For many a spot these days, finding the right music can be the difference between being hip or being hokey, between tapping into a target audience’s psyche, or missing the point completely.
Agencies are going the extra mile to find the right sound, resulting in, among other things, the emergence of Beth Urdang of Agoraphone, a New York-based, freelance music consultant who specializes in putting agencies together with new music and the people who make it.
Only time will tell, but in years to come Urdang may be recognized as a pioneer in the field of music consulting to advertising agencies. With increasingly targeted spots featuring music in a foreground role, and a seemingly unlimited number of musical genres and bands, it makes sense that music consultancy would be an emerging field.
"You can’t know everything about music," Urdang says. "An agency might have a music person who knows classical and show music, but they’re looking for an indie-rock sound and they need young, independent bands. There’s no reason they wouldn’t consult me for that."
They are coming to Urdang, and not just with skateboard and soft drink ads. For "Secret," one of four spots in an upcoming campaign for telecommunications giant Qualcomm, Urdang turned Fallon McElligott, New York, on to the British band Fila Brazillia on the independent Pork label-not exactly household names. Scott Vincent, group creative director for Fallon, says the agency had planned to take the spots to a music house for some original music. "We were going to post-score it, but we found some pieces of music that had the exact emotion we were looking for," Vincent relates. "The music in these spots was one of the most important elements."
For "Secret," the agency used an existing track by Fila Brazillia. "They were really easy to work with," Vincent says. "They were really enthusiastic. They were getting some exposure so they didn’t see it as selling out."
One of the other spots in the campaign is acquiring its music through the efforts of an art director at the agency who is Swedish and knew the music scene there. "He was in a band in Sweden and we found a piece through him." Vincent says.
Spot Threat?
Like the Fallon art director from Sweden, Urdang was until this year an ad agency staffer who was interested in music and who offered occasional suggestions to creatives about what cuts might go with certain commercials. In her case, the agency was Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., and it recognized Urdang’s contributions by promoting her from proofreader to the creative research department as a music supervisor. After time in Portland and in Wieden’s Amsterdam office, Urdang came home to New York and became a consultant.
So far though, there is little need to include music consulting as a tab in the SHOOT Directory, and established music houses don’t see Urdang and other consultants as a serious threat. "I have no problem with it," says Michelle Curran, president of Amber Music, New York and London. "People need an intermediary sometimes. To work with people from bands who sometimes have their own agenda, and with people from advertising agencies with their own agenda, it can sometimes be a very tricky situation to be in the middle of."
Jeff Koz, owner and creative director at HUM Music+Sound Design, Santa Monica, says he doesn’t see consultants as competition. "Agencies are always looking for creative solutions," he says. "The trend is definitely evolving toward [consultants]. I think it’s a smart move on Beth’s part. We have some clients we perform similar services for- coming up with creative ideas for existing bands or bringing in specific celebrity talent to sing on a spot."
While established music houses are more likely to compose original music for an ad, Koz says there is no reason they can’t work with small labels and new bands, too. "It’s just a question of having people at your company who are taking the time to go to clubs, listen to releases, have relationships with labels," he says. "That isn’t what we’re specializing in, but from time to time we provide those services for our clients. It just boils down to how you’re spending your time. A lot of music houses are quite busy composing and creating music for spots and everything that that entails."
John Adair, composer and partner at Admusic, Santa Monica, says he isn’t running into consultants very often. "It’s not much on our radar screen," he says. "The kinds of services Beth provides, we either do on behalf of clients as just part of the normal working process that has evolved for a music house in the ’90s, or an agency music producer will be performing that kind of a role."
Adair says even video editors can play a role in finding music for a spot simply because they like to have something to cut to. "It gives them the rhythm they like to have as a point of reference for the picture," he says. "Frequently nowadays, the clients will have us do that same thing. We’ll have the initial creative conversations and the client will say, ‘The editor would like to have something to cut to. Can you find some different ideas?’ It’s pretty early on in the process. We’ll research different sources and find different sorts of music and provide that to them."
Admusic also works with indie bands and labels to meet growing agency needs for preexisting music, and Adair suggests that the music house has resources to meet those needs that some consultants may lack.
"Over the past five or six years we have traveled all over the country recording indie bands in different towns," Adair says. "We’ll help the agency understand how to process the paperwork with respect to the band because an indie band doesn’t really understand the business end of commercial music. We’ll also produce the session. We help the band get the best performance they can and help the agency to make sure the performance fits their formats and needs."
Deep Impact?
If music consultants as a group haven’t yet appeared on music house radars, neither have they made much of an impact on agency creatives. "Beth is more of a specialist," says Todd Waterbury, a creative director at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore. who worked with Urdang on a Diet Coke spot, "Video Dating." "A lot of music houses are accomplished generalists while what Beth has is an ability to recommend existing pieces of music or emerging bands that may want either to create original music for a project or to license something they’ve recently recorded. I think of going to a music house with a commercial that’s already been cut and we need to post-score something. What Beth does is come in almost at the concept stage, when we just need to make some music. She can bring a really interesting attitude or point of view to the project and add value to it, rather than just an aural accompaniment to the story."
Waterbury says Urdang has an ability to deliver bands that are just on the verge of becoming more recognized. "She has a particular way of seeing a problem and the solutions she comes up with tend to be pretty surprising, and tend to be unique and that’s what people are striving for, not just to be idiosyncratic or weird for its own sake," he adds.
Fallon’s Vincent says the agency doesn’t have a music maven on staff but often takes suggestions from agency people who are into music. "It’s kind of word of mouth," he says. "And the producers at Fallon are pretty good. You can tell them what you’re looking for and they’ll have some recommendations, but it’s usually someone who is pretty well established. As soon as a band has a CD, they’re too expensive. Beth was able to get us some people we and a lot of other people had never heard of, some really cool bands."
Cool, affordable bands are what Urdang specializes in. She gravitated in that direction at Wieden & Kennedy, where she thought the music process was limited to either finding a song that was well known or going to a music house for something original.
"Those seemed to be the options," she says. "I was playing music and I’ve done radio. I was interested in independent music and my thing is, why not just find more music? It’s hard to buy the biggest song on the radio because it costs a million dollars. What about all that other music out there? Why isn’t anyone sourcing that out?"
Urdang says her highest profile spot so far is Nike’s "I Can" out of Wieden & Kennedy with "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by the Verve on it. "That was Nike’s big re-launch and it was a pretty big spot," she says.
Urdang likens what she does to the role of a movie soundtrack supervisor. "Ads are becoming much more filmic," she says. "They want a soundtrack that’s specific to that ad. They don’t want generic music. They want a specific song they can identify with exactly the kind of emotional and branding level of their spot. There is a great cachet for having a cool band on your ad. The more agencies want to steer away from having the same old crap, the more there is going to be a call for what I do."e
