Amid Chelsea's warehouse-chic event space, Second Floor, Veritonic gathered the audio intelligentsia last week to explore advancements in measurement made by content makers, marketers and agencies. Options to engage consumers with audio products continue to expand beyond traditional radio to streaming audio, podcasting, smart speakers and meta-environments, demanding marketers go beyond traditional commercials to create sonic landscapes that both signify and amplify their brand message. Enter Veritonic, an on-demand audio measurement platform for creative effectiveness that has been providing its global clients with turn-key metrics backed by an impressive normative performance database for the past seven years. The Veritonic-hosted "summit" was an opportunity for the company and its clients to share learnings with the broader industry.
In an expanding universe of industry conferences that offer vague banter and little depth, the half-day Veritonic event showcased actionable learnings gleaned from a balance of big media players (Audacy, NPR, SXM), specialist and general market agencies (Oxford Road, Made Music Studio, Havas) and A-list marketers (Pepsi's Tostitos). The day's presenters were refreshingly open about their audio experiments and how they are leveraging the results to improve performance for their content development and marketing efforts. From providing better metrics to understanding creative audio elements (voice, tone, music bed) to leveraging appropriate audio contexts, presenters offered a roadmap for attendees to evolve their own efficacy, resonance and ROI.
Insights were not limited, however, to just the nuts and bolts of making advertising work better. Two standout presentations delved into the highly relevant areas of representation and social responsibility. NPR's Senior Vice President of Sponsorship, Scott Davis and Senior Production Manager, Sara Barbour, opened the conference with a compelling case study for custom audio's role in helping brands demonstrate social responsibility. Later in the program, SXM's Creative Director, Nils d'Aulaire, walked attendees through an expansive two-part research study they conducted to unearth the history and impact of racialized listening, the results of which offer credible rationale for why sonic diversity is both an ethical imperative and a sound business practice. (To learn more and engage in that effort, visit standforsonicdiversity.com.)
Perhaps the most entertaining presentation of the day came from Made Music's Executive Vice President of Global Brand Partnerships, John Taite; Senior Music Producer, Lucas Murray, and their client, Pepsico's Director of Marketing Communications, Hana Golden. After an engaging conversation around the creative brief and strategy to develop a new sonic logo for the Tostitos brand, Murray took the stage to do a live recreation of the logo with the help of volunteer attendees and an array of Tostitos products that sonically contribute to the brand's new audio mnemonic.
The event closed with a session about "Getting Creative Right" and offered the most quotable comment of the day from panelist Jennifer Laine of specialist audio agency Oxford Road: "Brand trust is built in raindrops and lost in buckets." Sage advice for marketers employing any medium, but a careful reminder that every action has implications. In the world of audio, Veritonic is trying to help its clients step smartly into the expanding universe of audio engagement. This week's Audio Intelligence Summit was a four-star effort toward that goal.
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