Speaking of Stimulation

"Those who would mould public opinion must take due account of the relative effectiveness of eye and ear modes of stimulation, and particularly those modes of such vast and rapidly growing proportions as the screen, the radio and television. What effects are these comparatively new instruments of entertainment, of instruction, of propaganda, of culture exerting upon society. To which of these new tools of communication are people attending most readily? Are people remembering what they see on the screen and hear on the radio? Which do they remember better? And what do we expect from television?"

– From Eye vs. Ear in Moulding Opinion (The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, Jul., 1937), by Frank R. Elliott,

Holy Cow! 1937!

We haven't even fully answered –much less assimilated– the original question and here we are now, grappling with the effects of intercontinental travel, cable television, satellite communications, MTV, Reality TV, the 24 Hour News cycle, a thousand channels to choose from and a set top digital video recorder to capture it all, not to mention personal computers, portable media players, mobile phones, smartphones, smart missiles, first person shooters, video game consoles, causal games, social games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, texting, sexting, tweets, blogs, apps, email, social networks, the erosion of copyright, the end of privacy and the emergence of globalization, ubiquitous branding, guerilla marketing, environmental installations, product placement, branded coffee sleeves, ad-wrapped buses, digital signage, desktop publishing, instant messaging, chat rooms, online forums, streaming video, beat matching, pitch correction, loops, samples, plugins, hyperlinks, passwords, adwords, broadband, cloud computing, databases, floppy discs, laster discs, compact discs, hard drives, flash drives, backup drives, global positioning technology, Internet search, Silicon Graphics, silicon implants, collagen lips, avatars, Unix, Intel, AOL, Apple, IBM, Windows, Photoshop, MySpace, cyberspace, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, jpegs, mp3s, movs, office docs, dot coms, hook ups and STDs, slow motion, stop motion, 3-D, P2P, Hi-Def, holographic, motion graphic, closed captioning, closed circuit, open source, outsource, sound bytes, ringtones, podcasts, viral vids, keywords, metatags, 'I Like', 'Friend Me' , friends with benefits, wiki this and wiki that, free content, cross border discontent, hacking malcontents and porn, porn, porn just about anywhere and everywhere you look.

Gee, is it any wonder that the last decade has been characterized by attention deficit disorder, Adderall, crystal meth and serotonin reuptake inhibitors? Ha, and fasten your seat belts because this ride has only just begun.

And it makes me think that given the sheer number of stimulants available –media and otherwise– we live in a day in age when it may never be too early to teach our children patience, yoga, zen, and other skills necessary to sometimes sitting still and doing absolutely nothing at all.

Audio Imaging and Radio's Multimedia Future

Sonic Branding is by no means a new idea, although the phrase only seems to have come into common parlance with the new millennium. In the early nineties I contextualized the concept as 'Branding with Audio'. My old bosses, Scott & Jonathan Elias, preferred the phrase 'Sonic Identity' or 'Sonic ID' for short.

But radio stations have long distinguished themselves from one another using a technique the trade alternately calls Audio Imaging or Music Imaging.

Imaging is all the patter, Voice Over, music, interludes, along with every other branded sound asset, etc., that is inter-dispersed between programming. The composite effect serves to differentiate one station from others and provide a unique radio presence or identity.

In most important respects, Audio Imaging is a precursor of, and synonym for, Sonic Branding. I say "In most important respects" because the result of Audio Imaging is not a single brand asset, but a portfolio of assets whose resulting implementation is closer to what I define as 'packaging' than branding. In my brand mythology, a brand represents a singular asset; while packaging indicates a portfolio of assets that includes branded assets, but is not limited to them. That said, many professionals use the terms interchangeably, and for the sake of this article, I will, too.

What I find personally interesting is that unlike common Sonic Branding, which is usually implemented in order to distinguish similarly tangible goods and services from one another, Audio Imaging uses one palette of sounds (the packaging) in order to provide context to another group of sounds (the transmission).

A music supervisor (and his or her client) commissioned to create programming acts on the premise that the net result of a curated playlist will 'brand' a given (retail) environment. It may or may not: results vary. Muzak has developed a long, successful business model based on this premise. But other Sonic Brand professionals believe otherwise. Radio professionals, it seems, have found the practice lacking.

The reason being: radio playlists are in constant flux. Algorithm based programming will certainly distinguish one genre based station from another –tune in and you know immediately if you're listening to Country, Pop, Urban or Rock. But although they play an important role as an indicator of content/programming philosophy, playlists by themselves (in saturated markets) do not provide listeners with enough information to distinguish one station from another (that delivers similar/overlapping programming).

