John, we're back.

We are back.

How you doing?

Well fed from Thanksgiving.

Oh, can you believe 2024 is winding down?

Prefer not to think about it.

Whoever thought we'd get to 2025?

Who thought we'd still be podcasting?

I had somebody tell me that somebody referred to the year 2100. People are talking about it already.

So I had a moment of, oh crap, recently on that point, where I realized that if my son lives to his grandmother's current age, he will see the year 2100.

Oh my God.

Huh.

Thank God I'll be dead.

Oh, the world will be over.

Indeed.

All right. On that cheery note, let's,

On that,

in.

on that promising note, let's talk about something a little more interesting. So, you know, the holiday shopping season is now in swing. We just had Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and everybody's getting ready for the holidays. So I thought it would be fun to talk about a You and I actually just worked on

Yes, sir.

that enabled us to really dig into some holiday trends and holiday shopping trends. And, and we get to really look at the full scope of how people are shopping and buying things during the holiday season. And, into what people have bought the last few years and, and hopefully it can help brands predict what people are going to buy moving forward. So,

And we, and we should say that this was, this was based on a client that has access to billions of actual shopper data points. So really a fascinating ability to dig into where people are spending their money.

yeah, totally. One of the stats we came across from a, from a different source, Adobe was actually predicting that this year will be the biggest shop holiday shopping season ever. And predicting that consumers would spend 240

with a B.

Yeah. Online.

you know, Brian, I'm no math major, but that's almost a quarter trillion. Sheesh.

Maybe you should have been John.

I mean, I should have been. I did that pretty quickly, didn't I?

Yeah. So, so let's get into some of these nuggets before we talk to a really interesting guest. So one of the things that really jumped out to us as we were kind of going through the data and, and coming up with some ideas of how to present some of these insights and specifically we were really looking at shopping trends through Amazon, Walmart, and Target, the big retailers and and what some of these consumers do, not just people that buy products there, what else are they doing? one of the interesting things we really came across, which I think. Is a kind of a major alert for CPG brands is, the private label brands that Amazon target and Walmart are selling to consumers and the volume that they're actually selling and taking away from potential CPG brands. So home goods, which is a category of, you know, durable items at home, things like furnishings and beddings and different things you might have in your house. John, what would you guess would be the the percentage of total items purchased on these private label brands against all home home goods?

Yeah. Well, well, I would have guessed lower than what it actually is. 'cause I do know that it, 'cause we had that data, it's 36%. But I would not have guessed that because if I am thinking about going into a store like a Walmart or a Target and looking to buy sheets or something, or pillows, it wouldn't dawn on me that, there's a really good chance, the thing I'm gonna buy is their brand, their store brand.

Yeah, they've done a really good job of presenting these products like, Yeah.

I bet most people don't even know that you're buying a store brand, like, because they've branded them all, they've got so many different names on these things.

so many different names and, and packaged in a way that you just have absolutely no idea. And they've done a good job of it. And the products are usually good. They've made them better. So, you know, if you're, if you have a product and you're bringing it into one of the big box stores, know that you're fighting against them as much as other competition. So they're creating their own products to beat you on their shelves, which is already an uphill battle. So.

totally. So, so that's the durable items. Rip through the next three categories, where store brands are dominating.

So the other domination areas we were seeing or at least where they're getting a lot of a lot of play are, are home essentials, which is more around, you know, cleaning products and other consumable items, so the home essentials was 25% where private label brands food is 24%. And, and apparel is 21%. So you know, that's a pretty good chunk of sales with these private label brands. So we've really found that fascinating and the growing trend there.

Yeah, yeah, the aforementioned son might be able to go to college only because most of his clothes were from Target. By target brands back in the day. Thanks. So here's a quick question for you, Brian. You know, knowing that so many food items, almost a quarter of the food purchases, are store brands. Do you have a favorite white labeled food product who does who does a

Who does a good store, you know, I, I've, I, I actually really like store brand pretzels, which I never thought I'd like,

look at that.

good salt to pretzel ratio. So I'm a fan of the store brand pretzels. And if you can get that right, I feel like you can get anything right.

Interesting.

my litmus test,

It's a good litmus test. This, this could be a whole podcast by the way. There is a fascinating ecosystem around recreating branded food products and making them be pretty much the same formulation.

Oh, absolutely. And real fast one other thing for other shoppers out there with it being the holiday season, Aldi has a better holiday pretzel than they do the rest of the year.

what the,

The store brand pretzel, and it's a fascinating pretzel. I don't know why they don't just sell it as the pretzel throughout the year, but it's a better pretzel. So go out and get your pretzels while you can, because they fly off the shelves.

Brought to you

I just bought, I just bought four bags the other day.

About that. I, I never would have thought of this, but I've been looking for a reason to go to Aldi. You just gave me one.

There you go.

All right. My answer, by the way, would be pretty much the entire lineup of Trader Joe's cookies. I don't think they miss a beat on those. Alright, so the other big nugget that I think jumped out to us is this idea of how differently retailers perform during big promotional season. So, the one thing, the real obvious thing we noticed was that looking at day by day purchases across those power three of Amazon, Target, and Walmart, Amazon's done an amazing job creating its own holiday with Prime Days. Like, wow. It's covered in the news, right? You see it?

Yeah. Yeah. And other brands are trying to trail onto their own, the holiday that Amazon created. So, you know, they had a, they had a fall prime day, which

Yep. Added a

new to us and they're almost trying to just create their, a new black Friday for themselves.

