Can music make advertising more effective? Richard hosts a panel discussion with Professor Les Binet, Laura Devis from MassiveMusic, and Darren Till from CloudArmy exploring the findings from the Sound Science study and the measurable business impact of music in marketing. The conversation examines how engagement, surprise, fit, and recallability influence outcomes such as ROMI, pricing power, brand fame, and long-term profitability, and why music may be one of the most underestimated drivers of marketing effectiveness.
Brandon Wehn (00:07):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn, and you're listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast brought to you by the folks at Cloud Army. In this episode, Richard hosts a panel of Professor Les Binet of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, Laura Devis of Massive Music, and Darren Till from Cloud Army to discuss the recent publication of Sound Science: How Music Is the Missing Link in Marketing ROI and the power of music to amplify the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
Richard Campbell (00:47):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell. Thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. We have an unusual show today, a panel discussion, and I'm sitting here with Darren Till, Lauren Devis, and Professor Les Binet. And I'll let you all introduce yourselves, starting with professor.
Les Binet (01:02):
Hello. I'm Les Binet and I'm an author, consultant and marketing professor. I write about marketing effectiveness in particular.
Richard Campbell (01:15):
Great topic. Laura?
Laura Devis (01:17):
Nice. Thanks for having me, Richard. I'm Laura. I work at Massive Music, which is a creative global music agency, and I work there as a researcher and strategist. So my day-to-day, I think and help shape music strategies for brands, but also work on wider industry research on the effectiveness of music, which is what we're going to be talking about today.
Richard Campbell (01:46):
For sure. Hi, Darren.
Darren Till (01:49):
Hey, Richard. Nice to be on the podcast finally. So I'm Darren. We've got another Darren in the company, so I always have to specify that I'm Darren Jr., Darren Till. I work at Cloud Army in the client service team, a bit of business development too. And I guess my position is director of science and research. So I'm particularly interested in why consumers make choices, why do they feel certain things? What do they say on the subconscious level? And I'm very excited about this discussion today.
Richard Campbell (02:22):
So we have some research completed that's talking about the effectiveness of music. Who took the lead on this? Is this your story, Laura? It's from Massive Music.
Laura Devis (02:31):
I believe so, yes. For the past, I would say, two years now, we have been working on a big research project alongside the IPA here in the UK, which is the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising, to really try to prove the importance of sound for brands. Our research team, as I've touched upon briefly before, we have put out other previous white papers in the past which have focused quite a lot on the link between music and brand preference, brand metrics such as brand loyalty, brand preference. This is also research that Les has done quite a lot of work in. But with this particular study that we want to talk about today, we aimed to move from brand metrics to business metrics and investigate what is the effect of music for your business.
Richard Campbell (03:43):
So when we talking about effect here, we're talking about revenue?
Laura Devis (03:47):
Yes, exactly. We're talking about metrics such as ROMI, long and short term business metrics, but yeah, really those hard-hitting numbers.
Richard Campbell (04:00):
That adding sound to ads, specifically music, will increase your revenue.
Laura Devis (04:06):
Yes.
Les Binet (04:07):
Revenue is one of the key metrics we look at, but it is a little bit broader than that. So what do I mean by effectiveness? Because my whole career over the last 40 years has been about advertising and marketing effectiveness. And ultimately that's about what drives, for commercial businesses, what drives shareholder value, which is a bit wider than revenue. We're thinking about short and long-term profit. And feeding into that, there are a number of key metrics that one might want to look at. So things like market share gains, revenue increases, but also the effects on price sensitivity and margins and ultimately how that feeds through into profit. The reason I particularly wanted to mention that is that price effects are really important for the profitability and payback of marketing and they're under researched and often ignored. One of the most important ways in which brand marketing can help a company to make money is not by just selling more stuff, but selling more stuff at higher prices and therefore making bigger margins.
Richard Campbell (05:27):
And we've seen, I mean, relatively, few cases of companies changing their brand perception to become more of a luxurious brand that you will pay a premium for.
Les Binet (05:35):
Yeah. Well, it's less frequent, but having done this stuff for 40 years, I've seen a lot of it.
Richard Campbell (05:42):
Sure. It can be done and it's worthwhile, obviously.
