Nudgestock is coming - and audio plays a part! Richard chats with past guests Steve Keller and Rory Sutherland about the power of audio, both music, and voice, in neuromarketing. Steve discusses the power of music to elicit and amplify emotional responses, and how context matters when applying those effects to marketing. Rory finds parallels and examples in past marketing efforts to show the ability of voice and music to enhance messaging. Call it a mini-Nudgestock, this episode is a sample of what you can expect on July 7, 2023!
Brandon Wehn (00:07):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn, and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast, brought to you by the folks at Cloud Army. In this episode, Richard brings back past guests Rory Sutherland and Steve Keller to discuss the power of audio and its focus at the Nudgestock Conference.
Richard Campbell (00:31):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell and thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience in this very special show, we're going to call a mini Nudgestock. Because I have with us today both past guests, Rory Sutherland, who's the Vice Chair at Ogilvy, and Steve Keller, who's got the best title of all, the Sonic Strategy Director at SXM Media. Welcome back, gentlemen. Really great to have you here again.
Steve Keller (00:53):
Great to be here with everybody.
Richard Campbell (00:55):
So we're talking a little bit about Nudgestock and the great thing that's going on, and I'm excited you're part of this, Steve, because I think audio is one of those underrated aspects of neuromarketing and marketing in general.
Steve Keller (01:07):
Yeah. It's fascinating to me when I go to neuromarketing conferences that everything that gets looked at in terms of packaging, where things are put on the shelf, where consumers are in their journey, very little emphasis given to audio. So that's always a challenge that I give researchers to lean into audio from the neuromarketing side.
Richard Campbell (01:33):
And at the same time, when you talk about classic media for advertising, the jingle is a thing. It even has its own word.
Steve Keller (01:40):
Right. It's fallen into a bit of disfavor these days, but it's also evolved. I would argue that those short little things that we call audio logos or sonic logos are jingles by any other name. They're just maybe not quite as long as a full song where you're singing the brand name. And certainly we have brand anthems that are pieces of music that we recognize, but maybe we don't sing the brand name, and that's why we don't call them a jingle. But they're still really effective memory devices.
Richard Campbell (02:13):
I don't know that we have the 21st century equivalent of Barry Manilow writing, "You deserve a break today," ever again. That's one of a kind thing.
Steve Keller (02:21):
No, we just have brands that are willing to spend a lot of money to have shared equity with hit songs, which is a discussion in and of itself.
Richard Campbell (02:30):
Another angle entirely. Before we were even recording, I mean, we dove straight into the subject and I had to hit the big red button to coin this, because Rory was immediately diving into this interesting aspect of the emotional response of audio. I think even more than visually, there is incredible emotional responses that come from audio that both people turn on a song to feel a certain way, or feel a certain way so they turn on a song.
Steve Keller (02:57):
Yeah, well, there's all kinds of neurotransmitters and chemicals that are firing in our brain. I caught the tail end of that conversation where Rory was talking about rewards and that drip, drip, drip of the dopamine that's really addictive. That's why we like to listen to songs over and over and over again. Certainly that emotional component plays a key part in why we remember music. We might forget where we put our keys, but we might have trouble getting that piece of music out of our heads. And it's because that emotional connection drives it a little bit deeper into our evoked memory. You have oxytocin that's happening when we're singing along to a piece of music together or moving in time with a rhythm, and that oxytocin helps us feel really warm like we belong.
(03:54):
There's evidence that there's post-social behavior that's increased as a result of entrainment while we're listening to music together. So we're literally wired for sound in ways that I think are, I might argue far more superior than the ways we might be wired for sight, and memory is an emotion or one of those things with music that's really powerful. And I'd also add that if we know the musical building blocks, we can target emotions. So by changing tempo, articulation, pitch, harmony, rhythm, we can nudge, if you will, emotional states as a result of that.
Brandon Wehn (04:40):
Interesting.
Rory Sutherland (04:41):
And that's very interesting because one of the things I learned about vaping, now, this may seem slightly unrelated, but bear with me. Okay? Is that one of the reasons why patches, gums sprays never replicated smoking, okay, was that all smokers without being aware of it, learn to actually smoke in two completely different ways depending on whether you want the cigarette to act as a stimulant or a relaxant. And so the cigarette, unlike the spray or the patch, is a kind of mood [inaudible 00:05:19]. It's not a massively potent drug, but it can just perk you up if you inhale and exhale in one particular way, or it can calm you down if you perform the same action sort of more slowly, more deeply.