So, so what that did is Prime Days since 2021 have represented a 37 percent increase over kind of the average rest of this shopping year days. So really big jump on those Prime Days. And then, I don't know about you, but I was surprised to learn that that didn't do a damn thing in terms of kind of blocking Walmart or Target on those days.

Wasn't even a dent.

Yeah, no, they still sell as much as they always do. Which, P. S., is more. A lot more. As big a juggernaut as Amazon has become and appears to be, Walmart and Target still sell more every day.

Yeah. That's a, that's an interesting nugget that we were able to pull out on that.

Now, Prime Day did Close the gap a little bit. So their average cart value was like $49.40, average cart value on prime day that's really close to what Target spent sells on average, which is an average cart of 50 bucks. And Walmart average cart value is $69.22. So, you know, they're still moving plenty of merch, even on Prime Day.

Yeah. And, you know, as they continue, Amazon continues to try to get deeper into the food market. It'll be interesting to watch some of that because they're really expanding, their food into, into the, into the app, but also all this, you know, their own brick and mortar stores and

Yeah, oh yeah, big, good point, yeah. Amazon's doing a great job moving electronics during the holidays. So that was the other thing that jumped out. They, they sell almost three times as many electronics items. So that's one area where, you know, even though their total, total cart size is smaller, they're doing really well. On electronics. And then, as you know, no surprise, Walmart's really dominating food and we saw a pretty cool nugget that last year. Target crushed apparel.

was that all for you buying stuff for your son?

No, he's out of the, store brand target, apparel or, or any tar any apparel purchase at Target. I'm sure that's somehow not

not cool anymore.

probably not cool enough for him.

Nice. All right. Well good stuff. Why don't we get into our interesting guests we have here. I'm loving this topic.

Yeah, I'm excited to introduce our guest Joel Beckerman. he's an award winning composer, producer, arranger, and author even. And he's the founder of Made Music Studio, which is a strategic music and sound studio in New York City. Joel and his team have created original scores for more than 50. TV series and specials, including Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, Entertainment Tonight, ESPN's 30 for 30, and even the Super Bowl on NBC. Along the way, Joel has collaborated with talent that ranges from John Legend to Morgan Freeman, to OK Go and Will. i. am, and even I would argue the greatest film composer of our time, John Williams. But you know us, Brian. We're going to bring it back to marketing, right?

Let's do it.

That's because Joel's Made Music Studio is also at the top of the Sonic branding field. Now, Brian, coming into this conversation with Joel. Were you very aware of kind of like the idea of Sonic branding as a big part of the branding toolkit?

I was not. I mean, you kind of know it's there, but don't really know it's there.

Yeah, we take it for granted. Like, I mean, most brands do something, but and, and some of them are really consistent over years. But man, it's, it's not something that was like top of mind, but it is for Joel. And his work can be found in really signature Sonic identities for some global giants, including AT& T, IMAX, Hulu, and Disney. In 2015, Joel even wrote a book, The Sonic Boom, How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. which espouses what he calls sonic humanism, the power of sound to make our lives better and simpler. And Brian, who doesn't want their life to be better and simpler?

Amen.

All right, well, Joel, welcome to Snap Decisions. We are thrilled to have you here. What an honor. Your, your career is so distinguished and what you do is so distinct that we are excited to talk to you. Thanks again for making time.

Well, thank you, John and Brian. This is super, super fun.

Yeah.

Thanks for us.

So, so let's get started with maybe you explaining to our listeners a little bit about what sonic branding is and what your company does. We'd love to hear along the way, some of the examples of the types of assignments that you and made music studio takes on. Well, let me just kind of zoom back for a second. Cause this, we approach this really is like more like a human from a human perspective, first and foremost. So I wrote a book called the Sonic Boom, which basically about the role of sound in your life. So whether or not you realize it, every single moment of your life is scored by music and sound. And it's always there. It's guiding your choices. It's changing your mood in an instant. And You know, we don't need to be taught this stuff. We're kind of wired. We're wired for it. And, you know, there's really a direct connection, not just in brands, but also just overall and experiences that if you love a sound, you know, the sound and experience, you're 86%. More likely to want to have that experience again, and the inverse is true, where if you have a really bad audio experience in association with something, you're 86 percent likely to not want to have that experience ever again. So really kind of come from the human standpoint, and it's like, okay, how can we bring those truths that we have in terms of human experience to the work of building brands? We think of sonic branding kind of through this broad lens, like the strategic use of music and sound build brands. You know, I think a lot of times people get very focused on sonic logos, which is one of the things we do. So lemme let me talk about what, sonic logos are, if that's okay. Yeah, please do. A lot of what we do here is we try to make kind of marketing topics more accessible to people who might not be marketers, but have an interest in the way. Brands position themselves so yeah, go for it.