Les Binet (05:44):
It can be done. I mean, it's possible to both increase volume and price simultaneously. That's the sweet spot. Anyway, that's kind of diverging off. But the resource that we're tapping into here in this research is the IPA Databank, which is one of the world's, possibly the world's biggest and best Databank on marketing effectiveness. And here in this database, we have thousands of case studies, thousands of campaigns where we've got a reading on a variety of business effects, market share gains, sales increases, revenue increases, profit gains, changes in price sensitivity, penetration gains, improvements in brand loyalty and so forth.
Richard Campbell (06:35):
And just to push on an angle of this, so these are ads that were used in the field, these are studies based on actual ads. So this cumulative study on top of this is, here are ads that are out in the world and we've sorted through them to see the ones that were especially effective in the space and here are the reasons why.
Les Binet (06:50):
Yeah. Over the last 20 years or so, in the second half of my career, I've basically been mining data like this to draw general conclusions about what works and what doesn't, broadly speaking. So what are the factors that correlate with increases in shareholder value business success? And in this research, what we're doing is going back to the data and going, okay, let's look at how music was used in these campaigns, what we can understand in terms of how people reacted to the music and how that correlates with business success. So Laura's going to talk you through some of the stuff.
Richard Campbell (07:33):
Sure. My next question is, Laura, what's special about music in this scenario?
Laura Devis (07:39):
I think what is special about music is a question that everyone kind of inherently knows the answer to. I think music is the most emotional, or at least one of the most emotional... What's the word?
Les Binet (07:59):
It's a fantastic tool, isn't it? It's a tool for manipulating people's emotions.
Laura Devis (08:03):
Yes, exactly.
Richard Campbell (08:05):
We are all emotionally affected by music to different degrees, without a doubt.
Les Binet (08:08):
Unless you're dead inside.
Richard Campbell (08:10):
Yeah, you would hope not.
Les Binet (08:13):
There are people.
Richard Campbell (08:13):
But there is a price to it, the emotionality of that. I think this falls into where Cloud Army, and Darren, your work as well, is that's tough stuff to measure. That's not an easy thing to quantify, the level of emotional response.
Darren Till (08:28):
Exactly. I mean, music, sound in general, but I would say music in particular, is incredibly emotional. It's visceral. And I think back to the song that I danced to with my wife as our first dance when we got married. Every time I hear that song, if it plays on the radio, I get goosebumps. My body has a physical reaction to it. It just kind of shows the power of music. And you have all kinds of things like synesthesia where people feel music in different ways. And it's very much in the deep seated way that it kind of moves you. And I think the other thing that's quite unique about music is that it's intangible. And if you don't have some sort of degree in music science like Laura and team might have, you struggle to explain why you like this song over another song. You don't possess the vocab to actually articulate what you're feeling and thinking and acting on. And that's where, I guess, as you say, Cloud Army comes into play.
Richard Campbell (09:35):
Because you folks are always the ones that's like, don't ask them what they feel. They'll have a tough time describing it. You have to measure that implicitly.
Darren Till (09:43):
Exactly. Consumers have a tough time describing their feelings regardless of what the stimuli is. And here we've got something that's inherently intangible. If it's stirring emotions at a non-conscious level, you have to test it at a non-conscious level too. And the way I like to look at it is it's almost as if you've got a choice of different tools for your research. You're not going to choose a saw over a scalpel if you're doing, let's say, open heart surgery. The saw is incredibly useful, but in a different context. And here we have got a scalpel to really kind of get at, what are you feeling and why are you feeling that way? Below that level of consciousness.
Richard Campbell (10:25):
It's really interesting. Laura, what were the aspects from the study that you found that was important on the music side? Were there particular types of music or particular responses you were looking for?
Laura Devis (10:36):
Yes. When we started designing the study alongside Cloud Army, we tried to define how we can test music and what we can test music on because it is so broad. The first thing that we looked into was engagement. So how engaging is a certain piece of music. The second kind of metric that we defined... Also all of these metrics were defined kind of in collaboration with yourself, but also based on scientific research and also based on what experts in the music space, how they interpret music. So engagement as a first important metric. The second metric was fit with film because this study was about campaigns, like Les has talked about. The kind of sync between music and visual and how congruent that is was the second metric that we investigated. The third metric was surprise. And I think this metric is the one that we don't have favorites, but we were really excited about because we tried to pin down what is it that makes a musical choice for an ad particularly stand out and particularly creative and surprising and something that maybe you wouldn't expect.