(05:33):
It's sort of breathing exercise in and of itself. I mean, I shouldn't really be advertising the virtues of smoking or vaping here, but it was very interesting because that ability which people learn without really being aware of it to actually control moods to a small degree, is something I think that we really, really value. And so I even was approached once by a very, very interesting couple of academics who believed they were getting closer and closer to developing essentially playlists that could pretty much migrate you from one mood state to another. It was that reliable.
Richard Campbell (06:13):
And it begs the question that humans generally seek out this ability to modify their mood in one way or the other.
Rory Sutherland (06:20):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (06:20):
And certainly audio plays a role in that, but there's a bunch of other mechanisms as well. And there's a challenge for us as marketers then to press against those levers in a way that encourages a positive response towards a brand or a product.
Steve Keller (06:35):
Sure. Well, I think we're talking a little bit about congruency if we're talking about mood, and certainly there are a lot of bits of research around making sure that you are communicating in a congruent mood state. Unless of course, maybe you want to excite someone, maybe you want to shock them. There are ways to play with different kind of stimuli to do that. But I think this question of congruency is really interesting, particularly when it comes to music and the conversations around mood. What do you want to communicate in terms of a feeling? And sometimes there's a little counter intuitiveness to this as well, because quite often if you think, "Maybe I'm feeling down, maybe I should play some happy music to lift me up." The research has shown really, if you lean into the emotion, there's positive effects to that as well.
(07:35):
If I'm feeling down, if I kind of lean into that sense of melancholiness, there's a way in which that actually generates feelings of positivity because of the congruency that's there that can help lift us out of those mood states. And another interesting drug prolactin, which is generated when we cry, it's a neurochemical that kind of mitigates grief, if you will. There's some studies that have shown listening to "sad music" actually tricks the brain into grieving a little bit and releasing some of that prolactin. So-
Rory Sutherland (08:16):
Is it a hormone or is it a?
Steve Keller (08:18):
I think that prolactin is a hormone. Yeah, I said [inaudible 00:08:21].
Rory Sutherland (08:22):
That's the country and western hormone effectively. Yeah.
Steve Keller (08:29):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When you lose your truck, you lose your wife, you lose your dog, everything is gone.
Richard Campbell (08:35):
But interesting to lean into the emotion to sort of fully explore it, and then it lets go.
Steve Keller (08:39):
Sure.
Richard Campbell (08:40):
As soon as you were talking about congruency, I was thinking about that happy, chirpy ad in the middle of a serious news story on the radio. That's a great piece of incongruency that doesn't serve the advertiser well at all. It's interesting to think about when our ads are experienced and what environment they're in and how they're going to work with that.
Steve Keller (09:02):
Context. And Rory can certainly speak to context a lot, but that's really important, thinking about the context that an individual is in when you are attempting to communicate to them. I mean, just think about regular communication. There's communication that's inappropriate in certain contexts and more appropriate in others. And if we think about our advertising, certainly that's part of what we're trying to do with targeting, particularly with digital ads. Can we pick up on the signals that are there, whether they're time of day, whether they may be weather, whether it may be understanding what somebody's listening to before or after attempting to deduce a context. And can you serve an ad that's more appropriate for that context? And would that be more effective? Of course, that's the big question.
Rory Sutherland (09:58):
What certainly seems to be true about music as an accompaniment to anything else is that the power to take something from good to great seems to rest to a large extent with music. So a very recent example of that will be succession.
Richard Campbell (10:13):
Oh, yes.
Steve Keller (10:14):
Yeah.
Rory Sutherland (10:15):
Why I would regard, first of all, the opening sequence as being a work of art in itself, and actually the entire, is it non-diegetic soundtrack throughout that? It's worth actually going back to key moments in succession and just focusing on the music. 'Cause of course, in a sense, you're not supposed to focus on the music in that sense. It's supposed to basically evoke mood without you necessarily being directly aware of the process. Or you could take a film like Psycho, which would be still a very good film without the music, but I don't think it really would be remembered as a great film.