yeah. So, I mean, everyone knows like McDonald's, but Right. They've been. They've been hammering that in the nicest way. For I don't know what, 25, 30 years, and they've been super consistent about it, which makes it an enormously valuable brand asset for them. And, you know, it shows up everywhere, you know, generally in advertising whether it's, you know, radio or television. I think it now shows up in some of their social content. So. A lot of times would, you know, people would think about, okay, well, that's, that's really kind of a mnemonic for them. It's you could call it a jingle. It's in that it's a short version of, you know, of the theme. A lot of times, you know, people would kind of, you know, consider it a mnemonic as well, or like Intel Inside. You've heard that a million times. You know, now there are, you know, Liberty insurance, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. So I don't necessarily think of that as a jingle. I think of it more as like a Sonic logo. So, you know, we did, for instance, the Sonic logo for AT& T, which they've been using everywhere. You know, for what, nine years now. And what's kind of interesting is, is the, the formulation of these things is great at the end of advertising. It's great, you know, hearing the sound against a visual and it reinforces the visual, reinforces the sound, which reinforces the visual. So now you have a multi sensory experience. Which we all know just from research and just our own human experience makes things that much more sticky. Sonic logos also, you know, I call it the ham sandwich factor. Like if you're in the kitchen and you're making a ham sandwich and not even looking at the TV and you hear that sonic logo, it's like, Oh, you know, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, you know, you, you might all of a sudden you want to have McDonald's get in the car and Drive out to McDonald's. So that, that's kind of the basic the basics of a sonic logo. What's super interesting even though it has all of this research behind it about how valuable it is to the brand and to brand building, it's amazing how many brands have not yet taken advantage of that that as a tool in the toolbox. And the flip side is there are, you know, there are some great examples, things that, you know, super successful. And then there are a lot of things which it's like, Oh, sonic logos, let's check the box. So generally I, what I say to people is you, you need to put the same level of rigor and the same level of emotional, you know, what's the emotional connection like that you do into a visual identity. So if you're just kind of like doing something that's more executional for a spot or whatever, it is kind of checking a box. And in general, our experiences, those things don't last more than 13 weeks because they're not really centered in the brand or centered in what a particular ad campaign needs.

I like, I like the comparison to, you know, the amount of energy and investment and research and thought you'd put into doing a visual identity, because certainly brands can spend a lot of money and time there. I'm just curious, when you're doing, let's, let's keep it, let's limit it to the idea of the Sonic logo. Like the examples you just provided, how many options are you likely to be generating in the process and how many you likely to show a client, just real quick, curious to know, like, what's the process look like?

Okay. So that's a scary, it's a scary,

sure. I'm sure.

Talk about a ham sandwich.

Yeah. Yeah. Brian and I like to imagine what was it like to be in the, in the room and things get pitched and how much did we see versus how much you created in the first place to get there?

So I'll just like the dirty little secret is if we're producing less, it means that we did a really good job up front in terms of we do these sonic mood board sessions, which are very much like. Picking colors out of a color, you know, color swatch book or you know, you know, there's a lot of other sort of things we do in marketing. They're very intuitive. So so we'll talk about the brand. We'll get a brand brief. We'll, you know, give people, I mean, almost invariably people are coming to us and saying, look, we're in the middle of a brand transformation. What's what can sound do to help us with this? So So if we do a good job with these listening sessions, sonic mood board sessions, we're taking all that information in and we're playing examples of things out on the world and saying, okay, well, how does that make you feel? It's like, you don't need to be able to look, you don't need to play guitar, or you don't need to like, you know, know every you know, Led Zeppelin song to be able to do this. It really has to do with, how does it make you feel?

That's great. Great. That's great. Simple criteria. Stop thinking so hard. How do you feel?

totally, because you know, we're all consumers as well. Right. Even, and it's easy, actually, it's easier in a lot of ways to take a half a step back from your brand in music and sound than it is if you're doing a visual identity. So, in general, people say, you know, like, oh my, oh my God, this is like the most fun meeting I've ever had in my life because it's really just about listening and sort of talking about it and the emotional component of it. So if we do a good job on that. Now we have really a common language. We've developed a language that, you know, you have the brand language and you have the music and sound language. So now we can go back and kind of, you know bring all the alchemy to it. And usually I mean, let's just be honest, this is an iterative process. So sometimes we might create eight or 10 and it's like, Oh yeah, we, we kicked it. This is great. Let's just show it to the clients for a first round. Sometimes we might create 40 things before we're happy before we feel like we've captured something and, you know, again, people are really focused on the sonic logos, which is what shows up at the end of the advertising. However, you know, if you're, if you're doing it right, you're creating something that can show up in any touch point. So, you know, we did something for the Pillsbury dough boy. So you got the lap. Now there's a Sonic logo that just came out recently and it showed up. You know, in the middle of the stadium in a little break between you know, between innings of a baseball game. It's like, okay, that's how they're supposed to use it. So really what gets you to that point of coming to something iconic cause in, in that specific example, there's an underscore, which is a theme. So if you think about a theme from a movie or a theme from a television show, it gives you kind of a sense of the story. So if we're doing the theme, we're doing that You know, and the sonic logo becomes part of that, then hopefully that helps us get a handle on it and helps clients get a handle on it. We should always be listening to Sonic Logos in isolation, but if we have the story, the musical story that's attached to it, it just, it just becomes that much more resonant and much more a sense of, you know, we're trying to create music and sound that's iconic and that's enduring. That's gonna be around a really long time, not just something that's going to show up for 30 years. So it's a long process but you know, when you get it, when you nail it. It's super, it's super fun and it's super exciting.

The best, the best processes I've seen are when, you know, it is difficult because a client agency relationship will be like, you know, I'm hiring this agency. I want to see something that's complete. But at the same time, it's like, you know, you try to put something in a state where people can react to, and it might not be fully complete, but if you can get the right feedback, You don't necessarily have like wasted all the time on creating something. That's what you would consider complete. Cause you know, that they're going to have feedback but at the same time, they want to see something fully finished. So there's definitely a dance there. And when you get it right, it's great.