(12:09):
And then as a fourth metric, we've got recall ability, so memory, of course. How easy is it for participants to recognize that they've heard this song before? So how easy is it with this song to create those new associations, basically. So those are the four kind of key metrics that we measured using Cloud Army's services, but also with a consumer panel of 7,500 participants. So what we did specifically was from this IPA Effectiveness Databank that Les has touched upon, we selected 150 campaigns where music was a present, at least, but also in some cases played a big part in the success of the ad. There are a couple of examples. I'm sure Les can talk more about the John Lewis Christmas ads, which have always had a very kind of consistent strategy in the music that was applied to them and have just engaged so much with the cultural phenomenon in the UK. So 150 ads, 7,500 participants who we measured the true, implicit reactions to these four metrics.
(13:36):
And then we combined that data on music with the business data that the IPA Effectiveness Databank holds. And that kind of allowed us to look for patterns and correlations between musical responses and music and the effect of music and business data.
Richard Campbell (14:00):
And when we say music, I presume we're not talking about jingles like music fabricated for a brand definition, but like licensed music, existing performances or original performances?
Laura Devis (14:12):
Yeah. So we are mostly talking about hit tracks here, but not only commercial music, also rerecorded music. So sometimes brands, they will take a original song but kind of give it their own twist and recreate it and re-imagine it with the brand in mind.
Richard Campbell (14:38):
Wasn't one of the case studies where you did a choir of a popular song? Maybe I'm misremembering.
Les Binet (14:47):
It's not ringing any bells for me.
Richard Campbell (14:49):
No, but I get the idea that you take a popular song which is played a particular way and then have it performed a different way as part of the ad. That might introduce that surprise element.
Les Binet (15:00):
That's one of the things that we did. Laura alluded to the John Lewis Christmas advertising. I don't know whether all your listeners will know about those ads, but here in the UK, we have a sort of 10 year period or so where the agency that I used to work for, Adam and Eve DDB, we created these Christmas ads every year. And what we would do, our little formula was to take a well-known song and rerecord it in a new way. And typically what it was, it was a song that would be known probably by people who were older, but it'd be rerecorded in a modern, sort of indie, typically breathy female singer was the common, sort of semi-acoustic. And this had the effect of generating a kind of surprise. You go, "I love that song, but I've not heard it played that way before." It also did another thing which was we could appeal to older people who knew the song and at the same time, younger people who liked the younger style.
(16:24):
So there was a little bit of a sort of trick there that the young people were kind of going, "Well, this is a brilliant new song." And their parents were going, "Yeah, actually we knew this."
Richard Campbell (16:37):
"I kind of know that song." So you're pressing on the nostalgia button as well as on the popular culture button at the same time.
Les Binet (16:43):
And then during the course of that, we accidentally relaunched Lily Allen's career because one of the artists who... We got her to rerecord a song by Keen. That was one of the examples.
Richard Campbell (16:59):
And a fun part of the equation too, right? Because you never know which of these songs is really going to catch on. The ad went well and there's the, you created a national meme.
Les Binet (17:09):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that was really important. I mean, if I can sort of just segue from talking about surprise to fame. Surprise, as Laura said, is one of the four key ingredients that we identified as being part of effectiveness. It's a great way to get people's attention. So if you have an ad and someone goes, "What is that music?" Then you've passed the first hurdle of effectiveness, which is getting people to pay any attention at all.
Richard Campbell (17:47):
Yeah. It's the most valuable thing out there today.
Les Binet (17:49):
Yeah. And when you do it really well, then you can actually go beyond getting attention to actually making the brand and the ads famous. So what we did with the John Lewis advertising is, I think it's true of every one of the sort of ads that we did over the 10 years, every single one of them, the track in itself became a hit. I think we were... I don't even quite know how charts work in [inaudible 00:18:22].
Richard Campbell (18:21):
Yeah, sure. The idea that an ad produces a single that then performs in the music business as well is kind of crazy.
