Not too long ago, junior copywriters had to earn their stripes, starting from the bottom and writing 60-second ads for terrestrial radio—a task seasoned copywriters wanted no part of. But now creating an audio campaign isn’t a reflection of poor performance—it’s a sought-after opportunity to connect your brand across multiple screenless worlds.
For creatives, audio advertising is a way to craft unique listener experiences. You’re not designing for screens, you’re designing for road trips, Saturday morning cleaning sessions and rooftop parties. You’re building bridges between podcast hosts and direct-to-consumer start-ups. As our futures move off-screen, creatives need to be thinking beyond pixels.
Create personalized messaging in a world of diverse people
The mediums of digital audio advertising (like connected home listening and voice ads) offer a world of personalization and creative storytelling that linear channels cannot match.
Social media has given us algorithm dependency issues, and we expect advertising to be tailored to our preferences and listening habits. Flexibility in audio production opens the door to creative opportunities. For campaigns with time-sensitive messaging, audio provides the flexibility for real-time updates. Given the rise in connected home listening, flexibility has been particularly important during the pandemic, where audio has proven to be a fast and efficient vehicle for ever-changing messaging.
Audio is proven to be 36% more memorable than video, but it requires a different approach.
For example, Studio Resonate partnered with the Ad Council to create awareness campaigns around the importance of wearing face masks and COVID-19 vaccine education. The goal was to reach a wide array of Americans with critical information about how to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When considering how to address so many different audiences, we explored cultural insights via “transculturation” to create messaging platforms that resonated. Transculturation involves adapting copy, music and cultural references to ensure creative campaigns resonate across cultural landscapes. You, too, can better understand transculturation through Studio Resonate’s Creative Principles track (part of SXM Media’s e-learning platform, AQ Academy). Discover a series of short educational videos, which address digital audio-specific nuances to inspire creativity.
Build connections with sound
Every brand is a visual one when you’re staring at the logo, but what happens when you remove visuals or are trying to reach a visually impaired audience? Overemphasizing visual communications can spell death for brands in a world where we’re watching less and listening more.
The sound of your brand can provide an opportunity to connect with listeners on an emotional level, resonating with your audiences in moments of leaned-in podcast listening or joyful escapes with music. In a study with Neuro-Insight, Pandora found streaming audio ads within the beauty category to have higher levels of resonance and brand recall when compared to other media.
This invites a new dimension of creativity and design, one where listeners will subconsciously paint themselves into the scene being illustrated inside their minds. Audio is proven to be 36% more memorable than video, but it requires a different approach. And creatives should be excited about this. Copywriters can create scenes illustrated by sound design, which uses time, as opposed to space. The intimate nature of audio offers immersive and captivating opportunities via spatial sound design to draw your listeners into your scene. Designers should also weigh in on how the sonic palette is consistent with the visual language in brand guidelines.
Although audio may feel like a new medium for some creatives, it is skills-adjacent to what you’re already doing. You can find more details on writing for visual brands and the power of 3D audio within AQ Academy’s creative principles track.
Consider a strategy that goes beyond the headphones
As we adjust to hybrid lives and flexible media plans, audio should be considered an opportunity to enhance and strengthen campaigns with fluidity. An integrated creative thinker needs to think bigger than just embedding social within their campaign.
The connected experience should bridge everything from your choice of voice-over artist on the TV commercial to the hold music on your customer care line. As creatives, it’s our responsibility to connect these dots and bring new creative opportunities to our clients.
The real-world applications of sonic strategy invite endless possibilities for engagement, storytelling and diversity with messaging. If you’re planning an experiential activation for the “grand reopening,” hopefully sound design has been baked into it, but have you mapped out the customer’s sonic journey? Where are your branding touchpoints and what is in the sonic goody bag? How will you ensure this is inclusive for all attendees? Fundamentally, how are you using sound to enhance the experience of your campaign?
A well-crafted audio advertising experience will invite listeners to dance between scenes inside their mind, take them on an emotional journey and lead them to feel something in response. The best audio advertising isn’t about the ears, it’s about what’s between them.