You may already know that the radio industry is in crisis. Many stations, which in the last decade or so adopted a music only platform, now find themselves facing obsolescence in the wake of Apple's iPod launch.

iPods and other hard disc players have almost single handedly eliminated the necessity for radio.

If radio is going to survive, it will need something that iPods and other hard drive players lack. The industry is still grappling for the secret recipe that will pull audiences back to their programming. One ingredient can be found in a re-tooled Audio Imaging approach. Digital music players provide the capacity to create user-generated playlists, but such playlists as programming lack general accessibility. Unlike radio programming, they do not represent communication from one human to another, but rather serve the utilitarian function of providing a frame for a single person's individual experience (excepting playlists created in real time by a dance DJ for a live audience).

If a relayed signal requires at least one source and one receiver (which often alternate roles), can our own thoughts be defined as communication? Maybe. Personally, I think of thoughts as akin to cognitive reflections, which seems to be the antithesis of what we think of as broadcasting (or even narrow casting).

So although the hardware and technology that makes portable hard drive music players possible seems like magic, the experience a single playlist delivers can also prove less than magical once shared with others beyond the creator's own ear buds.

What we require is context, and the kind of disruptive surprise that only human logic choices in real time can provide, and that pre-programmed random play by algorithm simply has yet to demonstrate a capacity to deliver.

In the past, radio did not simply deliver experience; it was quite often central to the experience. Arguably, it was the experience. Before the invention of television friends and family members listened together, and while listening, they often stared at the apparatus. In effect, radio became the hearth, the fire we all sat around. And then enter TV. Now audiences actually had something to look at. Radio responded by scaling smaller and becoming portable, allowing users to multi task.

But in some cases chatter is perceived as an interruption. Naturally, competing stations eliminated chatter in favor of music-only programming.

Either way, portable digital music players have rendered both strategies ineffective.

So how can radio compete?

I would like to say that Audio Imaging can do it all, but neither branding nor packaging alone can prevent obsolescence. The task is how to prove necessity of being in the face of competing information and entertainment sources. Ultimately, unique and engaging 'Destination Content' will be key. But there are other things we can do, too.

Certainly greater brains than mine are already trying to figure this out, but why wait when I want to save radio right now:

One must ask ones self, what makes radio distinct from other forms of media? What is radio anyway? Is it the box or is it what is in the box? Up until the advent of PC distributed digital audio we have considered radio to be the composite of media and platform. In the face of current technologies, radio –like newspapers– must redefine itself as platform neutral.

What is important is not the box, but 'The Feed', or 'The Stream'.

So, it may be that one possible strategy is to dispense with any reliance on these devices we call 'radios', and instead concentrate on programming. But who and what's going to broadcast the programming if not a radio?

How about an iPod?

Saving Radio scenario #1: The primary agenda should be to influence audiences to tune in via PCs and hand held PC devices, and abandon sole-use dedicated devices, such as, ahem, radios. Listeners may then listen in real-time at their PCs, or download to their digital devices any programming as a Podcast. What's a Podcast anyway, but TIVO for sound? –At least that's the way the radio industry should sell it:

Listen to what you want when you want, wherever you want.

Simultaneously–

Saving Radio scenario #2: Embrace Interactivity. Traditional Radio, like TV, represents one-way communication. In the past, at least listeners could call in and make requests, which would be fulfilled in a reasonable time frame. Today, such communication is all but squelched. Though many, if not all, commercial radio stations have a web presence, their sites merely serve as a virtual wall scrawled over with a station's tag. With some notable exceptions, few radio web sites today boast the tool kit (or interest) to move beyond the monologue experience in order to more fully engage in a conversation with their listeners. In short, in the traditional radio paradigm, the goal is to gain and maintain listeners, which is a limited ambition, at most.

Moreover, expecting loyalty from someone, and hoping the other party will be content to only listen and not wish to contribute in any other way may have worked in centuries past, but that model is disintegrating by the moment.

Talk Radio itself is not immune to this sort of erosion, but over sized personalities may be one reason Talk seems to fare so well, when it does. Because Talk, unlike most iPod playlists, promotes a point of view. Love or hate the man or woman behind the mic, they have the capacity to make brains reel and emotions surge.

