Audio Branding

“ So I’m in Chicago, I’ve quit my job, I’ve almost run out of money. You know, you’re young, you don’t care. And I met Robert, who’s now my co-founder. He had mixed a CD of mine a couple of years before through friends of friends. So we meet up, have a beer, and then he’s like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m spending all this money on IT every month,’ because he was a sound engineer. And he’s like, ‘But we’ve...

“ Listen, I got unbelievably lucky with YouTube, and I don’t know why. I still really, I mean, I know why in theory, like, people have been like, well, ‘You provide XYZ,’ but I don’t know why I get to do this. Like, I know that I have certain qualities that lend themselves to my strengths, that lend themselves to this medium, but it’s completely and utterly luck. Putting out good videos, having a...

“ In February of ’21 I just randomly started. I just filmed a video, and I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ Well, it was February 11th, and then February 15th we were on our way to pick up my dog, my puppy at the time – she was you know, nine weeks old – and I started getting notifications on my phone and I was like, ‘Oh, weird, I must have left some somebody, like, a comment on YouTube or something.’...

“ I think people forget that. I think they forget that there’s a person behind the music and that they need to share that with their audience now more than ever, because if people hear your song and they like your song, they’re gonna go down a rabbit hole. And if they can go down that hole and come across you being genuine, being authentic, actually showing vulnerability, they’re gonna fall in lov...

“ I said, ‘Well, uh, my team and I would love to see the video,’ and the woman at Lost Highway said, ‘All right, let me pop a VHS in FedEx, it’ll be there tomorrow morning.’ So, we watched the Johnny Cash Hurt music video and once we’d wiped a tear out of our eyes, I got on the phone. I said, ‘Retta, put us in, coach. We want to play.’ And the rest is history. It was and remains still the most ico...

“ But if you think about it, like if all 360,000 of these, like, law firms, not lawyers, law firms had their own brand out there, who’s gonna rise to the top? The ones who are producing content that provides value, and then the ones who are producing content that has some good production value, and are the ones who are producing content that has some good entertainment value. ‘Cause I think that’s...

“ I don’t care what I have to do, they are not going to ignore me. So I would get up, I would walk around the room, I would stand on a chair in the middle of the room, I would shout, I would run, I would scream, I would kick things. If I was mad at the Devil, I would kick something. And if I was happy for Jesus, I would run around, woo hoo hoo! And I mean, people would just come out and be like, ‘...

“ That brings up a whole other point, which is the power of a voice’s quality to bring a brand to life. A lot of clients are, like, just hire voiceover and just have them say the copy. And it’s just, like, there’s a place for Gilbert Gottfried and there’s a place for, you know, John Lithgow. And I’m not saying we would use either of those, but you know, if I’m doing a commercial on a cancer care c...

“ And one year, Ariel [Detergent] was, like, you know that 95 % of the people in India still think laundry is a woman’s job. And Ariel was just, like, gosh, that doesn’t seem like it’s, this was 2017 or ‘18 at the time, [and] they’re like, that doesn’t seem right. Like, it’s, haven’t we all moved past that? So they created a campaign they called ‘Share the Load.’ And what they did is they went out...

“ So, when you’re speaking to somebody, hear them before, hear them during, [and] hear them after. And earn the right to have the conversation. It’s like you’re just always hearing them and you’re always double-checking yourself, and that’s when we were just talking about a few minutes ago. If you’re speaking to somebody and you’ve uncovered something, and it’s like, hey, is this still real? Is th...

This week’s guest is the creator and host of the Your Message Received podcast, a groundbreaking platform with more than 125 episodes where he empowers executives, businesses, and individuals through impactful storytelling and strategic communication training. With over twenty-five years of experience in media, spanning broadcast, radio, digital, and streaming, his career has been driven by a pass...

“ There’s three groups of people. When there’s a crisis, there are three people you need to talk to, including your employees, your stakeholders, your suppliers, whatever, and the public… You’ve got to get out there and tell your employees it’s okay, you’re going to be safe, and you need to tell the managers beneath you that, hey, you’re going to be okay, here’s what we’re going to do. But if you’...