Les Binet (18:30):
Not only that, in the early phase of that, when music revenues were bigger than they are, I think it paid for the cost of making the ad.
Richard Campbell (18:44):
Interesting. Suddenly I have another revenue stream.
Les Binet (18:47):
Yeah, exactly. But importantly, it made people listen to the song and that gave, if you like, gave the ad an extra reach as audio. It made people watch the video online more often in order to hear the song.
Richard Campbell (19:07):
And you had a year over year effect here too. I imagine folks starting to anticipate, what's the new John Lewis going to be this year?
Les Binet (19:13):
Absolutely. You presumably knew that. Maybe not all your listeners will know this, that in the UK, the Christmas ads became like the Super Bowl in America. And in particular, John Lewis was the one that became known as the stars of Christmas. So people anticipated it. Yeah. And fame is really important in advertising. You want ads that reach lots of people, that lots of people talk about, that people will watch again voluntarily, that people in the press will write about, that people will make parodies of even. And so music was part of that process.
Richard Campbell (20:04):
On one hand, as a marketing person, I'm looking at, how do I sell my stuff and how do I reach a larger customer and so forth. But this aspect of brand transformation that you become associated with a season, become associated with a culture, you're lifting to a different level. And I guess this is all the emotional response part of this, that you're really much changing people's perception of your brand.
Les Binet (20:27):
Yes. And to give you a feel for. The first of those Christmas ads was called The Long Wait. It was about gifts that you can't wait to give. So you think that the ad is going to be about a little boy who can't wait to get his Christmas present. And in fact, it's a little boy who can't wait to give his parents a Christmas present. Now, as I'm speaking, I'm literally getting goosebumps because I'm getting an echo of the emotions from that ad. I have talked about this so many times on so many platforms, and yet I'm literally getting goosebumps now. And it was that combination of the emotional storytelling with the music and the cinematography. To say it created a cultural phenomenon... I mean, there were examples of churches doing sermons about our ad as an example of the true Christmas spirit, and it was taught in schools. That's that first ad in the series. It wasn't all music, but the music was one of the magic ingredients.
Richard Campbell (21:41):
Darren, is goosebumps a good, implicit test metric?
Darren Till (21:46):
It depends on who you ask, I guess, Richard. I guess for us, goosebumps are relatively difficult to test because-
Richard Campbell (21:55):
They're pretty tricky. I don't know what instrument that is.
Darren Till (21:59):
You don't. No, you don't. And you don't know if that's a good response or a bad response. It's just a response.
Richard Campbell (22:03):
I think this is one of the challenging aspects of all this. When you're going to tap into people's emotions, you're never going to be sure which one you're going to get.
Darren Till (22:10):
Exactly. Exactly. And that's why it's so important to do the research upfront. And I mean, this is what Laura's whole team is dedicated for at Massive Music. It's to take the creative output from the rest of the Mass Music team and put it through the test and actually understand, is it meeting our sort of metrics? Is it actually moving the needle in terms of these key checks? In a world where, with generative AI and all these beautiful agencies that we work with, you have so many ways to create assets, brand assets, but sound in particular, you go and actually do the research. You have to work out, is this moving the needle or not? Because I think-
Richard Campbell (22:57):
Let's face it, revulsion is also an emotional response. I don't think it's one you want.
Darren Till (23:02):
No.
Les Binet (23:02):
Unless you're doing advertising to stop people smoking.
Richard Campbell (23:06):
Good point. Yeah. It's got to fit the scenario. But I think you really want to know where this is going to land. And you bring up the AI point. In the past few years, we've got new tools to make music, and I'm using air quotes, "fairly inexpensively". It's just a question of... I've also seen publicly there's a significant revulsion response to anything appearing to be "AI slop."
Darren Till (23:37):
Yeah. It's a question of authenticity in some cases. Is what you're seeing authentic or not? And that has an influence on the brand too. If the brand is putting out AI slop, it's going to lose a level of respect. But there's also the question of whether your consumers implicitly feel that this is AI. Regardless of whether they're aware of it or not, does the AI sort of input change their perception towards your brand in some way?