(11:02):
Let's take an advertisement. There's a wonderful advertisement for coal fires going back to the early 1990s. It's basically a dog, a cat, and a mouse all sitting down together in front of a fire contentedly. Okay? And it uses, "Will You Love Me tomorrow?" as the soundtrack. Now without that apposite music, it would still be a pretty good ad, but I don't think we'd remember it to be absolutely candid. It would make the point ostensibly, but it wouldn't really drive home the point. And I think succession actually is a very, very interesting case.
Richard Campbell (11:42):
And a very contemporary example. Steve, do you have favorites? I mean, you're in the business, so I imagine it's hard to pick any one, but when you think about great examples of using music.
Steve Keller (11:52):
Yeah, that's like trying to say, can you pick your favorite child?
Richard Campbell (11:57):
Oh, absolutely. I presume you'd pick one of your own efforts, that's just a given.
Steve Keller (12:02):
I mean, actually, I'm kind of drawn to interesting stories around music more than just my own personal preferences. And one of the stories that I love actually predates me. But when the cereal brand Wheaties was introduced, and it almost failed, they were having a hard time marketing it, and somebody had come up with a fun little jingle, we were talking about jingles, a jingle for Wheaties. And in an early example of market research, they started to notice that the Wheaties that were selling were in areas where they were running this jingle on the radio.
Richard Campbell (12:48):
Wasn't the jingle. Have you tried Wheaties?
Steve Keller (12:50):
Yes. It wasn't [inaudible 00:12:52].
Richard Campbell (12:51):
[inaudible 00:12:52] sophisticated.
Steve Keller (12:53):
Barbershop quartet style. And so they launched the campaign with that across the country, and sales of Wheaties went through the roof, and the rest was history, literally. So I love that example of a piece of music that's associated with an ad.
Richard Campbell (13:18):
Becomes the delivery vehicle.
Steve Keller (13:21):
Yeah, exactly.
Rory Sutherland (13:22):
Mark Ritson, the marketing academic, has wonderful data that shows that effectively auditory or sonic branding is one of two extraordinarily potent marketing tools to which disproportionately little attention is paid. The other one being brand partnerships. I've always thought that brand partnerships are a logical place to start in the sense that before we start giving money to Rupert Murdoch, is there anything we can do to symbiotically work with one of the other a hundred thousand brands on the planet to solve this problem between ourselves rather than by necessarily spending money? And it seems just a very sensible, philosophical place to start. Similarly, I think probably more ads should actually start with a soundtrack in a way. Historically, the process doesn't work that way. The reason jingles have fallen out of favor, I would argue is the same as the reason long copy advertising has fallen out of favor, pure fashion, and possibly also the distortions perhaps of market research.
Richard Campbell (14:37):
Yes.
Rory Sutherland (14:37):
'Cause if you play music in a research group while accompanied by storyboards, and of course, without repetition, it's a completely artificial assessment of the potency of that.
Richard Campbell (14:53):
And it's an interesting problem that we draw up away these techniques that have had success in the past because our modern testing methodology doesn't work with it.
Rory Sutherland (15:02):
Oh, no.
Steve Keller (15:02):
And I would also argue part of the problem that's happened recently as we've gotten more fascinated with performance metrics, where we're leaning more into the short term, and you think of audio-only advertising and a lot of traditional radio advertising is that kind of direct marketing approach. It's a wall-to-wall VO, it's performance based, it's a price point. And yet we've been talking about the power and emotion and using music and sound to build a brand long term is really powerful. And in chasing some of these short-term metrics, I think what we've also done is forgotten about how to use sound in telling a story, how to make connections with emotion. And we're losing the opportunity to be really creative with music and sound as a result.
Rory Sutherland (16:01):
As we said earlier, there aren't that many art forms that bear constant repetition, and they're even fewer that gain from it. I'd probably include poetry, very, very good comic writing. You've got to be up there with PG Wodehouse and the tiny, tiny number of films, that's why I kind of venerate Hitchcock, who patently paid a huge amount of attention to music, by the way. But one of the reasons I venerate Hitchcock is that such a high proportion of his films are rewatchable. And it's quite rare. It's quite hard to do. But actually, if you use music, you can cheat. Now, that's one of my favorite radio ads. I have to apologize for this 'cause it's very silly. It's a local company somewhere just across the Thames from me is a place called Rainham. And in Rainham, this place that sell sheds called Rainham Sheds very unimaginatively. And their radio advertising simply took its Rainham Sheds to the tune of "Its Raining Men." Okay?