Yes. You mean that you mean that mood stage, Brian, where it's kind of like, are you getting the right feel?

And, you know, and also like, you know, maybe needs a little bit more of this and a little bit less of that or whatever. So do you find Joel that Brands are you educating them on, on how they can use these things? do they even know how to fully use these things?

You know there are some marketers that have like, you know, really, really deep experience in this, but the vast majority of people don't yet. It's still a relatively you know, new part of the branding arsenal, but, like, you know, I talked about doing something in a break in a, in a screen in a, in a, in a stadium, but there's a million other places things can show up in like corporate meetings and you know, devices. There's a lot of things. it's inspired by, it's, again, like a common language. What you're trying to come up with, because it's about personality. It's really about, expressing the personality and all the places that the brand shows up.

So we are, we're curious to hear about the range of projects. You know, I know you've mentioned Sonic logos and early on, it sounded like that was just kind of like the tip of the iceberg for you, but And you've just mentioned doing device sounds and car sounds. Like what's the spectrum of audio work that you do on behalf of brands,

well that's like why this is insanely fun because every time we turn around, there's a new opportunity and something can do so we, we did we're actually working on a flagship retail project right now, which didn't open or hasn't opened yet which I can't talk about, but I'll talk about one that I can. So we did really soundscapes for. The the flagship retail store for AT& T in Chicago. So it's really, we're thinking about every, it's like scoring your experience through the whole store. So if you walk in, you know, when you think about like Chicago, there's all this kind of crazy noise and energy and stuff coming in off the street. We wanted to get people to like, just change their mood for a moment. And we wanted to do something a little bit whimsical. So we came up with this idea of doing like a sonic Rube Goldberg machine. So you have, when you walk in, you have all these sort of, you know you have a mood that kind of grabs your attention. It's like, all of a sudden you're seeing things. We wanted people to stop in the vestibule. So you're not just going and getting like a phone case, but you're like, Ooh, and you're looking across the store and you might see different things. Because it slows you down. It stops you, you know, we're able to affect people's behavior with this. And then the Rube Goldberg machine came in with sort of all these little surprises. It's like you hear, you know, a ball coming down a xylophone, or you hear like little moments of fireworks or whatever it is. So it's like it grabs your attention. You want to stay in the vestibule for a second. And the biggest problem we had with it really is the kids don't want to leave the vestibule. They don't want to go into the store. So, you know, but that's a good problem to have. So

but you're, so you're kind of helping navigate people through a retail environment by keying them with sound.

yes. And also in scoring. In scoring their experiences in different parts of the store we actually can slow down people's shopping behavior, which actually increases cash register. So there's a lot of, you know, it's, it's emotional, it's brand centered. It's also very much human behavior centered. And there's like a ton of research and associated with us. Like we'll do implicit association testing, which is subconscious research that shows people like, you know, basically by the choices that they make when they're under time pressure, we know that they're getting to a subconscious response. And that helps us actually guide the direction of the work. But you know, other examples if you think about You know, theme parks. Okay. It, you know, might be super obvious, but There, there is a little band in actually in the star Wars experience in, in the the theme parks where we created this song for a band with the aliens that play through a little window and all this kind of stuff. But now that song shows up in the retail environments. So it's like, there's something that's familiar, you know, the voice is familiar or whatever. And it's like, Oh, I just saw that or, you know, whatever it, it just, again, ties those experiences. Yeah. And, you know, people have a little smile on their face, which doesn't hurt when you're trying to, you know, sell merch. So it really shows up in a million different places. You know, products are probably one of the most fun places.

Are you a lot of times kind of starting with like a starter kit of like, you know, a couple tracks that they can use in like a commercial or like you said, on a, on a website or in an app, and then they come back to you to kind of expand on those things for different things. Cause You know, like a logo, there's different cuts or images and stuff, but I could, you know, music, it's the fit, right? So like, is it, you know, every time they have something new, they're coming back to you to kind of make a different version of the same thing? Or how does that work?

Yeah, I mean, it is different. It's different for every single client. You know, a lot of times people come in and it's like, okay, my biggest need is a product or my biggest need is retail or my biggest need is, you know, the end of advertising or the beginning of advertising. So a lot of times we'll start from those places. And then develop toolkits based on where people imagine their sonic identity is going to go. And again, we, we show people all the different possibilities in their brand. And they're like, Oh, well, let's have it for that. And for that what we've realized, you know, over the years and really just kind of dug into recently is what you were talking about. We know which, especially You know, having to do with social, we know that, you know what, there's probably a hundred or a thousand times as much content that brands need to create or agents who need to create that they use more than they used to. So we know that there's going to be that many thousands more pieces of music where the sonic identity shows up. So we developed this product called continuum, which has You know, thousands and thousands of tracks, which actually we then kind of call down to specifically the tracks that work for a particular brand, and then we'll kind of give them tools and instructions about how to put their sonic identity, pretty much on any piece of music that they utilize. For the brand. So, you know, we've been trying to scale this idea because more so than any time we've ever been doing this, you know, again, there are just thousands and thousands of executions. As you guys well know you know, it's a huge multiple, right?

And I'm guessing that, that, that service you just talked about, where you're trying to scale a core set of sounds across a bunch of different. Marketing channels. Imagine with some franchise brands, you're talking about many, many different types of people and creative teams playing around with that service.