Les Binet (24:08):
I had an experience recently of a friend of mine who showed me a video that he'd made for his daughter about their dog. And he'd created the video and created music, created a song about the dog to go with the video, and the whole thing was created by AI. And that got an emotional response from me and it was a positive one. I thought it was clever and funny and quite touching in the way in which if you made a handmade card for somebody. It maybe wasn't at the professional level that one would associate with a big brand, but let's not assume that AI can't generate emotional responses.
Richard Campbell (24:57):
Well, and the case was very authentic, to use Darren's word there, that people respond positively to authenticity no matter what tools you're using. Tools are not unusual, paintbrush or keyboard, it's just a question of the authentic intent.
Les Binet (25:15):
There are vast swathes of the music industry that long before AI got involved, were mass producing crap.
Richard Campbell (25:26):
We've had plenty of bad music over the years, not just this one.
Les Binet (25:31):
I mean, 99% of all human creative output is probably rubbish. So let's not make too many assumptions about what AI can or can't do.
Richard Campbell (25:42):
But to your point then, Darren, it's all about how you measure.
Darren Till (25:45):
Exactly. It's so important to actually just check, does it land or does it not? There's always a chance that it doesn't and it does the opposite of what you're hoping. And so research it.
Les Binet (25:56):
I think you touched on something quite important there, which is, what kind of emotional response are you looking for? Is it goosebumps? For example, often when I'm talking about, sometimes if I show the John Lewis ads in a presentation or something, I have to be quite careful because sometimes I cry. And not all ads evoke that response. I mean, laughing is an emotional response and anger is an emotional response. I have to say, I don't think there's much very good research on what emotional responses work better or worse because I think it's going to be context dependent.
Richard Campbell (26:37):
Well, I think social media has shown us pretty clearly that rage is a very effective tool for "engagement".
Les Binet (26:44):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (26:45):
Yeah, if not particularly constructive.
Les Binet (26:47):
But I think broadly speaking, most, at least for commercial brands, regardless of how you do it, ultimately what you want is for people to enjoy the music. And that could be high energy, exciting music. It could be death metal. It could be something folky and evocative. But ultimately, and I think this is what's behind the engagement metrics, is, is this the kind of music that I relate to and that, broadly speaking, I like? And that's really important because that's how brand advertising, broadly speaking, works. This is a sort of bit of a side issue, but about 20 years ago when I first started working in this space, my co-author, Peter Field, and I had this epiphany, really, when we looked at the data. We'd been brought up to believe that advertising was about communicating messages. Things like music were sugaring the pill. So the aim of advertising was to tell people about your products and give them reasons to buy your products.
(27:59):
And music and creativity and dancing polar bears and all those other things were there to get people to pay attention and to keep them paying attention and all those other things. That's not what the data shows. The data shows that actually the emotions, the feelings evoked by advertising are the main message. Messages play a relatively small part in making advertising work. Advertising isn't, at least for brand advertising, I'm leaving aside things like performance marketing, for most advertising, most brand advertising, it's not a communications medium at all. It's not a message transmission medium at all. It's more like a Pavlovian conditioning mechanism where you associate the brand with a set of feelings. So Pavlov's dog, the classic study is you ring the bell and you give the dog a piece of food and then eventually it associates the bell with the food, and when you ring the bell, the dog salivates. And advertising kind of works in a similar way. You have entertaining, enjoyable, creative work associated with the brand. And eventually if you do that enough, then when people see the brand name, they feel some of the same feelings.
(29:40):
And music, I think, is one of the best demonstrations of this. So from a previous piece of research I've done in this area, there's reason to believe that maybe about 20 to 30% of the money you make from an ad, 20 to 30% of the profit is down to the choice of music. And you kind of go, this is almost like the proof that this is not a communication medium, it's an entertainment medium.
Richard Campbell (30:09):
Yeah. Or an emotional response medium. Laura, I mean, Massive Music, this is the job. How do you pick a piece of music?
Laura Devis (30:16):
There's a lot of factors that come into what makes a piece of music good for a particular ad for a brand. What I just want to touch up on on Les' insight about profitability and music and profitability, this is actually something we found in our study as well that we did. So this engagement metric I've talked about, and I realize I've talked about these metrics, but I haven't actually given you guys the results, the big "So what?"
Richard Campbell (30:56):
Why they were effective.