As it happens, digital playback devices are increasingly becoming multimedia players, so portability is not exclusive to sound programming. Users can travel with video as well, but viewers can't multi task the way listeners can. It's a simple fact of life: Consumers of sound-only content can multi task in a way that Television and Print audiences cannot.

Thus:

Unique Selling Position #A: Radio provides content that doesn't require you to stop your life in order to consume it. We turn to Print when our lives are on hold. We turn on the Television when we want to relax. But Radio provides Content (Information and Music) to Go.

Radio is where the action is, and one marketing strategy might be to impress upon media consumers that 'RADIO' and 'ACTION' are SYNONYMS, and where there is Life there is Radio. Indeed:

Radio=Life.

In contrast:

Saving Radio scenario #3: Given the choice to choose either listen-only content, or viewable content with sound, what will audiences do? If the answer is the latter, then radio may want to create viewable content to accompany heretofore listen-only conceived content. For instance, a slide show, if nothing else, or other visual content that enhances an otherwise heretofore listen-only experience. Representatives of the radio industry may scoff, but as audio books evolve into multimedia experiences, I believe radio itself may well embrace the idea of enhancing audio content audio content with images, the way television uses audio content to enhance video.

After all, who doesn't look at the back of the box while they eat their morning cereal? Even eating is enhanced by imagery, –any imagery.

But if radio starts providing images, what will make it any different from a TV company?

If the New York Times and CNN are both streaming video from their websites (and they are), why is one company considered a newspaper and the other a cable television company? In effect, they space each once inhabited is converging with the others.

Forward thinking radio professionals already intuit this. But what many may not realize is that the media universe, unlike our own, can be thought of as collapsing. By collapsing, I don't mean that it's disappearing. Rather, all media is evolving into multimedia.

Today, we are witnessing the emergence of Multimedia Singularity.

We are moving past the day when there are TV companies and there are Radio companies –or Print companies, for that matter. What was once a constellation of individual communications companies, each inhabiting their own space –Print, Television, Radio– is now better perceived as a single moving object: The Feed or The Stream. Where once we saw a smattering of stars, now we see an interconnected galaxy (of providers). Distribution platforms themselves are increasingly incidental (as primary indicators of experience); whatever the next technological advancement is, it had better be transparent.

Likewise, when we look through a telescope we don't care if we're looking through a Celestron Telescope zoom eyepiece or a Meade Series 4000 Eyepiece & Filter Set. We just want it to work, and if it works, then all we see are the heavens.

Multimedia Singularity is being made manifest in a variety of ways:

The New York Times, like all newspapers and magazines, is reinventing itself as a content aggregator and distributor, using not a single media platform delivered on paper, but a multimedia one, traveling via light through fiber optic cables. The similarities between Print and Television increase by the day.

Radio must follow suit if it is to survive. When Media Singularity is achieved, radio's competitors will not just be other radio stations, but all media sources (providing parallel content choices in a given market). Though perhaps born as traditional twentieth century newspapers, magazines, television channels or radio stations, respectively, all heretofore separate platforms will continue to transform themselves until each has fully evolved into, quite simply, unique points of interest, destinations, hosted by purely electronic media.

Do you remember what a Venn diagram is from your high school mathematics class? A Venn diagram consists of two or more overlapping circles, or sets. The overlapping area indicates shared characteristics or commonalities between the set

Now imagine a 'Content Venn' composed of not two circles, but many, –and possibly in three dimensions. Each circle represents a traditional media platform; to name three: Radio, Television, and Print. Within each circle are numerous other Venn diagrams representing subsets composed of individual companies competing in a given space. It doesn't take a futurist or psychic to see that the circles as they are presently positioned are not static, but that they are in motion and will continue converging upon one another until we are left with not many spaces, but one space. The result is no Venn diagram, that's for sure, but a single globe representing The Feed.

And what of that overlapping common space where all companies in all spaces meet, regardless of distribution platform? That space is what we can now think of as Multimedia Singularity.

So how will we choose who and what to tune into?

Once platforms become universally transparent, content will have to speak for itself. Given that scenario, context will be more important than ever. And context will be achieved via the same tool kits and assets we rely right on now:

• Personality
• Positioning
• Branding
• Audio Imaging
• Sonic Branding

–All of which we increasingly recognize as aspects of Design.

The result being that after the technological deluge, humans will actually be more important that ever.

Ironically, there will be so much to look at, that sound will play an exponentially more significant role in hooking in audiences.

