Audio Branding

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...

“ There are a few perspectives from which you can see this. One would be you pay a premium price for a premium car or premium product in general. So basically, if you just look at the numbers, you pay for people like me at BMW, now doing this. But then also what you mentioned, you’re buying a premium product, you’re expecting a premium experience. And obviously sound, it can be, you can relate thi...

“ It’s just the way music is consumed. My kids went to summer camp, and they wanted to, like, bring music with them. But they’re not allowed to have electronic devices, like, they can’t bring a phone. And my son was, like, ‘Oh, I’ll just take my phone.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you don’t understand, like, you’re not going to have internet.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, how do I get the music from, like, Spo...

“ I can go back to when I was sixteen, and I was at a movie theater and I was watching a really great scene in a movie where the violinist was, like, moving his bows, you know, the camera was like panning around him. And I got to the end of that scene, and, like, he lifts his bow up, and I started clapping in the theater. And I realized that that film had just totally taken me out of the movie the...

“ So what we found out about the Flying Dutchman, for example, they’ve been in business for forty years and they simply didn’t know how to grow. But one thing I’d found out when I went to the original Flying Dutchman store is that people like to gather there, but they didn’t have anywhere inside the store to gather and sit down. Everyone sat down on the sidewalk and hung out outside. So that’s wha...

“ For example, like, even commercials, there’s that one commercial for the Indian casinos. And my wife loves the song, and she knows it’s actually a singer that’s produced it. And she always thinks about that casino, you know, she doesn’t gamble, but every time she hears that song, it goes back to that feeling like, oh yeah, it’s about the good time. It’s about, you know, gambling, right? So now w...

“ It’s one of the rare things. I know, Jodi, you know it ‘cause you’re, you’re literally like an ambassador of Podfest, but, um, it’s unusual when you share it with people like, ‘hey, the education could be some of the best you’ve ever seen.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, okay. I hear that all the time.’ It’s like, no, no, no. People prepare all year to showcase what they’ve got at Podfest. So, it is an...

“ So I got involved in YouTube first, uh, in ‘06, and then audio, I got involved in 2012. I started, like, paying attention in 2013, um, the summer of 2013. I really got heavily in podcasting ‘cause I saw the opportunity and what it could do for people. And like you said, I love voice. It’s a much more nuanced form of communication, but it’s so profound ‘cause, right now, um, even today, even thou...

“ All right, so this happens a lot is that brands will be, especially in agencies, they’ll be coming up on a new campaign and they’ll think, ‘Oh well, you know what, this campaign is going to launch at such date, I’ll throw some audio branding on there.’ And then, from the get-go, then they’re thinking about the audio brand as part of the campaign’s messaging, and that is not what you want to do....

“ That’s right, yeah, and to me, that’s one of the most important steps in the whole process is this research, brand assessment. And then you bring that research and assessment to life in the mood board, and that is what allows you to create something that is so customized to this brand, that it only works for this brand.” – Jon Brennan   This week’s guest is a lifelong audio producer who lov...

“ It’s got to look good, sound good, look good if it is video, but it’s got to sound good, good quality audio, good editing, and it’s got to have enough interesting information that people want to talk about what they heard or they have a pivotal moment or an a-ha or it changes their life. So, and that again is why I am so incredibly passionate about podcasting and just, in general, because, I don...