Laura Devis (30:56):
What did we actually find in combining all of this consumer data on music with all of this business data from the Effectiveness Databank? So if your piece of music in the ad is really engaging, we found that it can make ads perform up to twice as effectively, so up to double the ROMI that you would get from a non-engaging piece of music.
(31:27):
On average, it boosts your ROMI by 32%, but in those really high hitting cases, it could perform up to twice as effectively. So that for us was obviously... It plays into the previous research that Professor Les Binet has done so well, but it also kind of expands our understanding of, okay, we've now dissected the music a little bit and taken that engagement metric and we see we can now with confidence say how important it is. Alongside the engagement, we also find that fitting music, so if your music fits your ad really well, it can make consumers up to seven times more likely to pay a premium price. So the business effect on the IPA side was price sensitivity. That shows that seven times more likely relationship with highly fitting music.
Richard Campbell (32:37):
Willing to pay more for the same product.
Les Binet (32:39):
That fits with, as Laura said, some previous stuff that Peter Field and I found, which is that people are willing to pay more for the things that they feel warm about, basically the brands that they love. And this is not about a rational reason.
Richard Campbell (33:00):
This is an emotional response.
Les Binet (33:01):
Basically when you feel a strong emotion towards a brand, it kind of throws reason out the window and people are willing to pay a lot more.
Richard Campbell (33:10):
What about the other effective metrics there, Laura?
Laura Devis (33:13):
Yes. So we've talked quite a bit about surprise already, and Les has already made the relationship between surprising music and fame, so this was the relationship we found in our study. It was that surprising music can be up to five times more effective at driving brand fame. If we look at these three findings already, we can see that fit has that strong effect with price sensitivity and surprise has this strong effect with brand fame. And we believe that fit and surprise, they can coexist. It's not necessarily a complete trade off, but it can also be a bit of a trade off, and it can also be, what is important for your brand where it is today? Are you already a very famous and big brand? And would your goal be to increase prices? Then making sure that the music you pick fits your ad and your brand perfectly might be a bigger priority than surprising to try to cut through the noise, which when you're a smaller brand who can really benefit from this brand fame moment to catapult it.
Richard Campbell (34:40):
The surprise element seems risky. That would be the one I'd want to be the most careful with.
Laura Devis (34:45):
Yes, but it's also the most groundbreaking and creative.
Richard Campbell (34:52):
And for an upcoming brand, as you've implied, that's a really powerful thing. This is where you would take the risk.
Laura Devis (34:58):
Exactly. Exactly.
Darren Till (34:59):
And Laura, is that where the creativity comes from in what you guys are doing at Massive Music? It's not like you're following a formula of do this, then this, then this, and you've got a hit song. There's a lot of creativity that goes into it. I mean, maybe you can touch on that.
Laura Devis (35:16):
Exactly. I think we've touched upon AI briefly. And as we've mentioned before, AI is a great tool, but AI is trained on music, historic music, all music that's already been put out there and exists in the world. And for us to kind of create something new, you have to make sure that the people behind the tools also kind of know where they want to go. And a certain idea and a certain creative concept passes through not only many tools, but also many people's brains, and that's how the best ideas form, really. So yeah, our process at Massive Music, the music selection and music creation, it goes through a lot of rounds. We are quite proud that our development process is pretty elaborate. Although timelines don't always allow for that elaborateness, but we still try to be as thorough as we can in every brief we get to make sure that we have looked at the brand and this campaign and this ask from every possible angle, and then therefore we create or help you choose the best possible track for your brand in this moment, with this campaign.
Richard Campbell (36:50):
Sure. And Darren, this is where the implicit test would come in to say, this is the surprise we want, that we're getting it and it's constructive to the goal.
Darren Till (36:57):
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I'm going to ask Laura a question which I've never really asked before but I've always had a hunch about. Laura, does, let's say, the creative agency's intuition line up quite often with the results or are there often curve balls that the results throw to you guys?
Laura Devis (37:20):
Big question. I've seen both. I've seen both multiple times. So I've seen... When we've tested both bespoke assets or licensed tracks, hit tracks for campaigns, there are some cases where the team is already very aligned on what they think is the best choice and the data confirms it and then that's great. We've also seen cases where the data tells a different story. And I think especially with music, which is so subjective and quite often, in the creative process, is something that different people, different stakeholders have quite different ideas about. I think the data and the work we do and testing the music with their consumers is very often a very handy information to bring into the room. Because I also don't want to say data is king and whatever the data tells us is 100% what we have to do. I think it's just another information source that can tell us a lot about what's going to resonate best with the audience.