One should expect to soon see what might have once been conceived as asymmetrical partnerships now engage in strategic merges. We may have had an inkling of that when Time Warner merged with AOL. That partnership was universally judged to be a fiasco. But ultimately it wasn't because Time Warner didn't need to be a multimedia company with an Internet presence, but rather that Time Warner didn't need AOL to withstand the same digital pressures, and be subject to the same evolutionary processes, eventually sustained by all successful members of the corporate species.

But regardless what partnerships evolve, and what eye candy is produced, sonic assets and Radio's importance as a vehicle for content distribution will also increase at reasonable rate.

Here's why:

When people listen to radio they may request more or less talk, more or less music, more or less advertising; but they never request less sound.

As it happens, Television viewers, rich with color, dimension and ever increasingly denser pixel formations, also share with radio listeners an enjoyment for sound. Likewise, they never request less sound either. Lower volume, yes; less aural data, emphatically no. That's because TV isn't just a vision experience; it also relies on sound. In fact, Television only 'works' so well because it is a multi-sensory experience. You don't think so? Try muting the audio. Subtitles communicate information to a varying degree, but the experience is far from optimal. Except for video art installations, the television experience is compromised without an accompanying soundtrack.

In the nineties comic and radio talk show host Howard Stern famously declared his ambition to become a 'King of all Media'. It sounded funny to hear him say it back then. In retrospect, Stern was ahead of his time. For today, radio strives for Multimedia Singularity, inching closer to TV and Print, and at exactly the same time TV and Print edge closer to Radio. It's that or die. And by die, I mean, fade away into silence. Of course, there's not a single profit or not-for-profit information, or entertainment company, that wants to stop broadcasting. So, silence is not an option.

It may be that one day the word 'radio', generally speaking, will solely come to mean 'broadcast sound', and that no one will actually think of a device called 'radio' when the word is uttered. By radio, we won't mean hardware, what we will mean is simply:

Content (though it may be accompanied and supported by images), requires no visual enhancement in order to communicate information, entertain or deliver a message.

And because storytellers have sustained that model since the dawn of man, it's safe to bet that radio, whatever form it takes, will continue to be a powerful medium for years to come.

Broadband Video Buzz

Broadband Video Buzz & The Interactive DilemmaBy Terry O'Gara
Originally published on Adholes, Wednesday, June 7, 2006

BBDO gives birth to Atmosphere. Mezzina Brown renames itself Agent 16. The Barbarian Group is redefining the very meaning of ‘Production Company’.

It’s no secret that established agencies and migrating talent have spent the last several years re-branding themselves with new mastheads, or by creating distinct interactive divisions. However, many creative suppliers remain entrenched in the traditional broadcast economy and are –perhaps– just starting to dabble with online media. Sure, every broadcast design firm and music house has their own website, but how many have necessarily been commissioned to work on online media pieces? Here in New York, not as many as you might think. (If you can tell me which ad houses are partnering with which post houses to produce killer content, post some links and let’s get a list going. )

A decade after the initial Internet explosion, many post-production houses can be said to have only dabbled in the medium, if at all. –And not for not wanting nor for lack of adventure. Actually, more than a few high-end creative suppliers have confessed new media budgets just don’t pay the bills. One wonders if Interactive work, like banners of every shape and form, really doesn’t lend itself to an external collaborative process, and therefore it’s all produced in-house?

Will Broadband Video Commercials change this? With recent IAB recommendations, and new formats rolling out of companies like Unicast and Forbidden, all of a sudden the future of Internet Advertising looks a lot like, gulp, the :30 TV spot.

Which leads me to this basic question: If every designer today is required to be an HTML whiz, will a director’s job change when hired to shoot expressly for broadband? How will an editor’s? Hey, will anything actually get shot EXPRESSLY for broadband, or will we actually be looking at repurposed :30’s? Are there any new skill sets that post-production staffers will have to demonstrate before the e-crowd believes they ‘get it’? And if audience/consumers are equally happy with content, regardless of screen size, and agencies handle the integration, why would anyone in post have to upgrade their skill set?

Interactive Advertising/Interactive Process

In late spring of 2006, my company Position Management, was commissioned by a Los Angeles production company to produce a State-of-the-Industry market analysis on Interactive Advertising. The report would thereafter serve my client as a reference tool with which to identify clients, contacts and other points of entry suitable for investigation by their associates. It was a project I was quite excited to work on, especially as I had been chasing the broadband video tail since the previous decade.

