Sounding off in Brazil

I was honoured this week to speak in São Paolo, Brazil, at the 22nd Semana Internacional da Criação Publicitària (International Week of Advertising Creativity). My hosts were Brazilian advertising legends and top guns from the Long Play agency, Prandini and Luna. (In Brazil, when you’re famous you become known by one name, usually your surname. I knew the custom from their footballers, but I never realised it happens in business too.) A more charming, hospitable and clearly highly effective duo it would be hard to imagine.

I spoke twice, once to a full house of 400 students in the afternoon and then at 10pm to the same number of industry professionals. The reaction was powerful and positive both times. The students asked about the similarities between the effects of music and the effects of drugs (nice to know students are the same everywhere!) and the professionals were interested particularly in how The Sound Agency works with - or in spite of - advertising agencies. I recounted some of our experiences and confirmed that for now we find it far more productive to deal directly with the client, because agencies simply don’t understand sound: they may pretend they do and try to marginalise our work, or they may see us as a threat and make it a power struggle. The best agencies, of course, are curious and open, wanting to learn. I’m sure that in 10 years every agency will have the skills we have in The Sound Agency and will design and create with sound just as they do today with form, colour, light and texture. However, for the time being, we have skills that they don’t and so we need buy-in at CEO, or at least CMO level in order to be effective.

Although Brazil has such a wonderful musical heritage, the use of sound in branding and in public spaces is currently somewhat chaotic. For example, standing in the customs queue at 7 am in São Paolo airport, I was assailed by three Samsung plasma screens suspended from the ceiling. Were they showing beautiful images of Brazil to the tune of some soothing bossa nova or some irresistible samba? No, the selected content to welcome visitors to Brazil was... Yo! MTV Raps. It would be hard to think of something more inappropriate in that place at that time.

It turns out that these screens are the norm. The city has a local ordnance banning outdoor advertising, which makes for a slightly surreal experience. Not only is it vast - some 18 million people live there and it stretches away in all directions as far as the eye can see - but the only visual messages you encounter there are from graffiti artists. No ads in bus shelters; no billboards; no poster sites. As a result, the digital signage industry has gone indoors, so screens are everywhere inside the buildings and the vehicles of São Paolo. Many have sound on, and I sincerely hope that my talk to the local advertising community has given them some food for thought about the implications in terms of arbitrary, incongruous and hostile soundscapes.

I do believe that by designing visual and auditory environments to work together, we can create a quantum leap in powerful and positive customer experience. But we need to start now, before the world ends up like that customs queue in São Paolo.

I made some good new friends in São Paolo and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. On the way back I was lucky enough to marvel at one of the most spectacular sights I have ever seen: a vast, four-pronged thunderstorm in Northern Brazil at sunset, stretching from the ground to way above our cruising height of 35,000 feet. Splashed with golds and reds at the top, the cloud’s lower blackness was illuminated every few seconds from within by violent stabs of lightning. We changed course to avoid these potentially lethal monsters and I’m very glad I wasn’t underneath them. But from a few miles away they were possibly the most beautiful and dramatic things I’ve ever seen. I only enjoyed this because the in-flight entertainment system was broken. Makes me wonder what I’ve missed over the years outside the windows of other planes...

Sound at TED

TED (www.ted.com) is an extraordinary conference. Its acronym stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, and it brings together 1,600 fascinating people, and around 50 brilliant speakers, in a hothouse of ideas and connections. It's a highlight of my year to be back in Monterey. Already (on day 3 of 4) this is turning out to be a vintage TED. Sessions will be posted on the TED website in the coming weeks - I urge you to bookmark it and check regularly because there's been some stunning stuff.

This morning a highlight of the entire week happened, and it was about sound. MIT Labs' Tod Machover gave a fantastic presentation about the work they are doing in Boston, ranging from an ever-expanding range of new instruments designed to engage children in music, to their new Hyperscore software that makes composing an option for everyone in the world, to new work on music as therapy for those with both mental and physical illness or disability.

After debunking the cod science of the Mozart Effect (see my book for more on that red herring) Tod gave three postulates:

1 music is better if you make it
2 music is transformative
3 music shows who you really are

Along the way he covered the Toy Symphony, the Brain Opera, and the exciting new work Death and the Powers, which premieres in Monaco in September 2009 and sounds incredible.

The talk climaxed in a performance by Dan, a patient at Tewksbury Hospital MA who has cerebral palsy but is able to perform his compositions live thanks to a personal instrument (linked to Hyperscore software) that reads his facial and head movements and interprets them to drive tempo, phrasing, arrangement and so on. It was deeply moving to see this young man's movements become deliberate, precise and even beautiful and he drove this unique combination of technology and music, giving us a performance no-one in the hall will ever forget. The long standing ovation, and tears in many eyes, testified to the joy of seeing a human being liberated from a physical prison and allowed to express his whole identity in this wonderful way.

Hats off to Tod, whom I look forward to meeting in London next time he's over. I commend MIT Labs' work to you - check them out on the web and be inspired!

DOOH idea

The Digital Out Of Home (aka public or in-store TV) industry is booming, and The Sound Agency is flattered indeed to be featured in DOOH guru Adrian Cotterill's blog here; also I did a long interview with David Wiseman that he's boiled down and run on his Minicom blog here. They're running a competition with some signed copies of my book as prizes.

I believe the digital signage/DOOH industry is approaching a crossroads with a major decision to make about sound. It can either add to the noise of modern living, turning on speakers in lifts, shops and even toilets and driving even more people to take refuge in their iPods, or it can make visuals work with audio to create a carefully-crafted, pleasing, appropriate, effective environment in every space. This means creating the right background first, with ambient visuals (they don't even have to move!) teamed with ambient audio, ideally generative. Then and only then should designers start to think about foreground sound, delivering it according to our four Golden Rules: make it optional (or at least targeted); make it appropriate; make it valuable; and test it often.

The analogy is creating a picture: you make the background first, and then you make the foreground object stand out by using contrast but always acknowledging the tones, mood, elements and movement in the background.

I hope to see and hear a world of moving wallpaper and helpful, appropriate foreground content that offers us guidance or advice just when we need it in either visual or aural form, or both, as appropriate.

The dark path, of course, leads to noise (in every sense) - a random mush of competing messages that bombard people everywhere in ever-more shrill and frantic tone. Let's not go there!

Martin Lindstrom opened the field up for us all with his important and very readable book BRANDsense. Every month that goes by, my news and blog feeds are giving me more and more hits as the message spreads: brands exist in more dimensions than vision alone! We have five perfectly good senses, so why do many organisations still spend millions on how they look and nothing at all on how they sound?

Here are some recent fish my trawls have caught...

Business Week featured the rise of sound as a major consideration for business with an article on Ford upgrading its in-car warning tones here, backed up with a pleasant, if rather perfunctory, slide show on product sound here.

The subject or brand sound is cropping up in more and more blogs. Recent examples include Chief Home Officer, Ready To Spark and Personal Branding Summit. This mirrors the trend in business: more and more boards are talking about multi-sensory branding in general, and brand sound specifically.

The latest major sonic logo to launch is Mercedes: you can hear it at the end of this German ad. To me it sounds like something from The Exorcist, and I am very confused about its relationship with the traditional Mercedes brand values... other blogs like BurstLabs and Autoblog seem to agree. Maybe it's a grower...