Darren Till (38:37):
Right. So it's less about stifling the creativity, but more about having data points to support the creativity, to decide how do we optimize this? Where do we take it?
Laura Devis (38:47):
Exactly. And I think with music choices and creativity, it is often quite difficult to, or it can be quite difficult to get to a consensus on it. So when a choice for music might be surprising for a CMO who's making a choice about it and they might think, "Oof, I'm not sure if this is going to work." This report, showing that this surprise actually can be a really, really powerful thing for a brand, can give a little bit of peace of mind and can also just lift creative choices and creativity.
Les Binet (39:38):
I think it is a difficult balancing act in some ways because for instance, surprise and fit, there can be a tension there.
Richard Campbell (39:52):
Well, they seem to be almost in opposition, right? If it fit perfectly, then it wouldn't be a surprise.
Les Binet (39:57):
Yeah, exactly. For a given ad, for a given brand, there would be music tracks, which would be the obvious fit and those are going to be the least surprising. Equally, one can come up with a surprise, but it may be a surprise that doesn't fit. And remember the other one, engagement. You've got this triangle, fit, surprise and engagement. It's quite easy to come up with ads that are surprising, but they don't fit the brand and people don't like them. Squaring that circle. In an ideal world, you want something that's a surprise and then, "Wow, why didn't I realize that all along?" It's kind of like naturally fits, but not obviously, and that's quite hard to do. But agencies don't always get it right. And I can think of an example from my own agency.
(40:49):
We made an ad for Volkswagen and we used a hip hop track. The ad was called Last Tango in Compton and it featured a couple of young tango artists doing a very sort of contemporary tango to this hip hop track. So it was definitely surprising. It was not the obvious choice. But two problems, one, and the key to understanding this is that people who buy new cars are old. The average new car buyer in the UK is about 60 years old, I think. Young people do not buy new cars. People who work in advertising agencies forget that because people who work in advertising agencies are young. So they thought they've got a really great surprising new track. And they had, trouble is that the 60 year olds who buy a golf [inaudible 00:41:46] the track and didn't feel it fitted the brand and it bombed. Interestingly, some member of the public took the ad, uploaded it to YouTube and put a different music track on it, put Philip Glass on it, and the YouTube video got lots of likes.
(42:12):
So yeah, agencies don't always get it right. But then on the other hand, I mean, I can think of another car related ad. We did an ad for breakdown cover from the AA, Automobile Association, not alcoholics anonymous. And we used the track Proud Mary, a great track that lots of people of different ages know. And the point was it was about how the breakdown cover keeps you rolling. It's got that, "Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river." I don't think people would have... It was surprising to pair that with that brand, a rather stuffy brand in some ways. It was a bit like... Well, breakdown cover is not obviously sort of funky, but it showed how when you have them on your side, you just keep rolling basically. So it fitted the brand, people loved it and it was surprising. And it was another one of those ones where within a week, that song had suddenly gone up the streaming charts and so forth.
Richard Campbell (43:25):
Yeah. People grabbed the music and then wanted to hear that song again.
Laura Devis (43:27):
This is also something that has happened so many times, I feel like, over the past couple of years, songs and artists that have been put high up in the charts again because of their songs being used, not only in ads, but also in films. I'm thinking of the Murder on the Dance Floor which was used in Saltburn. Stranger Things are also so good at that.
Richard Campbell (43:55):
Yeah. Whoever's choosing the music for those shows is brilliant.
Laura Devis (43:59):
Oh, it's fantastic. And it just goes to show that music, it can really surprise you.
Richard Campbell (44:08):
It's not a lot of assets out of advertising that end up charting, so to speak, like live on their own. I think it's only music. You never see a font product cast separately. There's something about music that has a particular power. Hey, I do want to get back to that last measure of effectiveness. I think it was recallability.
Laura Devis (44:26):
Yes, exactly.
Richard Campbell (44:27):
What were the impacts for recallability?