“ Communicating is something at surface level: we’re communicating, here’s the words, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, go, see it. That’s the message, right? But what you want is meaningful interaction. There’s a quote in my book, and I could read it for you in a minute, but the idea is to shift from transaction to transformation. I could give you all kinds of data, but it’s not going to transf...

“ And to bring it back to sound, I find this is also fascinating, when we put things on vibration. So yes, your thoughts are powerful. And when you think something, but you also speak it or sing it, when you put it on vibration, you bring it into the physical world amplified, and word is powerful. If you ask the Indigenous Australians, the Aboriginals here, they tell you, the wise ones tell you th...

“ When I’m in there working with leaders, it’s around communication, and how do they communicate initially with themselves? What’s that like? And then with the people around them, because without communication, communication underpins our ability to be successful in anything that we do. When I say successful, I mean to, you know, to get the results we’re hoping to get. And whether that’s in a pers...

“ I am a huge advocate for trailers for podcasts for a number of reasons. I can talk about the marketing aspects of it, but first, let’s do the content. So, I think they should be short. And the reason I say I think, even though I claim to be an authority on this topic, is because there is no right and there is no wrong. You can do whatever the hell you want and that’s the beauty of podcasting. Ho...

“ Yeah, for me personally, I love anything that tells me... I find myself drawn to shows that are like, ‘We’re gonna make something interesting that’s not interesting at all.’ And then they’re like, ‘Let’s talk about broccoli.’ And then they’re like, ‘Let’s talk about cement.’ And then the next episode is, ‘Let’s talk about neon.’ And I just love that. Maybe they do the history of it. Maybe they w...

“ Sound is probably one of the most prevalent things that we focus on with our children at Operation Smile. And you know, they’re so thankful that they have, they work as hard on their homework for speech therapy as they do in school, right? And, you know, as both of us sort of being maybe teased and bullied in school, maybe we were actually, excited about doing our homework. And maybe we did stud...

“ Anyone who needs surgery around the world will be able to do it and get it and survive from it. And we’re making significant impacts by delivering cleft surgery care and by educating and training more and more people each week. The numbers just increase and we’re about to... launch something very special as this podcast is being aired, where we’re going to really build and strengthen one hundred...

Artificial intelligence has come a long way over just the past few years. It can hold conversations and manage social media, it can create art and edit videos, and it can even write blogs (though not this one). Every aspect of our lives has been touched by AI in one way or another, and that’s particularly true for sound. While many podcasters, including some of my guests, now use AI tools for rese...

“ It’s interesting that you say that because, you know, you’re back to what we were talking about a second ago with why people don’t have their own song brand or why they don’t do that, because all of my clients are early adopters. It takes courage, right? Even back in the days when I was doing it, I called it the theme shop, where we would come in and do it, write a song for the organization as a...

“ Yeah, so I started writing songs for speakers to walk on stage to their own song, and then when they had their sizzle reel, people would hear their song again. And then if they went to a training, you know, they would hear the song again. And so there was this audio consistency that also had the effect of lifting the person, the speaker themselves. They would say to me, you know, ‘When I walk on...

“ Don’t just produce a single ad, produce three or four ads that are all related to each other in a campaign, because you get that familiarity, you get that consistency, you get that storytelling narrative that spans a single spot and starts to reach across the entire campaign, and it’s consistent across touchpoints. But then when it comes to the sound, they don’t apply exactly the same rationalit...

“ Does that sound like a robot or does that sound like AI? Does that sound synthetic? Does that sound human? When we think about it, we can’t tell. But when we rely more on those primal, very basic human responses, we can tell. And what’s fascinating to me is even after we told people which voice was which, they still couldn’t tell the difference between two voices. Um, but again, on a subconsciou...

“ What I did is also in the beginning with my prototypes, I did those science-fiction sounds. I watched all the science-fiction shows and I was like, yeah, let’s get those spaceships in there, I need to do spaceships. And it was fun, I’ll be honest. My wife hated it. When she was in the car with me, she was like, ‘Hey, everybody’s looking, please. No, no, everybody’s looking at us.’ But then when...