Do SFX and music tracks 'play' in voice advertising?
Music and sound effects have a long history in marketing—Jingles, scores, sound effects and other audio tricks play a major role in helping ‘set the scene', conveying emotion and moving story lines along.
As an audio-based medium, it stands to reason that ads on our Mobile Advertising Network would benefit from sound effects and music. But, of course, things are never quite that simple.
The tiny amplifiers and speakers even in today's most advanced phone handsets are a big part of the problem. But the real culprit is in the channel bandwidth of the system. To help jam as many calls in as little bandwidth as possible, cellular audio is encoded at 8.55 kbits/s (kilobits per second). Voice activity detection and variable rate coding that the carriers add in can bring it as low as 1200 bits/s. (For reference, downloads for your iPod are normally encoded at 128 kbits/s...about 15X more audio information every second).
As a result, music by itself doesn't sound great. Music and audio playing together has the potential to be a muddy mess.
But all is not lost! After much research, testing and gnashing of teeth, we've found that, as with chocolate brownies, moderation is the key.
Bumps and Buttons
Carefully selected bits of music and sound before, after, and sometimes even during audio ads can help call attention to your ad, increase recall and drive action.
Remember that mobile phones are designed for speech, so be careful to select sounds that are in a similar range to our voice. Apparently, the saxophone is the most human-sounding instrument, so one would think that it is ideal. Unfortunately I have yet to find a sax-track that the 18-24 audience can't wait to hear.
Don't get too high, or too low
High pitch sounds are bad! OK... I used a female scream in an ad we did for Harpers Island, a new mystery TV series for CBS television. But I knew it would sound distorted and jarring on the phone. And that was the effect I wanted.
To my ear, bass is a bigger no-no. Low tones and thumping base lines really break down over the phone. I've done battle with hip-hop tracks in ads for some of our ringtone advertisers and I can tell you it's not pretty. Thank you, T.I.
Keep it in the Clear
As I said earlier, music or sound playing beneath (at the same time as) a voice track tends to make the music very difficult to hear and the words almost unintelligible. But even that's not a hard and fast rule. For our campaign for Chevys Restaurants, we created a set of ads that use a "fajita sizzle" sound effect that plays to the mouth-watering goodness of Chevy's Fresh Mex food. Sections of audio don't have to be completely naked of other sounds, but it's a good idea to minimize any overlaps with key words and phrases.
Compression is Good
I recently called my friend Steve Shapiro to get his wise counsel. He spoke at length on the topic of compression. I took notes, but couldn't read them, so I'll paraphrase. His main point was that pro-tool compressors make audio sound bigger, better and clearer on just about every device, without making it louder. If you have access to these kinds of tools, use ‘em. If not, the software compressors found in most basic audio tools can add a little extra punch to your MobileAd audio project, and that's a good thing on the phone.
Bottom line, the phone is not the perfect device for delivering complex sound and music. But if you make sound sound choices, little morsels of audio and tasty bits of music can deliver a delicious boost to your mobile and landline-based audio advertising.
Write a comment