Laura Devis (44:31):
So recallability, we found that picking music that will stick in people's minds, so is very recallable, can drive up brand salience by up to four times. So brand salience is being front of mind in a purchase situation, which-
Richard Campbell (44:49):
When I want to buy, I remember you.
Laura Devis (44:51):
Exactly. Exactly. Which is something we all inherently can understand. It makes sense. But now having the kind of proof for it and, yes, having showed this based on our consumer data and the IPA data is just really, really cool.
Richard Campbell (45:12):
Yeah. It's very powerful. It's a thing that every marketer hopes for, that you'll remember me when you want to buy. And it sounds like music plugs into that in a way that makes it far more recallable.
Les Binet (45:23):
Certainly one of the things that music... Music is particularly good at sticking in the memory. Sometimes it's too much so. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I'm one of those people that suffers from ear worms.
Darren Till (45:39):
Yeah.
Laura Devis (45:39):
Yes.
Les Binet (45:41):
I will have a piece of music that I just cannot get out of my head. So if you can make your advertising music stick in someone's head like that, then that's valuable as long as it doesn't piss people off.
Laura Devis (45:55):
Yeah, exactly. Especially if it's a positive association. If you're like, "I love this track." And then somewhere in your brain, the association with the ad will be there because you've seen it in that context, in that combination, that hopefully subconsciously when you are in the supermarket aisle, you see a brand and you're drawn to it because it... Which is what advertising is all about, being drawn to a certain brand because it made you feel something, and music, of all tools, can make you feel so much.
Richard Campbell (46:38):
Yeah. I think there's only so many swoops and shapes and things that are iconic to brand, but music can work in a much more broad way. So for more organizations, they're going to have more opportunity here if they explore this angle. We're coming to the close here. I do want to sort of get back onto this. You've now measured numerically this ad effectiveness strategy around music, so we have some really solid evidence for folks to dig into. What's the guidance going forward? What's the next actions folks should be taking here?
Laura Devis (47:11):
Well, I think if you as a brand have to make a choice about music for an ad, if you start by applying the lens of these four metrics when you're in the boardroom making a decision and you ask yourself, does this feel engaging? How well does this music fit with my campaign? How surprising is it? And how recallable is it? If you already kind of focus on those four metrics, you're miles ahead from what happens quite a lot, which is decisions being made purely on feel. But looking at it through those four lenses can be really, really helpful in making decisions. And then of course, if you want to dive into it even more, teams like ours exist to help you make those...
Richard Campbell (48:18):
Hire professionals to help you. I also want to make that push on, you want to test this. Every ad's going to get tested in the market, but you might want to know what's going to happen before you get to the market.
Les Binet (48:25):
I have a slightly controversial view on this, which earlier on I said maybe 20 to 30% of the money you make from the ad is down to the choice of the music. What percentage of production costs does music account for? Not 20 to 30%, I don't think.
Richard Campbell (48:45):
So it bats well above its level.
Les Binet (48:48):
Yeah. I mean, one way I think about it actually is music is a really cheap and efficient way to make your ads more effective. I know at one point earlier on in my career, agencies realized that they could get ads through pretesting simply by putting a banging track on them. To the extent that Millward Brown, as they were in those days, had a rule that you were not allowed to put a track on unless you actually really were going to use that track. But there's another way of flipping that round is to say maybe you should be spending 20 to 30% of your production on music rights. I think probably it's an area where... Licensing the original track may be an expensive thing to do, but if that's the thing that's going to double the efficiency of your ad-
Richard Campbell (49:47):
Sure. Shifts your brand.
Les Binet (49:49):
... take your payback from five million to 10 million, maybe it's worth spending a little bit of money on.
Richard Campbell (49:56):
Might be worthwhile. Absolutely. Folks, I really appreciate the insight here. The study is awesome, but it's really nice to take it apart and talk through the different parts of it. Thank you so much for joining me here to have this conversation.
Les Binet (50:09):
You're very welcome.
Darren Till (50:10):
Thank you, Richard.
Laura Devis (50:11):
So welcome, Richard. Thank you.
Richard Campbell (50:15):
Les, Laura, Darren, thanks so much. And we'll talk to you next time on Consumer Neuroscience.