Yeah. And you know, that's, it's actually kind of like part of what we're doing is, gamify it and just make it super fun to use. Just like, make almost like a toy. And,

So like a knucklehead like me could go into a brand sound kit and, and, and create some, some sounds or, or use sounds into a social post.

Yeah, I mean you absolutely and again,

Brian just says, Oh God.

Amazing. It's terrifying to hear that.

So, you know, there are guardrails, right? You can't just do anything but

now you made Brian feel better

Oh, okay. Okay. You know, I, and, and all, probably all the brand managers out there, too. We may just feel more comfortable, but I think the idea is to give people a limited, but very expansive and fun toolkit. Again, a lot of it is library music, but match it up against the owned assets or use the owned assets sometimes on different projects.

That's great. I love the work that you guys have done with Corona specifically, like when I watched. And listened. I mean, you really feel like Rona when you're when you're interacting with that. And the Burger King work that you've done as well, which seems to be pretty significant in terms of, you know, building sonic branding with visual branding. I mean, that seems like a client that really was, lockstep with. You know, building to everything that you guys can do.

You know, it's, I'm really glad you've been here. You pointed out both of those because they're amongst our favorite projects. The Corona thing was super interesting because you don't always do this now. It's partly just because of where we are culturally with music and sound, but we had a band. in the room and everyone was just jamming. And from that jam, we're like, Oh, this is cool. This is cool. So it became again, sort of an iterative thing. And it ended up like, we were like, well, this melody, this melody. And at the end, there was just like one cool chord that got played. And it's like, Oh, that became now I'm on the beach now. And this is. So I'm, I'm glad you pointed that one out. It's, it's won a lot of awards and it's actually one of our favorite things. The Burger King work you're talking about is international. So it's pretty much everything X, U S and it's kind of like, if you think about it almost from anyway, hopefully people will, will YouTube these things and find them, but

We'll share links.

Yeah. Oh, good. That's great. There, there's another one that again, just kind of an interesting solution we did for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, where they had this kind of idea about, you know, owning this word that they made up called cinna dust. So you know, cinnamon and it could be in a lot of different things. So we're like, you know, they're like, yeah, we want to, we want to have a, A mnemonic for, for this thing we're calling synod dust. So it's like, well, nobody knows the word, so we have to say the word in the logo. And we were messing around with a whole bunch of different things and it's supposed to be irreverent. So again, it's like you, you end up a lot of times kind of going down really blind alleys. And we get down a ton of blind alleys on that. And one of the guys is like, wait a minute. And, and he just came like he, he was on the way to Like he was going to go to a stadium to a game and he's like, wait a minute. And he pulled out like one of those handheld air horns. And so we just recorded the air horn, you know, said the word synod dust in a really interesting way. And there were like little chords, a little you know, chords that were that fit in were associated. And we're just cracking ourselves up. We didn't even know if it was going to be fun for anybody else.

it sounds like a really fun place to work.

It, you know, it, it is except the times when we're trying to come up with the idea and it's not coming and then you're banging your head against the wall. So I think probably everybody's familiar with that, but yeah, it's,

So, do you have musicians wandering around your studio every day? Is it, is it just a

every day, like pretty much everybody, there's a guy who's even a business development guy here who is a kick ass composer. So like a lot of times, I mean, he's, you know, he's worked on a lot of our jobs, just like, well, wait a minute, I'm going to not sell for a minute and going to go into the studio and record, you know, something. So yeah, it's, it's very much like a, you know, it's, I want to say like a playground, but sometimes it's more like a playpen. So yeah, you're, you know, you're kind of encouraged to just do stupid stuff and see what sticks.

Do you guys find yourselves, like, constantly, like, pulling out your phone and, and recording something really fast, like on the go, or do you wake up in the middle of the night and be like, Oh my God, I got something in my head, I got to get it out. I got to record it. Like, we do that with writing and stuff and God knows what you, we actually were thinking at the time, but

Yeah.

Yeah, I, you know, for me personally, I can't talk about everyone else's process, but for me, I do it all the time. It's like I wake up and it's like, Oh, I got to do this thing. And I'll just, my wife gets pissed off because I'm waking her up or whatever. I've been doing this

you're making it sound,

Yeah. And then I put the

you can't just write it.

and in like nine times out of 10 in the morning, I listened to it. It's like, Oh, this is crap. But then there's one, there's one time every out of 10 that it's awesome.

Yeah. Most of those 2:00 AM ideas are bad, but it's good when Good when you get a good one.

You don't, if you, and if you, if you hadn't put it down, you would have been like, I missed the one thing that was

I know. Yeah, exactly.

The other project that I wanted to really ask you about was HBO because HBO was such an iconic sound over the years, you know, for decades of You know, just going through the history of HBO, it has that, that sound and you were able to, you know, bring new sound around that. And I really wanted to ask you about that process of like merging and integrating newer sound to an iconic sound and making sure that it fits and goes together and, you know, becomes more modern and tells the story. And I feel like you guys did a really great job on that. And I'm sure that's an interesting process.

Yeah. I mean, thanks. That's actually really fun to do and also very stressful

I'm sure.

because you got to get it right. You know, it's, it's people know, love that brand. And if you don't get it right, man, you're going to get really, really. Bad social media posts.

Yep. Thank you.

