Sony wanted to start out this campaign with a bang," says Josh Rabinowitz, VP/executive music producer at Young & Rubicam (Y&R), New York, about Sony’s latest effort, "Walk This Way," directed by Samuel Bayer of bicoastal RSA USA. The spot is the first ad in a campaign designed to promote the Network Walkman—Sony’s entry in the field of digital music players. It features R&B singer Macy Gray covering the classic Aerosmith hit from the 1970s.
"Walk This Way" features Gray sporting a blue satin suit and a long scarf while performing on a minimalist set. As the ad opens, the singer triggers an effects box—the gesture is clearly meant to evoke pressing the Network Walkman’s "play" button. Then she launches into the classic rock song. As she moves and sings, she stands amidst transparent moving panels emblazoned with the Sony logo and the Walkman’s specs, including its 30-hour battery life. The closing tag: "Like no other." (The :30 version of the ad jumps right to the swaggering chorus.)
Brian McDermott, the creative director/copywriter on the campaign, notes that the new product is essentially an update of the original portable device that came out in the late ’70s. "The big problem was how do we re-launch what’s probably one of the great sub-brands in the history of consumer electronics?" he says. "In the last few years, it seems to have become less relevant, and we needed to re-energize it. The campaign theme that we came up with was this notion of ‘walk this way.’ It’s a great phrase that can express what the Sony Walkman [is] all about."
Y&R’s next challenge was to find a way to turn that phrase and idea into something that would resonate with consumers. "We [decided to] use music because the Walkman is obviously a very musical brand," relates McDermott. "Sony itself is a very musical brand because they’re really an entertainment brand. Apple is a computer company—they’re not a music company. We wanted to use [Sony’s] heritage as a music company and get into songs."
It turned out that Sony’s record label has an extensive catalogue of tunes dealing with movement. "There are so many great songs out there that play off the notion of walking or forward motion," McDermott says. "Walking is forward motion—it’s people choosing a direction. It’s really about choosing your own path in life. We really loved all those different connotations, and we wanted to come up with songs that have those connotations."
After initially compiling a list of tunes that might work with the ads, the team at the agency further refined their approach. "We wanted to contemporize a classic idea, which is portable audio," relates McDermott. "[We thought] why don’t we have different contemporary artists interpret these great ‘walk’ songs? Let’s pair artists with songs in a way that is somewhat unpredictable."
According to Rabinowitz, he and the rest of the Y&R team went to Sony’s strategic marketing people and asked them to suggest artists that might be right for the campaign. (Sony recording artists had to be used to promote the updated Walkman.) "Everyone handed us ideas from the different Sony imprints, we came up with a list of a few different bands, and Macy Gray resonated with everybody," Rabinowitz recalls.
Perfect Union
Using Sony artists and music to promote products under the Sony umbrella is not a new approach. "Over the years we’ve really tried to synergize the interaction between Sony electronics and Sony Music, and we’ve had some success," says Rabinowitz.
One of the more high-profile examples would be Sony’s "The Trip," a branding effort for the company directed by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA, which debuted during the telecast of the ’03 Super Bowl. The spot featured Alana Davis, a Sony artist, covering the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune "Carry On"; Rabinowitz produced the track. A full-length version of the song was later made available online and released as a single.
The recording session for "Walk This Way" took place in Dublin and Los Angeles. Damon Elliott, a producer who has worked with Pink, Beyoncé and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, put together a band in Los Angeles to cut the instrumental tracks. Rabinowitz describes the sound they were going for as "Sly and the Family Stone meets Aerosmith in the year 2004."
Meanwhile, Gray was on a tour in Europe, and Rabinowitz and McDermott flew to Dublin to meet up with the singer. Linked with the band tracks via ISDN lines, Macy and her backup singers laid down their vocal parts. Rabinowitz points out that Gray sings the verses of "Walk This Way" in halftime—at half the tempo of the original. "We loved it," he says. "It was kind of an accident that she did that. She was just trying to figure something out. We [said], ‘Let’s definitely do it that way.’ "
Rabinowitz and the creative team wanted Gray to make the song her own: "We kept changing it to adapt to her style, to make it really sound like her as opposed to her forcing herself into someone else’s style," he says.
The recording session was different from most other spot music sessions in that a whole song was being tracked, not just material for a :30 or a :60; the full-length version of the tune can be found online at www. sonyconnect.com, Sony’s online music store. It is also on Gray’s new CD, The Very Best of Macy Gray. "We wanted to make sure we had the whole song," says Rabinowitz. "We didn’t know at that point that they were going to use it on The Very Best of Macy Gray. We just knew Sony Connect—the online proprietary digital downloading service for Sony—was going to use it."
After the session, Rabinowitz headed to Los Angeles to do a mix with David Pensado, who has worked on albums with Christina Aguilera and the Black Eyed Peas. Later, the track was tweaked in a studio and edited.
Y&R chose Bayer to direct because of his knack with musicians. "He has a great eye, and he has a history of working with musicians," says McDermott, referring to the director’s work for Nirvana and Metallica, among others. "We knew he would be able to immediately understand and grasp what we were doing but bring a different and fresh approach to it. Sam knows music and he knows images. And probably better than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he understands how music and images should work together."