Obviously the resulting report and its findings are confidential, therefore I won't be divulging its contents here. However, as I carried out my task, I endeavored to conduct parallel research for a story which might end up in one trade magazine or another. Of current interest to me was the fact that eight years after the founding of Blister Media, and fifteen years after my first Interactive job, it was readily apparent that most traditional production companies who worked on broadcast advertising projects still hadn't worked on an interactive project, save their own website. Not only that, but some of these shops, despite their relative inexperience, promised vertical branding solutions. Whoa. Hello, people, that means top to bottom.

Anyway, I was –and I continue to be– intrigued with process. That is, how does a particular medium affect the way creative people work? You know, of course I already have my own ideas about this, but it's important to find out what other people think. Some people will tell you the technology has no bearing on their process. Others will tell you that it changes everything. Despite the fact that everything can be distilled to electro-magnetic waves, I can tell you from personal experience, that I write different music at a piano than I do a synthesizer. The electronic keyboard's layout might be identical to that of the piano, and it might in fact only be triggering a piano sample; but something changes in my brain when I know the possibilities have suddenly become limitless. –Or narrowed, for that matter.

VN Collation/ Gamelab/ Loop/ Nabakov

The 2000/2001 edition of VNCollation happened to be a collection of Nabokov related items. Happily they published this interview with Eric Zimmerman of gameLab regarding a new game his company had developed for Shockwave, Loop. Gamelab, in turn, had retained Blister Media to produce an interactive audio track for the game.

Briefly, Loop is based upon the character Aida, a little girl obsessed with catching butterflies.

Game players actually catch the butterflies by using their computer mouse to draw a ‘loop’ around several of the same type. The actual cursor had been designed to resemble a pencil. Butterflies once caught, were dramatically mounted and framed to indicate scores.

Eric being a magnanimous director, had graciously invited Michael Sweet and I to participate in discussions regarding character development and marketing concepts for the game. Our official task was to create interactive audio, not provide marketing concepts, so I was rather grateful –and appreciably surprised– when I discovered quite by chance (googling myself, I admit) Eric had so selflessly and publicly given me credit for first submitting the Nabokovian reference, which meeting final approval launched as an integral contextual element for the game–

FRESH AIR REVIEW

Q. My 13 year old son discovered "Loop" on shockwave.com and said "Look Mom, a game about Nabokov." Most computer/video games are not so literary. How did you come to create a game based on Nabokovian themes?

ERIC: At gameLab, we usually begin with an idea for a game's interactivity and let the narrative content grow out of our experience of playing the game. In the case of LOOP, we began with the looping interactivity first. We tried a few kinds of objects in the game, including wandering stars and floating abstract shapes, but when we hit on catching butterflies, it made such perfect sense that we stayed with it.

The addition of Nabokov to the game came about halfway through development. We felt that the game was feeling too kidlike and we wanted to make it clear that this was a game for adults as well as children. During a design meeting, Terry O'Gara (who works for Blister Media, the company that created the sound for the game) mentioned using Nabokov to help frame the game. We batted several great Nabokov quotes around over email before settling on the one we have in the game.

Although it was not part of the original game concept, we like the way that the single quote from Nabokov reframes the game. It and calls attention to the intertextual quality of the game as "writing" - since the player is drawing lines to capture the butterflies. And since games are so much about "pleasure," it is a nice way to start the game experience.

Q. Is Terry O'Gara a Nabokov fan? Were any of you Nabokov readers before creating LOOP?

ERIC: It turns out that most of the LOOP team were Nabokov readers. We pride ourselves on being more cultured than the average computer game developers.

Q. How was LOOP received on shockwave.com? How did it compare with other more traditional games?

ERIC: LOOP has done very well on Shockwave.com. It was launched at the end of February and more than 1.1 million games have been played. Shockwave has received a huge amount of fan email about the game.


* * *

In addition to the Nabakovian reference, I submitted several other original tags. Here are a select few that I presented to the electronic game developer:

Scribble This
Match and Catch
Net ‘em & Set ‘em
Backyard String Theory
Get. Net. Set.
No one’s looking. Play the game!
Can a Mouse Catch a Butterfly?
Butterflies are free. –Not!
No Small Thing Shall Go Untouched
A Girl Amok

But in the end, the famous lepidopterist simply had stronger ideas than I regarding butterfly collecting, and the game launched with this rich, memorable quote-

"My pleasures are the most intense known to man; writing and butterfly hunting."


games, marketing, nabokov

Too Many Notes To Choose From?

