any of these, you're probably listening yourself.

35:26You probably got your headphones on. And that is a very different like mental environment to be able to speak. Like you literally, you're the voice inside their ears. So we were like, you know, if you want to reach these audiences, you need to do something that is going to speak to them in that headspace. So it's like, you know, we should like, don't shout. Maybe we should whisper into the ear. You know, we've got two ears, which means we can do simulated 3D sound. They can do stereo sound, can do something really interesting and creative with that audio. So we spent a lot of time going out to brands and like teaching them about the power of sound and what we call at the time, like we called a theater of the mind.

36:04And we had a lot of traction with just this kind of, I guess you call it now thought leadership. At the time it was just like, we call it the road show and we just go out and spend a lot of time with brands and agencies and just talk about audio and the sound medium and how to rethink about it because you call it the theater of the

36:21Claire:mind and that would be the the way of you speaking to agencies to tell them what it was about yes and it was like and theater of the mind was the the way in which we wanted people to think about audio because the i think the simple way of thinking about audio advertising is like there's a little bit of music someone has a vo and then there is a call to action at the end yeah and like and that was 99 % of the stuff out there and we were like no you have a sacred space with your audience and for like 30 seconds you have the opportunity to tell them something that they can maybe hold on to as a memory for a long time the opportunity is there to tell a story there's opportunities there to like tell a series of stories you know we had some interesting new technology that allow us to do like sequential advertising so like we know that this listeners heard part one of the story maybe they're going to hear the second ad after a while the third ad after a while and we can build up like sequential stories over time yeah um we were also able to like target people based on like their postcode or uh target people based on like the area that they might be in so then we could do versions of ads like spoke to their local area a little bit creepy at the time because it was still fairly new yeah sort of micro targeting yes but that was really fun in audio because then we were able to do interesting things that would really subvert people around having these kind of surprise and delight moments where you would mention their local cafe or you would mention like the auto dealership that's like in their area.

37:52At the end of what sounds like what would be a national campaign, which people really responded to well and it became a really fun thing that we were doing. So when we were going out to like telling all these brands and agencies about the theater of the mind and the power of sound, we really started to focus in a little bit more on like, what are the distinct ways that a brand can really show up in audio? And the natural gravitation of that was to move towards sonic branding,

38:21Claire:the sound of a brand, which, you know, at the time, there was a handful of big brands, like we mentioned before, like a McDonald's that had already been doing that. But the vast majority of advertising in the US had never really explored sonic branding before. So McDonald's were one of the first that intentionally did it. I think they, yes. I mean, as a prominent brand, for sure. There are older examples that go back all the way to the radio times. the one that is often brought up in the US is NBC, which is the TV station, has a chime sound, which is the NBC sound, which interestingly has more to do with the way that they used to start the news broadcast and end the news broadcast on radio as just a signal to go.

39:14This is the beginning of the news and this is the end of the news. They've kept that chime sound all the way through to what NBC still is today. They use it a little bit less now. but McDonald's is definitely one that started using it interesting and funny stories around an urban legend around who actually created the McDonald's one it's been attributed to like several different artists, Justin Timberlake has been associated with it, Pharrell has been associated with it, the reality is it's a little bit more convoluted than that but those are artists that were involved with McDonald's advertising and I think they also So McDonald's definitely don't want to dispel any of those myths because it's like the power of those urban myths are also interesting.

39:56Right. But anyway, so the sonic branding thing became kind of like a real interest of ours. And having also, you know, being in a company that was so tech data and targeting focused. Yeah. It gave us a unique opportunity to go, hey, wait, if we take an ad and we put a sonic brand in it and then we take the same ad with no sonic brand in it. why don't we test you know over a period of time how responsive people are to the ad or how much they will remember it two or three months down the track and because this was a because this is a san francisco tech company they love testing that kind of stuff so we started testing effectiveness of sonic branding and it took off it became it was just became a real story within the company that they really loved um and it really resonated with a lot of clients and it became very much part of the narrative that the company was going out with on the power of of advertising in in audio particularly on pandora and we went from being this you know weird fledgling supporting the marketing efforts team you know to becoming the part of the revenue generating part of the company's like real core uh team as a you know not just from the point of view of like thought leadership but just you know bringing us in on decisions bringing us in on like some of the product decisions that were happening at the time so you know we we just felt our team was having more and more of an impact internally and before i knew it i you know i was going out and getting on stages and talking about sonic branding as if i was an expert on it but it was more like i feel like we just you were but But accidentally, it was like we just kind of, we fell backwards into it in a way that, in a way that was never the intention or the plan.

41:48We were never like, we're going to be, we're going to be the world's greatest sonic branding team. We were just kind of, it just ended up being the result.