Luckily we haven't had that yet. We've seen a couple of competitors who've really gotten blasted on an app. That there actually was a television show. I won't tell you which one that took our work off the air and did an arrangement, a different version of it. And They just got completely blasted with tweets from their, you know, their audience. It's like, why did you change my thing that I really love? I, you know, wake up to it every day. So it's, it's very it's, there's a lot of pressure. I, I did the same thing actually for the Superbowl theme for NBC. So there was this piece that John Williams wrote, you know, wrote that had been the theme for the Super Bowl and actually for NBC for quite some time. And it was really awesome, kind of like a march tempo orchestra thing, which was perfect at the time. And they wanted to evolve it and move it forward. And they said, John, okay, well, you know, could you put some electronics and maybe some rum? He's like, okay, that's not my thing. But I had, you know, he and I had worked. Briefly on a project actually for the news division of NBC. So he said, well, why don't you give this guy a try? So he referred me to work on this. Of course, now I'm already petrified, you know, that,

gonna say, stressful working with the HBO logo, working with John Williams music. Oh

Yeah, I mean, geez, talk about like being nervous.

Good lord.

Originally when I was given the assignment, I said, you know, like, let me call up. John Williams and just see if he has any guidance suggestions, whatever. So I called up and I I spoke to his agent for a minute and said, you know I'd love to get in the phone with with you and john and we can have conversation about this And he said let me call him. Let me check it out And he called me back. He said, Oh, actually, John, John said, you should just do what you think is right. It's like, no, no, no, no. Really? I want to get on the phone with him. No, no, no. He wants you to do what you think is right. And I knew also that he's a big football fan. So now I'm really screwed because I'm going to create this piece with no input. And knowing that you know, it's possible that it can't be that the first time he hears this is on the air. So I finished all the mixes. NBC was really happy. I called up the agent. I said, let me send you the mixes. He said, wait, wait, wait a minute. Let me find out. And he spoke to John. He came. No, John just wants you to do what you think is right. So here we are. I know the first downbeat that he's going to hear this is on the first downbeat of the Superbowl. So of course I was freaking out, called his agent after the Superbowl. I said, well, you know, What did he think, you know, because I think I called a week or two after I was kind of I didn't want to know, but I wanted to know. So I said, you know, well, what did he think? He said, let me get back to you. It's like a typical thing, right? Let me get back to you.

Yeah, just, just twist in the wind for another

Exactly. So twist in the wind for another two weeks until he gets back to me. And it's like, then he's on the phone. I'm like, my hands are shaking. He's like, Oh, John really liked what you did. I'm like, so anyway,

Amen.

that, that's my, that's my brush with trying to take greatness and, and move it into the future.

Awesome.

At least he had the right reaction.

Thank God. Otherwise I think I would have curled into a ball into like fetal position.

that could have, that, John Williams throws you under the bus could, could, could change the trajectory of your career, I suppose.

Even if he just hates me, that could change the trajectory of my, of my brain.

You can't even, you can't even continue to work if that happens.

Yeah,

You know, they're still hiring at the bank. So maybe I can go there and like count, count cash or something. So, you know, Let lucky but you know, it's again, these kinds of situations where you're redoing a famous Sonic logo or a theme. Again, there's a lot of pressure. It's also super fun to really, you know, kind of dive in and, you know, you know, it's already part of popular culture and you have to kind of be brave about it and realize that that's the job. It really, I mean, I know you guys do that with visual content all the time, and I'm sure. Brand managers and marketers who were listening have probably done that a lot of time, you know, a lot of time too. It's, it's exciting and terrifying.

Joel, I'd like to connect a couple of things. You started talking about the human element, right? The things that make us feel and just kind of experience things differently. What stands out in terms of a brand sound or soundscape or Sonic logo, anything that was really effective in shifting consumer perceptions about a brand

It's such a great question. And there's so many dimensions of that because it could be cultural. It could be, you know, it, it, you know, now you have a brand that's, that's connected to culture. Now you have a brand that's, you know, much more, you hear like a brand evolution. I would say probably one of the most interesting ones was, you know, nationwide, it's like, you know, I've had like old school nationwide is on your side, which I think is kind of boring. It's like, Oh my God, I don't want to use that. And, but there were some smart. Advertisers out there who said, you know, like, wait a minute, there's like all this equity. How do we bring that forward? So, you know, you had, you know all these people in ads going like in, in different ways, electronics and all sorts of different ways that it could be reinvented, but you know, sort of tongue in cheek like I thought that was super successful again because they were carrying the equity forward, but really doing in a way that was kind of self-effacing. You know, you were talking a little bit again about kind of going back to human experience. There's one thing I mentioned in the, in the book called, which I call sonic humanism. It's the idea of using music and sound to make people's lives richer and simpler. And a lot of that doesn't have to do specifically with marketing. But again, it's the same principles. So we've used music and sound principles, for instance, for Hospital rooms. So in hospitals, one of the biggest problems is what they call alarm fatigue. So alarms, there are alarms that are going off in hospital rooms for like every device and for things that are super minor, but they're blaring and they're not blaring to help patient experience. They're blaring so that the manufacturers don't get sued. To make sure that it's grabbing the attention of the caregivers. So one of the things we're really trying to do is use some of the principles of music and sound To make you know to to sort of calm people in those experiences It you know, even if you just have a very simple biophilic idea, you know, like from nature sound from nature Like, you know a wave like a sound like a you know, an ocean wave, but you have to Pick exactly the right kind of wave. You know, there are ones that can be very sort of irritating. There are ones that could be scary. There are ones can, you know, ones can grab your attention. I think a lot of times in these Experiences, especially in alarm fatigue. It it's, we want music and sound that people don't even know that it's there unless you turn it off. So just be kind of part, you know, becomes part of the landscape that you're in. So this idea of, of improving people's lives in, in these kinds of experiences, I'm really, really interested in that there, there's another thing we've done with some cities where there are, you know, for instance, in Detroit, There are some areas of Detroit where there's a, like a ton of houses that are right next to a highway. So they'll go in and they went in actually and, and put in all these sound and noise barriers between the highway and the houses, but that doesn't solve the whole thing. It's, it'll, it'll decrease the din, but you're still hearing the noise. That road sound the, the, the sound of the cars on the road. So what we did is we designed for the city of Detroit sort of a, a nature scape with you know, what the local birds would be in Detroit in the trees. And maybe they should add more trees, but, but again, it's sort of covers that din.