I returned to New York from Miami after attending the 2001 Winter Music Conference with the interesting observation that DJ's were not only trading in their turntables for laptops and recording software, but many were also abandoning the tag 'DJ' in favor of the more expansive title of 'Producer'. It didn't take a genius to realize that this trend would eventually result an increase in the number of creative audio options available to advertising agencies. And in fact, where there had once been a few music houses, soon there many boutiques, and the choices so plentiful that an ad shop never had to use the same audio house twice.

A lot of studio guys who had been in the business for years were still paying off their Neves and Studers would find themselves sweating bullets. But, since my partner and I were basically kids with laptops ourselves, I argued that if we could squeeze into the industry, then there was still room for more competition.

Now, whether or not this is actually true maybe for up for debate, but one thing is certain: The New Economy favors small, fast and lean –and over leveraged, top heavy post production companies were going to find themselves forcibly downscaled or simply overtaken by the unforgiving forces of market evolution.

The title of this article, 'Too Many Notes To Choose From?', is inspired by Emperor Joseph II's famous comment to Mozart that there were ‘too many notes’ in his music. Mozart replied there were neither too many nor to few notes than the composition required of it.

–Terry O'Gara

Too Many Notes To Choose From?
By Terry O'Gara
First published in Shoot, April 13, 2001

There has been a discussion in the music production community as to whether the number of people entering an already crowded field is reaching a saturation point. Ultimately it's a matter of perspective, but I think the repercussions are generally positive for all involved.

The reality is that many talented people out there now bypass the rigors of training at a large shop, and directly approach an agency. The reason being that you no longer need a multi-million-dollar studio to create first-rate music. A modest investment and your hobby can become a viable way to get immediately into the game. Or so it may seem. If you can manage to pound the pavement and find a way to stand out from the rest, then who's to prevent you from competing?

A decade ago this wasn't necessarily the case. But as the competition multiplies, music houses are definitely going to be niched. They are already. The variety of projects available to an established composer is significantly--and ironically, one might say--reduced. Regardless of what you're able to do, if it's not on the reel already, you won't get the job. Because clients now have such a wide range of talent to choose from, they're more likely to place their bets on someone who has already done exactly what a client wants to do for a current project.

This makes sense from the client's viewpoint--much to the detriment of many composers who need the work to expand their craft and abilities. But if stuck with a smaller budget, clients and composers have to take fewer risks and get it right the first time. Also, because licensing a ready-made track is much easier than creating an original piece of music, a client on a smaller budget will go for the former if it has already been created--by a recording artist or through a stock library, for instance. Whether or not a ready made track can address the branding issues of the advertiser or the campaign doesn't seen to make much of a difference as long as the experience of the spot is riveting. I'm not personally convinced that this is true, but it seems to be the tendency. And branded or not, a licensed piece of music has a good chance of hooking an audience that is already predisposed to listening to it in the first place. Since licensing does appear to be a growing trend, add it to the increasingly competitive climate of the industry.

One new difference does make someone on our side of the business optimistic: The avenues from which a music production house can generate revenue have also multiplied. Advertising dollars now only account for a part of the income pie. I started my career in 1991. Back then we only did commercials. Many houses still only do commercials, as they remain a lucrative business. But today a talented production team can make a living in a host of other media, as well--like electronic games, Web sites, in-store kiosks, special venues, sync to-broadcast and enhanced television projects.

New talents in shops like mine no longer have to sit in their studios waiting for an agency and/or client to believe music-makers can score that campaign right to the Clios. We can dive in and have fun with all sorts of new technologies and the new media they provide. Granted, none of these media generate the dollars that a steady diet of TV commercials does, but this variety keeps you on your toes and does provide composers and producers an opportunity to work differently. It keeps life from getting dull, and you're not allowed to repeat the same formula twice.

Banners Versus Commercials

It's 2006 2012 as I write this update, and not a trade show passes that someone doesn't argue declare the a banner dead. As it happens,  I first heard this argument five eleven years ago in 2001, in an article published by The Silicon Alley Reporter.  A given banner, it was said, was ineffective unless one could determine that a potential consumer actively engaged with it -that is that they clicked on it. This argument sounds reasonable on the surface, but it also negates corresponding behavior exhibited by the consumption of off line advertising, and which could not yet be disavowed as anachronistic by modern communication devices. So, I wrote a response arguing that clicks don't matter as much as impressions, and happy to say, it was published.  More than a decade later the article is quite dated, of course, but I still think it provides a valid reminder that we should not  underestimate the power of a static image to influence, or overlook the possibility of deferred action (especially after repeated imprints). After all, asking potential consumers to click here there or anywhere is a bit like asking drivers to stop, get out of their car and kick a billboard before we can measure the value of the billboard. Granted, mere visibility and hoping doesn't provide immediate metrics, but those numbers can be measured by eventual sales.  I still believe in the power of 2D. But then, I also like the Beatles in mono. What say you?