Richard Campbell (17:07):
Obviously.
Rory Sutherland (17:11):
Obviously, okay. It's Rainham sheds, hallelujah. It kicks off. And then it's just the fact that big, small, tall, et cetera, that it sells a wide range of sheds. That was a case of someone, I have no idea what the advertising of a Rainham Shed company budget might be, but I think I actually go online and re-listen to that kind of once a year because it's just amusing.
Richard Campbell (17:37):
It's the right amount of ridiculous.
Rory Sutherland (17:39):
It's exactly the right amount of ridiculous.
Richard Campbell (17:41):
Yeah.
Rory Sutherland (17:42):
Yeah, it's wonderful.
Richard Campbell (17:43):
Should we talk a bit about voice? Because I want to separate that from music. I mean, you mentioned the wall-to-wall voiceover effects, Steve. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what voices for voiceover? Does that have an impact?
Steve Keller (17:55):
Well, totally. I mean, you can think about voice in the same way you think about music. Certainly there's rhythm, and that's an aspect of it. There's repetition. There's the ability to recognize a voice using pitch, using tambour, using tempo. All of those things can communicate emotion. And if you think, again, really our brains are wired for congruency. That's how we survive by finding the ways things fit. Now we can use things that are incongruent to surprise and maybe delight, but we don't tend to be drawn to incongruency time and time again. So thinking about the sound of a voice as that relates to the other sonic elements, or the other visual elements, or the brand attributes, how are you finding congruency in those choices as well? So I think voice is a hugely important part of the sonic palette, if you will, that a brand can choose from.
Richard Campbell (19:05):
And I've got to think, knowing Rory's role, it's like you're looking at the demographic of the potential customer and saying, "What voice will this customer respond to?"
Rory Sutherland (19:14):
I think that's right. Yes. And actually, there are familiar voices, which we have no idea who they belong to, but nonetheless, they carry a sort of weight for that reason. It's funny actually, earlier I mentioned that Neil French, who was Creative Director of Ogilvy, asked a whole bunch of people in the creative community to list their 10 most memorable moments in film. And the point he was making there was an astoundingly high number of these very high proportion were accompanied by highly distinctive and appropriate music. I also think, and this is an interesting debate, the voiceover, although it's absolutely despised by most film directors who have the mantra of, "Show don't tell," a significant number of the most enjoyable films actually have a voiceover. Rather, someone once said that actually the voiceover massively improved Blade Runner, for example, Goodfellas.
Richard Campbell (20:18):
And that's exactly the case I was thinking, because now you can get a director's cut version of Blade Runner without the voiceover, which the director didn't like, but the studio forced upon them.
Rory Sutherland (20:30):
That was probably a case that the studio was, right?
Richard Campbell (20:33):
Yeah. Yeah. Depends on who you are. I mean, it was such an art film too. But then you also have Harrison Ford doing the voiceover, which is its own gravity.
Rory Sutherland (20:42):
Yeah. Oh, of course. The public's favorite film of all time, which is the Shawshank Redemption. Okay. I mean, it's from a short story, so I suppose it's perfectly lent to narration. But I mean, that's basically almost entirely narrated.
Richard Campbell (21:00):
And again, it's Morgan Freeman, so why wouldn't you want to listen to that? Even though this material is terrible, but it's so powerful.
Rory Sutherland (21:08):
No, no. It's music in itself, actually.
Richard Campbell (21:10):
Yeah.
Rory Sutherland (21:11):
I mean, that's an interesting thing, which is the joke I always make in Britain is that, "The Welsh and the Celts, the Irish, to some extent, there's a form of conversation which is akin to music in that you're not conversing to convey information, but to demonstrate that you are good at it." It's kind of peacock's tail conversation, which is almost done for display purposes, which I think it's just in a sort of distinctively Celtic way, but you also see it in other groups. It's really, really interesting. There's a certain Irish facility for storytelling and so on, which I think is worth noting where if you like, it's bridging the gap between music and speech.