So Joel, you have created these urban soundscapes. Is that something you do regularly? Was that Detroit project a one off?

Well, it definitely was a one off. I don't think we get calls from cities every day of the week, but, we took that thinking and brought it to this project in Dallas called. Discovery District, it was for at and t and at and t took over like a two square block area of downtown Dallas and looking to revitalize it the same way that Detroit was looking to rev, you know, revitalize some of the sections they had in their city. So in this two square block area, they created almost an adult theme park in some ways, but you didn't experience it that way you really experienced it almost like its own unique environment. Unlike any environment you'd find anywhere else. So on one side of a building, there was 100 foot screen and with all sorts of really cool, interesting visions that, you know, we're essentially animations everything from sort of. Supernatural kind of floating beings to looking at the side of the building and like bits and pieces of the building would fold and unfold and become different buildings. If you stood in one spot, there was like an Easter egg where the whole place would light up So, the sound really was incredibly important in that particular exercise because we experience sound before we experience Any other input from any other sense. So really in a lot of ways in multi sensory environments, because we hear the sound first, that becomes the arbiter of all of our other, our other senses. So either the visuals match up to what you're hearing or they don't. And if they don't, you could be really annoyed by it, or you could be, you know, you get kind of like cognitive dissonance against it. So we really have to think about. Not just what we're doing sonically, but how it is marrying against all other sensory input. I used to do a lot of horror films. I'd score a lot of horror films and one of them. Yeah. And when they're like, when I started my career and I had like, Just, I was trying to get examples like these B or C horror movies. And what I learned was if you put the sound right on the scare, you blow the whole moment for like, you wouldn't be scared because you experienced the sound first, I actually had to move the sound later. That was, I think the first time I realized how important that was. And I've carried that through my career ever, ever since.

Can you talk a little bit about kind of how you got into the industry and kind of what you were doing and what led you to You know, get into the industry. I know that you you kind of had a connection to sound from up from a young age, but like, where did you start? And then talk a little bit about kind of how you got into this specific part of the industry.

Well, what really started was trying to convince my dad to pay for an education in NYU and for me, you know, in music. And what he said is, I won't do that, but if you do a business double major, I will pay for that.

Oh,

that's where I went. And who knew that the business part of this would really help me going down the line. But my first my first inclination of course, was to be like a rock star, like everybody else studying

Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes dads know things, apparently. Look at that.

In the long run.

and I'm a dad. I'd like to think that I knew something, but not as much as my dad knows. But you know, the so when I got over my rock star fever, I realized, you know, look, I, I love movies. I love television shows. And I started to score. I started to learn how to score in at NYU. But of course there's nothing like getting on the job. training and trying to figure this stuff out and making directors happy and understanding their vision and hopefully making their vision even a little bit better. But at the beginning I was kind of starving and I had like a family at home. So I, so I got introduced. Believe it or not, to my wife, who is in promo world in television promotion, the idea of not just scoring film and television, but scoring promotional campaigns. And then all the things I learned about creating themes for film and television, I brought to the idea, I brought to the concept of creating themes for brands. So at first it was just entertainment brands and that's where things like the HBO project came, you know, came into being and some work we did with Turner classic movies and for Showtime. And a lot of this stuff is still on the air decades later, which is really fun to see. And then that led into doing things with general market brands, which, you know, like this AT& T project, which became really fun because it's like, Oh, now it's, it's this whole new medium, this whole new. Area that I'd never played in before.

So Joel, that, that career arc transition from being about entertainment into a focus on helping brands and, and being, you know, kind of supporting the marketing role. How, and you've mentioned, you've talked about you know, driving results at retail and things like that. How do you measure some of that stuff in the market or how to do, how do the marketers you work with measure the impact of sound? Yeah.

you know, there's a lot of different ways. Obviously, the easiest one is cash register, right? If you add something to an environment. And it changes the cash register one way or another. That's that tells you right there. But as we all know, marketing is, is probably a bit more art than science. Please don't tell our CMOs and our but, you know,

it.