–Terry O'Gara/ 2006 2012

Banner Vs. Traditional Television Advertising
By Terry O'Gara
Originally Published in The Silicon Alley Reporter, May 14, 2001

Banner ads are generally considered a failure. But how many click-throughs does a TV commercial get? A billboard? None. And it's probably better to compare banner ads to billboards than to TV commercials, which at least may entertain an audience, as well as suggest a call to action or purchase from consumers.

Great TV commercials and billboards can be extremely effective. The One Show Interactive Awards demonstrate that great banner ads can also be effective. The key word is "great"--as in great creative. The real lesson: Not everyone with a PC can be a new-media company. How many times does one learn the programmer was also the art director, the copywriter, the brand manager, and sometimes the composer or sound designer? All the time! The result is almost a promise of mediocre results.

Probably the only TV commercials whose effectiveness can be measured immediately, like banner ads, are those that close with an 800 number for ordering--the "click through" just requires pushing 10 buttons instead of one.

What may ultimately be important regarding the influence advertising has on consumers is not the medium, but the frequency, consistency, and mindfulness of the message.

It's difficult to measure the influence on my purchasing dollar by any kind of advertising. So, perhaps it's not whether banner ads work, but if any ads work? The answer seems to be bad ads don't work. Ill-conceived branding doesn't work. But a great billboard that I unintentionally look at may spark my interest, and the online equivalent--banner ads--may be as effective.

The banner medium can be more effective than a pop-up interstitial because it remains on the page your scanning. But the moment a pop-up opens, the window can be closed, often before it really gets going. I do that every time. So, in that case, maybe banners are more effective than television. Click.

The Post-Post Production Era

Blister Media sourced for THE POST-POST PRODUCTION ERA, a special report published in the April 2001 Advertising Age CREATIVITY magazine.

Writer/Reporter Ann-Christine Diaz writes:

Advancing technologies – the Internet, the imminence of interactive TV going mainstream, the explosion of new formats – are driving the redefinition of the post industry from being the last stop in the production chain to being an integral part of the entire creative process…

…Advancing technologies have opened up new sectors of specialization as well. Consider music and sound design. In 1998, for example, Terry O’Gara and Michael Sweet launched Blister Media in New York to cater to the sonic needs of the interactive community. Blister provided both the technology and sound for interactive projects like MTV’s Web Riot, a broadcast cable and Internet quiz show; the interactive game Loop on Shockwave.com; various web sites for Sesame Workshop; and the Nasdaq learning kiosks in Times Square. Such assignments go well beyond the needs of the traditional TV spot.

“We have more homework to do than someone who just has to kick out a track,” says O’Gara. “With interactive projects, everything relies on constantly evolving technology to deliver the message. Even though we’re a music production facility, we have to understand all the technologies our client is speaking – or at the very least, how our technology and code will integrate with theirs from project to project.”

Blister is not alone in its efforts; full service music and sound design houses like Elias Associates and Hest & Kramer in Minneapolis have both added what the Blister crew calls “interactive sonification” to their services.

The 2001 Challenge

At the end of the 2000, I was among several members of the advertising community asked to submit my thoughts regarding what I thought would be the most important issues affecting the Industry in the coming year. Putting on my magical forecasting hat, and from my studio in the heart of Madison Alley (Madison Ave + Silicon V/Alley, i.e. the ad tech community), here's what this interactive music producer thought at the time–

–Terry O'Gara/ August, 2006

The 2001 Challenge
By Terry O'Gara
Published in Shoot Magazine, Dec 8, 2000

This coming year presents new challenges for producers who provide content and services via the Internet and Television. These, depending on your perspective, are either becoming one technology, or parallel technologies working in tandem. New Media will remain "new" for only so long, before becoming standard operating procedure.

Until then, delivery models multiply. Unlike their peers in television, where protocols have remained stable for years, Internet artisans can't bask in their knowledge of current methodologies. Suppliers must keep abreast of every technological advance to maintain an edge in the online marketplace. The more you know, the more you can do--hence the more clients you can accommodate. Saying, 'No, we can't do it,' is valid regarding creative objections. But not being able to produce a project because your eyes glaze over when you learn that the message will be delivered over a mobile phone is business death.

