Looking for brand/music harmony
By Justin Toland. The Music 4.5/brand-e Brand Discovery event in London last week gave brands, agencies, musicians, record labels and music-tech firms plenty to chew over.
As Clare Crean from AudioFuel pointed out in her opening presentation, “music is an underutilised and undervalued tool for brands.” To illustrate the point, she highlighted metrics from Millwood Brown showing that while sound has a relative importance to consumers of 41%, it only takes 12.5% of the marketing spend (sight, with a 58% relative importance, attracts 84.2% of the money).
Brands can’t just use any old music, though.
“The biggest crime is being forgettable,” believes Susan Stone from creative music agency Tonic. “There is so much music tech out there, unless you’ve got an idea and people who care madly about the quality of the music you won’t find success.”
Nonetheless, believes Crean, music technology startups offer “a competitively priced opportunity to build good, strong and lasting relationships between brand and consumer.”
She points to the success of the recent John Lewis TV spot (More Than A Woman) and of music-based social campaigns such as Mini Connected, Who Killed Summer? (Vodafone) and Right Music Wrongs (Virgin Mobile) as examples of how music – backed by the right technology – can “help start a conversation with consumers and keep the conversation going.”
However, Francis Rodino, a musician who is also part of social media agency Softwind Studio, suggested that in the end “it needs to come back to the product and the music rather than the technology and the platform.”
Eric Sheinkop from MusicDealers, a firm which specialises in licensing music for use in TV, movies, ads, videogames and elsewhere, said that “analytics can help brands choose a track, but it still has to connect on an emotional level”, both with the audience and the creative team behind the ad campaign.
Daniel Cross from music consultancy Record-Play noted that an artist or track selection has to be “a good fit” for the artist and rights holder, as well as right for the brand. Matt Smith from AWAL provided a good example of such a relationship in his case study of Misty Miller’s involvement in the Burberry Acoustic series, a branded online new music showcase. Noting that “the sync [was] the vehicle to launch her career,” Smith said this particular partnership was a success because “it was about a band and a brand understanding each other and working together.”
Many more partnerships fail than succeed, though, he said. “I wish they all worked – maybe a couple out of every 10 work.”
According to Richard Kirstein of Resilient Music, a company which advises brands on the costs and risk management of using music, “things go wrong mainly as a result of misunderstandings” because brands want ease of access to rightsholders and flexibility for a flat fee – the opposite of what rightsholders want.
As Rodino pointed out, “brands and technology are simply a platform – they are not what is important for a musician.”
For the brand, “the nuts of it is clarity – what rights you need, what value you attach to them and negotiating from the outset,” said Richard Kirstein.
The good news for brands, said Cross, is that record labels and music publishers are more open to licensing deals than ever before and, in future, there is an expectation that they will make money from brand exploitation. This means new options from brands and new opportunities for music-tech firms as well as musicians and labels.
