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 Hi Marketing Bestie, I’ve been informed that now I owe Ari a boo basket? And my son? Stressed Every holiday involves shopping in this family lol Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by HubSpot 🚨 New AEO master class just dropped. Obviously I thought of you 1st. SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD 5 WAYS TO USE SOUND AS A MARKETING WEAPONSteve Keller has one of the most interesting titles in marketing: Sonic Strategy Director at Sirius XM Media, working inside Studio Resonate, the company’s in-house audio agency for Pandora, Sirius XM, SoundCloud, and YouTube. His job description, in his own words: blending sound science with sound art to unlock sound decisions. While most brands obsess over visual identity, logos, colors, typography, Steve’s entire career proves sound is sitting right there as an underused lever. And the research backs it up in ways that sound almost too good to be true. One word change in a jingle. One shift in background music. One sonic cue at the right moment. All measurably moving behavior. Listen to the full episode here where Steve breaks down the French wine study that’ll change how you think about retail music, why sonic logos outperform visual logos 8.5 times over, and his actual sonic diet tip involving earplugs. 1️⃣. Sonic Logos Beat Visual Logos At Building Brand Memory. By A Lot.Steve’s Take: “Ipsos did some fascinating research around this, where they actually cataloged across 2,000 ads the distinctive assets that were being used. Unsurprisingly, 92% of the assets were the visual logos. Sonic cues and consistent uses of music were a very small percentage. But then they looked at the impact of these assets on actually producing brand salience or bringing a brand top of mind. And sonic cues, sonic logos were the most effective, eight and a half times more likely to land in top-performing creative.” Every brand defaults to visual identity. Logo, colors, typography, brand guidelines nobody reads past page 3. Ipsos’s actual meta-analysis of over 2,000 pieces of video creative found sonic brand cues showed up in just 8% of ads, visual assets dominated at 92%. Meanwhile sonic branding gets almost no investment relative to its payoff. But when researchers measured which assets actually drove high-performing creative, ads with sonic brand cues were 8.53 times more likely to land in the top-performing tercile compared to the bottom. Not a small edge. A massive 1, on an asset type almost nobody is using. Steve’s point isn’t that visual branding doesn’t matter. It’s that almost nobody is investing in the 1 asset type that research proves works best, which means there’s a wide open lane sitting right there. Takeaway: Audit whether your brand has a distinctive sonic asset: a sonic logo, a recognizable music bed, a consistent brand voice. If the honest answer is no, that’s not neutral, you’re forming a sonic impression whether you intend to or not, just an inconsistent one. Start small: pick 1 consistent sound, voice, or music cue and use it everywhere your brand makes noise, ads, hold music, app notifications, in-store. 2️⃣. Brand Early In Your Audio Ad. More Than Once.Steve’s Take: “In a piece of research that Lumen did, they found that there are some advantages to audio capturing attention that you don’t even get visually. And so the rule of thumb is to brand early. And more than once. You could say first two seconds, first three seconds. I don’t know that it needs to be a hard and fast rule, but somehow there needs to be a connection with the brand as quickly as possible.” The brain is constantly deciding in the 1st couple seconds of any ad: do I need to pay attention to this. If the answer is no, you’ve lost the listener before your message even lands. Steve’s rule of thumb: mention the brand early, mention it again in the middle, and close with it again. Sonic logos are the easiest way to do this, but it can also be a spoken brand name, a signature piece of music, or the start of a recognizable campaign. The reason this matters more in audio: if someone skips your ad after 2 seconds, you’ve still at least registered an impression, but only if the brand connection happened immediately. Takeaway: Review your last few audio or video ads. Count how many seconds pass before your brand is clearly mentioned or heard. If it’s buried past the first few seconds, you’re losing people who skip before the payoff. Build in a brand touchpoint at the open, the middle, and the close, not just once at the very end. 3️⃣. Background Music Can Shift Purchase Behavior Without Anyone Noticing It’s Happening.Steve’s Take: “North and Hargreaves did a study, set up a shop with German wines and French wines. On the days when the French music was playing in the background, the majority of the wine sold was French. On the days when the German music was playing, the majority of the wine sold was German. The majority of folks didn’t even recognize that there was actually music there.” Shoppers in this study weren’t consciously choosing wine based on the music. Most didn’t even register that music was playing at all. But the data doesn’t lie. Researchers Adrian North and David Hargreaves found that swapping the background music from French accordion to German oom-pah changed which country’s wine sold more, with French wine outselling German roughly 5 to 1 on French music days, and German wine outselling French roughly 2 to 1 on German music days. This is the uncomfortable part of sonic branding: it works below conscious awareness. People will tell you they picked a product because of the label or the price. The actual driver might have been the background audio the whole time. Takeaway: If you control any physical or digital environment where customers make decisions, retail space, app interface sounds, hold music, think about what the ambient audio is signaling about your brand, even if customers never consciously notice it. Match the mood and cultural cues in your background audio to the product or outcome you want them to associate with your brand. 4️⃣. Audio Taps Personal Memory In A Way Visuals Can’t.Steve’s Take: “With audio, we’re all bringing our own memories to it. We can paint an auditory picture of a beach and voices of people on that beach, and where we tend to go is our brain draws from memories. That makes that experience much more powerful and connected to us because we’ve quite literally in our minds put ourselves into that scenario.” Show someone a picture of a beach, and you’ve shown them 1 specific beach, with specific people, specific weather, specific everything. Describe a beach through sound, waves, distant voices, seagulls, and every listener’s brain fills in their own beach. Their own memory. Their own emotional association. That’s a structural advantage audio has that visual simply doesn’t. It’s not competing with a fixed image. It’s activating a personal one, which makes the emotional connection deeper and more individually relevant. Takeaway: When building audio creative, resist the instinct to over-specify every sonic detail the way you would a visual shot list. Leave some interpretive space, the right ambient sound or music choice lets the listener’s own memory fill in the emotional texture, which creates a stronger personal connection than something fully dictated. 5️⃣. Short-Term Performance Marketing Only Works Because Of Brand Memory You Built Earlier.Steve’s Take: “The extent to which your performance marketing is going to work depends on everything you’ve done before that to build the brand. 90% of consumers have already made up their mind by the time they get to that bottom part of the funnel. If you don’t own them in the upper part of the funnel, the short-term pieces that you’re doing are not sustainable.” This is the marketing hill Steve said he’d die on. Performance marketing gets all the budget and attention because it’s measurable in the moment. But Steve’s research point is blunt: 90% of consumers have already decided before they ever reach the bottom of the funnel, the part performance marketing is optimized to capture. Which means that bottom-funnel conversion you’re crediting to your retargeting campaign was largely decided earlier, by whatever built memory and familiarity with your brand well before the purchase moment. Chase only short-term metrics and you’re optimizing for a tiny slice of the funnel while ignoring the mechanism that made that slice convertible in the first place. Takeaway: Don’t treat upper-funnel brand building and lower-funnel performance marketing as competing budget lines. Audit your current spend split. If it’s almost entirely weighted toward performance, you’re likely underinvesting in the memory-building work (consistent creative, consistent sonic and visual identity) that makes your performance marketing effective at all. Build toward a mix that funds both, with brand work treated as the thing making performance marketing sustainable, not optional. Sponsored by Unbounce Your campaign's ready. Your landing page is still in the dev queue. IN A MEME  Your reports look fine. Something is still costing you pipeline. 👻 Join us live on Oct 27th to expose the 4 invisible marketing problems your dashboard will never show you. OPEN TABS 🏹: Targeting without retargeting on YouTube What's your favorite candy/sweet treat? Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
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