Richard Campbell (21:56):
I don't disagree. And I think you've heard those voices that you cannot resist. I almost wonder if it detracts from the message at times that you're just fascinated by the voice rather than the words themselves.
Rory Sutherland (22:07):
Not a politically correct film example perhaps. But Zulu, which ends with the voiceover by Richard Burton.
Richard Campbell (22:15):
Another great voice.
Rory Sutherland (22:16):
Detailing the number of Victoria Crosses award and so forth, is almost unimprovable as a way to end a film.
Richard Campbell (22:23):
Yeah. Very powerful. We sort of blew past this idea of the jingle falling out of favor, perhaps because it's difficult to measure. But here we are at a time and a place where our measurement tools arguably have never been better.
Rory Sutherland (22:36):
We are, yes. This is the tragedy. This is the absolute tragedy. Now, I come from a direct marketing background and I love direct marketing because it's measurable. And the marketing world, I think came to believe that once you could measure things more, you would be given much more freedom and much more budget. Okay. The downside curse, which no one ever anticipated, is that suddenly you'd no longer be allowed to do anything that you can't measure.
Richard Campbell (23:06):
Right.
Rory Sutherland (23:07):
In other words, they took an optimistic take on measurement and failed to notice the kind of obverse of the coin, which is that in a world where you can measure some things and it is assumed you should attempt to measure more and more, a very large part of the value of all marketing activity is of necessity, immeasurable and unattributable. And those are the parts which disproportionately suffer. And music would be a classic example of that. I mentioned the point about good to great. I think there's a lot of good advertising which could be greater and could actually reach the level of greatness if that sort of little element of self-indulgence were applied. Can you prove it? No, except empirically. I mean, I always joke about this, which is some of the empirical findings of advertising, which I think are inarguable, are almost too embarrassingly trivial to relay, which is one things with animals in do disproportionately well. Okay?
(24:18):
Two things with great music effectively earn an extra star in the consumer's mind. And I think those two things are absolutely provable. It's a bit like [inaudible 00:24:35] Americans, but my argument for constitutional monarchy is simply empirical that the 15 countries that practice it, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada are kind of disproportionately, okay?
Richard Campbell (24:55):
One monarch seems to get around on that ridiculous scenario.
Rory Sutherland (24:59):
No, no, no, no, absolutely no, but I mean, we don't know why. Okay? But do you necessarily need to know why? If there's a reliable kind of correlation without needing no causation, why take the risk? It is very interesting because you can't really go in as a kind of and Ivy League graduate and say, "One of our consistent findings is that if you put a gecko or a chihuahua at the ad, it'll be a more successful ad."
Richard Campbell (25:29):
It'll do well. I mean, I'm smitten with this idea of how do we metric the repeatability of something? Because that seems very valuable, but clearly not an easy thing to measure.
Steve Keller (25:40):
Yeah. I mean, you have to measure that over time, which is in our need for immediacy. Sometimes with metrics that becomes difficult. I will say though, that I have seen in the last 10 years in particular, the rise of companies that are more dedicated to measuring audio, to producing some metrics there. Certainly for years in academia, we have the music cognition folks, the experimental psychologists who have looked at the ways that music and sound have impacted us in different ways. So there's more research out there that's available. I think sometimes the problem is maybe we're not thinking about the right questions to ask. I'm a questions guy. I think finding the right question is probably harder than finding the answer. And so what are the questions? And then I think sometimes in our attempt to kind of condense things down with data, we can miss things. I love jazz. I love Miles Davis. And one of my favorite Miles Davis quotes is his talking about his approach to music. And he says, "I don't play what's there. I play what's not there."
(27:07):
And I think as data scientists, sometimes when we approach data, I think we need to look at what the data is telling us is not there as much as what it's telling us is there. And I think there's a creativity that can be found in that kind of problem-solving. So I'm encouraged because I do think we have more and more opportunities to ask questions, to measure things, but it also, again, will challenge us to move beyond short-term to look at long-term and maybe move outside of some of the typical places that we're going to look for the answers to find better questions.
