Thanks to the creative collaboration between Y&R Melbourne and Mr. Schweppes’ fizzy pop, I’ve been humming the same tune all week, and once again I’ve been left wishing commercials came with track lists and credits. Eventually I tracked it down, well actually young Adam at HowardMusic focused my ears in the right direction, and I can tell you It’s called “To Build A Home” and was recorded by those little rascals Cinematic Orchestra. You’ll want to know because it’s dazzlingly hypnotic and will have your inner i-tunes buzzing for days. You can check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFfJJjLpqw. The pictures are quite nice too, in that slightly over-powering, special effect, Cannes winner way.
Adland is awash with great tunes, from huge rollercoaster tracks that need a full orchestra and hours of baton twitching, to simple little ditties that stick in your mind like chewing gum to your shoe. Whatever the genre advertising has stolen it, re-recorded it, and generally tweaked it before squishing it into a 30, 45 or 60-second mnemonic for toilet paper. Or computer games, if such a lowly title can be applied to the vast entertainment landscape that is Halo. The brutally invasive “Big Sur Moon” by the charmingly named, Bucket Head, swirls and dive-bombs like a futuristic bomb laden aircraft. Sign up at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKTC50JjIE
These days, of course, a simple song is no longer enough to snare the hearts of the consumer, last week, for instance, I was booked in for something called a Sound-scaping session with the guys at Audio Junkies. Nice blokes and after several hours of “squark,” “bang” “crash” and “parp” I figured out that this scaping thing is all about adding thunderclaps, far-off cars and farting noises to “flesh out” the track of my simple ad. I must say it certainly helps create a real life ambience that makes the whole communication more convincing, right down to the barking dog next door. See what I mean at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3R0vB12LU The Canon commercial is loaded with SFX and, well, noises, created by Toby Jarvis and Mike Connaris from the mighty sound house, Mcasso.
From the same stable the McDonalds spot shows how the sound-scaping can counterpoint humour to make the point more powerfully, love it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfMryXuRwYA&feature=channel_page
A little spaghetti western type music with a few under and overtones help tell a story of a showdown between a couple in a parked car. The soundtrack is nicely paced and relatively subtle, more than can be said for story itself. Still, It still makes me smile, take a listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9y9McTwN
Someone, probably the mighty Paul Arden, once said that a great soundtrack is 50% of a brilliant ad. The flip side of this is that a crap track can lose you half your impact and memorablity. Take the new Honda Jazz “I Can”, ad, it has a thin track with a rather clumsy mechanical finger-clicking device dropped over it for effect. The effect being banal. But it’s nothing like as trite as the Vaseline Skin Care commercial which again employs some kind of clicking sound and again seems out of place with the photography. Admittedly neither are as aggravating as that damned song that surrounds the Defy campaign, full of smarmy franglais (“pink, schmink, money, honey…) and annoying noises that seem to make each ad go on forever, and not in a good way.
To drive these impossibly catchy tunes from my inner juke-box I foolishly appealed to my musically obsessed art director, humming something by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs she ran one of Audi’s recent offerings on her Powerbook. “The slowest car ever built,” highlighting the new R8’s hand intensive building process, is under-scored by a deceptively simple track full of angel-sweet voices and a seemingly effortless melody. Tune in and hear “the beep beep song” by Simone White at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDwEE_1ESMU&feature=fvsr Just be prepared to be hated by your loved ones as your incessant humming spreads faster than flu from a pig.
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