we, we know that also we, if we can show that we've influenced, influenced Consumer behavior, or at least how they feel about something, their impression of a brand their emotional connection to some kind of communication, you can begin to glean from that, the value and, and hopefully the multiple of value that you bring in each of these communications. A lot of times what I talk to people about is what we try to do is to create things that move people that really leverages their media spend. So if you get the same value Let's say by doing half the media spend. That's amazing. If you get twice the value by doing the same media spend in terms of having people, you know, changing people's impressions of your brand. I mean, that's gold. So that to me, that's really kind of our, in terms of how we're serving our clients. That's one of the most important things. Obviously, elevating and lifting the brand perception is important just intrinsically, and the same thing what we're doing for audiences, which is people love brands. They love to love brands. And if we can create that kind of emotional stickiness in association with the brand, it's sort of like win win. One thing that's really typical, obviously for for marketers is, basically using groups of people in focus groups to figure out how they feel about, you know, different, Advertising or whatever it is, the moment you do that with music and sound, like throw all the results out the window because sound really, especially in marketing and film scores and television scores, the moment that you're aware of it consciously and you're saying, Oh, I like this. I don't like the music. It's like, that's not the point. So you really have to do this subconscious testing, which is the implicit association testing in which gives, you know, gives you a much better sense of people's you know, subconscious reactions to things, because again, it it's sounded music. It operates on this subconscious level. The other thing we've been doing a lot with now. Believe it or not is is eye tracking studies

I was going to say, you must be some biometrics involved here.

Definitely using biometrics and, you know, some of this stuff, I think we're still learning where the value is, But again, I think that the The, you know, the research portion of this is incredibly important.

Interesting. Joel going to pivot to the inevitable question about AI. has generative AI kind of come into your business? How often are you using it now?

you know, it generated AI. I think it's obviously still evolving. There's some, some applications of it that are incredible. There was, or there is, a physical location where there's you have to think about, oh, well, it's not just the customers. It's also the people who are working in this space all the time. And, you know, one of the things that drive people crazy is a playlist of two hours of music, and then it repeats

Oh, amen.

And then it repeats. So one of the really great uses of A. I. We created a whole, you know, long piece of music with a lot of different Elements, you know, okay, there could be a guitar element here. That could be a, you know, snaps. It could be this, it could be this, it could be this. And we, we fed it into an AI generator for, you know, basically generator for you know, gen AI, gen AI for music, and it created about 40 hours of music that. You could listen to and it felt different enough that it was like pleasant and it just, you know, there's like, okay, I think there were actually like five or six different pieces of music and tons of stems, you know, which is all those different instrumentations. That is a really great. Use for AI especially in, in sort of more spatially driven things, the, the stuff that's,

So just expanding on the thing, expanding on the human created elements

yes. And, and utilize, yeah. Utilizing them kind of in, in, in, in a specific fashion based on the the vocabulary that AI learns from that material. I would say like, You know, I know everybody's in the same boat here, but ethical AI is super important to us. We don't want systems that have been trained on music without permission. So the systems that we're working with right now and still experimenting with are trained really just on the music that we've created. For that particular project and other music that we own. So you know, the more data you put into these things, the, you know, into these models, the better it is. But that's, that's one of the things we're really trying to make sure that we've got it straight. The other thing we learned about, you know, using AI is there always has to be a human touch in this. It, you, you can't just let. The generative AI just do its thing because it just, there are points of, it just doesn't feel right. It definitely feels canned or mechanical. So it, you know, it, it's a huge time saver, but we still need that, that human touch. And I think this is going to keep getting better and better and better. The one thing I'm scared about is with AI is I train and when I train and I was doing music for music libraries and other things, I wasn't writing great music. I was writing okay music when I first started out. And I think in our business, music that's created that's just okay, that's dead. Because there's tons of AI. There's going to be tons of music created by AI. That's going to be just okay. So my question is, how do we train the next generation of composers and producers when those Okay. Applications like, you know our song in the back of, you know of a scene of CSI where people used to make some coin as they were learning, like, okay, well, if AI is doing that, how are we going to grow our next crop of people, which I'm sure it's not just music. You guys experienced the same thing.

Hadn't thought of it in those terms, but that's really interesting. Yeah. How do you learn if, if the machine is. Doing the basic stuff.

Way. I mean, if everything can do okay, work, how do you take your okay work and make it great. Oh, and cause that's going to be the bar now. Joel, really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us. It was really interesting to connect on all this stuff. It's fascinating to think about all this stuff that kind of goes on that you might not always think about and how it kind of is the best part of your experience.

what an education, really cool. I mean, we're also aware of the visual stuff in our lives and don't we take the audio for granted. So this is really helpful to hear from your, hear from your experience.

Well, thanks. It was really, really, really fun to talk to you guys about it. And it's it's always you know, it's the big marketing concepts and the big visual concepts that we find inspiring. And what we try to do is add something to them and make them even better. So thank you guys for what you do. And cause otherwise I wouldn't have any work. So

All right. Well, Joel, thanks again. You have a great day and take care of yourself.

guys.

John, that was that was a great interview. Really love talking about things that you might not be thinking about in marketing

Never think about you.

yeah, never. And you just see how important that really is and how that does really align as a piece in the, as a strong piece in the brand toolkit.

Yeah, well, and we'll share some links about with some of the examples, because when you hear them, you're like, wow, that is I'm so aware of that. And it creates such a connection to a brand or a show that I wasn't fully aware of. But when you hear it and think about it, like, wow, yep, that's that's the thing. I know. I will say I was, there was one question I really wanted to ask, but I never got the nerve.

What's that?

I really wanted Joel to redo our Snap Decisions music, our intro and close music, because you know, it makes me a little upset.

Maybe that's a 2025 gold, John.

Yeah. I don't know if we can afford him, but if he likes the podcast, maybe he'll do it for free.

You never know.

Reverse compensation for his appearance. All right. Well

it down.

happy shopping and to, to, to everybody. Thanks for listening to a show about audio.

I like what you did there.

All right.

Alright, let's shut it down.

Bye.

Bye.