Rory Sutherland (27:55):
I mean, I think there's something wonderful which you could almost refer to, which is how you produce whole brain advertising. And of course, if you heavily rely on research, essentially you are talking to the part of the brain which post rationalizes, and it will always make sense. It will always say that the point of a dishwasher is to clean your plates and crockery and knives. Okay? Whereas I jokingly say, Deep down, the value we derive from a dishwasher is chiefly that it gives you a place to put dirty plates out of sight."
(28:27):
The reason it's frustrating when your dishwasher breaks down isn't that you have to wash up by hand. It's that you have to look at the damage or smell it. Okay? And so I think that the deeper explanation is often actually opaque to introspection. Now, what interests me about music and humor having had children was how early the appreciation for humor and the appreciation for music and dancing appears in children, which suggests that if you believe that kind of, the development of the fetus all the way through to the child kind of recapitulates evolution to a degree, okay. It suggests that this is something pretty deep.
(29:11):
Now, what's glorious about both music and humor is that evolutionary scientists have effectively made attempts at explaining it, I think some of which are quite good. Some people believe humor's a reward for kind of error correction, that you need to have a kind of error correction mechanism when things get ridiculous, to prevent things escalating, to prevent things becoming absurd. And therefore, evolution has given us an emotional reward for performing that correction. What the role of music is even more mysterious unless, as you say, you believe it's a kind of spandrel. And then by the way, on my good to great thing, which is that music elevates good things to great. It can actually, as I said, with Rainham Sheds, actually rescue pretty bad things. Okay. But Curb Your Enthusiasm would be an absolutely magnificent example where somebody with real genius without that final track, without indeed the soundtrack, it would still be extremely funny. But I don't think it would reach the heights that it does.
Richard Campbell (30:20):
An intriguing effect that the opening music basically sets your mind in a state for the humor to come.
Rory Sutherland (30:26):
Absolutely. Perfect. Yeah, yeah.
Steve Keller (30:28):
And I think what's interesting, we were talking about congruency and incongruency. I think a lot of times when music is used in a humorous fashion, it's put in an incongruent fashion. You're hearing something that is lighthearted under something that you might think, "Oh, that should be somber or vice versa," and ways that it kind of shocks us in the context in a similar way that humor does. It reframes things in a way that maybe we hadn't thought about that, and that peaks our interest and our curiosity. So I love this line of thinking about the relationship of humor to music, because I think it's one that's not thought about that often.
Rory Sutherland (31:18):
In another politically incorrect parallel, perhaps Benny Hill.
Richard Campbell (31:22):
Yes. That is politically incorrect as you get.
Rory Sutherland (31:25):
[inaudible 00:31:25] as you get. But I've already mentioned Zulu so I can't really go in any deeper, but...
Richard Campbell (31:31):
But he certainly transformed Yakity Sax.
Rory Sutherland (31:34):
Yes, he did. Absolutely right.
Richard Campbell (31:37):
Gentlemen, we've had a fun half hour of, obviously this is the feel of Nudgestock to me coming up on July 7th. Any callouts, things we should mention for folks who want to get more involved?
Rory Sutherland (31:48):
The website, nudgestock.com, the fact that you can attend in person, it's in London on July the 7th, but you can equally well attend online for free. And the fact that it's nudgestock.com on July the 7th, you said, realizing the value of repetition.
Richard Campbell (32:06):
Repetition is powerful.
Rory Sutherland (32:07):
If only I could could sing that, I would have an excuse to repeat it four more times.
Richard Campbell (32:12):
Yeah. All we need is a jingle. We might even have a plan.
Rory Sutherland (32:18):
Yes.
Steve Keller (32:18):
We'll work on that.
Richard Campbell (32:18):
Yeah, for sure.
Steve Keller (32:18):
Something humorous.
Richard Campbell (32:18):
No doubt.
Steve Keller (32:18):
Something funny.
Richard Campbell (32:20):
Steve Keller, Rory Sutherland, thanks so much for spending some time with me.
Steve Keller (32:23):
Thank you, Richard.
Rory Sutherland (32:24):
It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.
Steve Keller (32:25):
Thanks.
Richard Campbell (32:26):
And thank you for listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.