Is it "Sync-to-Broadcast" or Enhanced TV? Does it work in Netscape and Explorer? The makers of these technologies are in competition with each other; that means we folk who create the stuff that gets broadcast have to understand as many of these technologies as possible. If your business hasn't evolved yet, my advice: Jump in. It's changing on a daily basis, anyway. Immerse yourself in the stream; then figure out which way the current flows.

Remember the first time you started using a PC? Cute folders and trash icon aside, you were still befuddled. But you finally got it. Now it's second nature, Well, you're about to experience growing pains again.

Maybe you've spent the last year focused on print, or television, or you were an Internet specialist. Tomorrow your projects will cross all platforms. It'll be your job to understand how things get done and when they go wrong, to understand if it's a creative issue, an integration issue, a technical issue or all of the above. By "your job," I mean, of course, everybody's job.

As a music producer I've been forced to deal with things I never thought I'd have to deal with as a "creative guy." Once, all I needed to know to produce music--beyond a sonic vision--was a broad understanding of the film production process. Skip one beat ahead and we've entered an age where, for instance, if a composer doesn't understand the technical issues regarding the way audio is delivered, then maybe he's in the wrong business. I'm not advocating a complete out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new. The piano, for instance, is a wonderful technology as it is. But there's more to music today than just tickling ivories.

Storytelling remains paramount. But as the definition of "television" is expanding, it follows that the definition of "composer" is also expanding. Artisans in other broadcast industries will have to broaden their general knowledge, as well. Clients are changing, too. They're not hiring talent that can't speak their language--which is increasingly sounding like jargon to those used to standard American English.

Experimentation yields great advances in science and technology. The same is true of art. I believe the challenge ahead is to make the line between technology and art transparent.

Convergence And The Composer

Convergence And The Composer
By Terry O'Gara
Originally published in Shoot Magazine, August 11, 2000

Convergence is the buzz word du jour in media circles. But what does convergence mean for those of us who produce music and sound design? What happens when the public is armed with a digital television that allows viewers to delete commercials with a simple command? You could assume many of us are going to be out of our jobs. But the truth is that there will be more work out there than ever before. Just get ready to learn new techniques and habits again and again before a stable format finally arrives.

So, what's it going to be like? Presently, scoring the Web is like scoring a magazine. And the audio is a smattering of effects that respond to a "click." But as the Internet paradigm becomes more like television, audio for the Web will be more like scoring for video or film. It's only a matter of time before television style Web spots replace banner ads as the online advertising model. This is a good thing for music and sound design production houses: A Web spot for one product might target a certain demographic group, say women; the score accompanying the Web spot will be different for subsets within that demographic. Older women might hear one track, younger women might hear another; teenagers will hear still another. From a production perspective, I'm looking at one spot, three finals! And, heads up, by the way! It's already starting!

The same demands for audio will apply to Websites. As broadband opens up, as media companies merge with Internet access companies, computer users will devolve from being "users" back to being spectators of this great, unfolding digital pageant. Users already pass on sites that provide little in the way of design. Before you know it, sites without sound will seem "flat," and even the most utilitarian of destinations on the Web will have to consider the entertainment value they provide. Given a choice, audiences don't buy bland. The information will draw you in, but the experience gets you to return. By necessity, audio will undoubtedly have to play a larger role than it does now.

Today the Web is like a stack of periodicals. Tomorrow it's going to be more like browsing an endless supply of DVDs. Folks like Atom Films are poised for this. Amazon.com may remain essentially an online catalogue, but it will come to resemble Home Shopping Network or QVC, with a personalized, interactive sales clerk to help you. On the audio post side, this will require clever vocal digitization and thus a new stream of income for those who specialize in creative audio services. Does this mean audio engineers will have to add computer programming to their repertoire? You bet! Welcome to convergence: endless creative possibilities for the consumer, and an increasingly demanding skill set for audio professionals.

Even text-based content providers will be forced to the inevitable conclusion that sound and music provide a richer experience to the consumer. Books online will resemble their cinematic model. As you scroll through the Internet version of the book, a score (not to mention graphics) will accompany it. And then you, the consumer, will be able to go to Amazon.com, or wherever, and buy the music that went with the book.

What's driving this? The audience is, of course. So, it's inevitable that the currently acceptable clicks and boinks won't cut it down the road. But it's exciting that the opportunities for composers, sound designers and audio post will multiply exponentially. That's convergence!