41:55Claire:Any of those new areas, that kind of inevitably is what happens, isn't it? If you discover a new stuff, you don't intend to be the world's leading expert on it, but you're going to kind of accidentally become it. Yeah, yeah. so that that kind of became what our team was known for but became what i was known for and yeah and and before i knew it like i i realized that i was the guy i had i had a moment when i was um hanging out at an event not that different from a place like can uh with people from agencies and uh someone came up to me and someone who i hadn't met before was introducing we were going introduced to and they were like oh i know you you're the sonic branding guy and i was like i'd never had anyone say that to me like that before and i was like huh i guess i'm the sonic branding guy now um and then realized that like oh well if that's now what i'm known for it's like i should probably run with this like this is i don't i don't mind a difference on something you love totally by that point it really was something that became a bit of a obsession of mine but it's it's funny because i i think back and i'm like i i went to art school i'm like traditionally trained in the visual arts yeah and then now i'm in uh you know what would be the art of sound and the art of music with people isn't it sort of just different forms yes i think it is i think you know in the end the medium doesn't matter it's like it's like what is what it is you're trying to create and how are you trying to elicit specific emotions and specific vibes and specific actions in human beings and that whether it's through the medium of visuals when the medium of sound I do think it's all communication so how did you find massive music how did you because I mean yeah that's no that's that's that's a good question I after I worked at Pandora and having you know worked with a lot of big brands I wasn't sure whether I wanted to continue working in this kind of area of music and sound.

43:54I felt like maybe I needed to go in a different direction. I tried a couple of other companies in the kind of ad tech space, a few different startups because I did feel like I was still like advertising adjacent and I felt like that's where the focus of the tech industry was at the time. And having spent so much time in the Bay Area, I felt like that was the thing that I should do. and I really disliked working in some of these startups because the people were different and I realized what I actually really enjoyed about working at Pandora it wasn't the tech or the medium it was the people that I was working with and the people were music people yes okay and I realized that like oh maybe I just need to be around music people and that's what that's what gives me the kind of drive to to keep going and i so you know at the time i was speaking to some friends at other like music platforms competitive platforms to pandora um and some of the some other smaller streaming companies and it never really occurred to me to go to a sonic branding specialist company like massive music but i was having a conversation with a friend at the time and they were like you should why don't you just go and do the sonic branding thing like full-time like that's that seems that seems to be the thing that you enjoyed the most when you were working at pandora so i had a couple of conversations with different companies sonic branding is a very very niche space like there is not a lot of companies around the world that do it all of them all of the people know each other um it's a very very um intimate space um and it's a growing space it's it is a growing space it's definitely a growing space but it's also a space that is still not well understood by other adjacent industries but you know so once you start reaching out to a few people that are in you know specialist sonic branding agencies you start realizing that they're friends with all the others um and a few conversations very quickly led me to oh you should speak to the guys at massive music massive music are the best known in the space in terms of like uh the like globally known sonic branding companies definitely because it's it's probably the biggest yeah um with the most amount of offices around the world and like the portfolio it goes quite deep and large if you if you go to gemini um or any kind of ai platform and ask about which is a good sonic branding agency what's the best sonic branding agency that massive definitely comes up in there in the list so uh i feel vindicated when when we say that yeah we're definitely known in the space but uh i when i first interviewed with massive it went from you know just introducing ourselves to more interviews very quickly so it was like i think within the space of within the space of two weeks i had like five interviews really yeah it was really it just went really quick and i think my my second interview was with the cmo at the time or that was title at the time it was it went for 90 minutes and at the end of it he he said to me hey i would like to continue this conversation can we do the same time tomorrow wow and we had another conversation the next day and it went for like another 90 minutes wow and it was that's fantastic it was the longest the longest interview in succession of my life obviously works for you as well because you're just making sure it's the right move it definitely gave me a really good understanding for who the people were and i think that's what mattered the most to me and like whether these were the people that you you're going to work with how much you can actually vibe with them how much you understand each other and yeah that that was great because it would like both all the conversations that i had going in were very informal it was very much about like you know our backgrounds you know what we did you know and and what kind of projects that we're interested in we had we talked about a lot of things that were not really to do with sonic branding yeah but it was more you know talking about like cultural understanding talking about interesting things in the emerging tech spaces branding but it's where it's what why it's affected because it's the roots of everything yes exactly that's kind of how we i ended up at massive with just many many many long interviews yeah um and then coming on board which was about

48:25Claire:i want to say about two and a half years ago now what's your job today what's the good question i have my title is vp of partnerships which i don't actually know what what that means but what i do is i spend time with people who run brands or with agencies that uh work on on behalf of brands to really try and figure out how best for a brand to approach the world of audio that doesn't always mean that it should be a sonic logo it doesn't always mean it's like a sonic brand that we have to make it's more how can the brand really embody and take the emotional aspects of their brand and take their brand values and figure out how to best translate that in this medium and that could be through you know bespoke music that could be through a sonic logo that could be through a podcast that could be through any kind of anything that has a sound anything that has an opportunity to have a speaker how can the brand best show up in in that space yeah and these days every device in the world has a speaker yeah so this kind of opportunity for for brands to show up you know without a screen and just be like felt and understood and heard i think it's it's becoming the opportunity there is becoming bigger and the interesting thing i think is that there is no real one size fits all that that works for every brand across this medium so that's the fun part it's the strategy figuring out and figuring out what is the best way a brand can show up whether it's in a physical space whether it's in a digital space whether it's on someone's headphones or whether it's on the sound of an app the sound of a notification coming through figuring out what that is like that's actually my job yeah and then figuring that out the sound of a notification coming through i don't think most people would realize that that's that's a sonic brand yeah that's a sonic brand um so if anyone's ever used duolingo duolingo has a very specific notification sound and they they have a series of them that changes depending on how much you've been doing your duolingo lessons yeah um and i i think they're actually as a digital app brand probably one of the best at understanding how to best use audio because they have really really effective sounds that they use to create this kind of world of Duolingo.