Audio Creative Best Practice: Brand Early And Often
What to do when your clients says their ads aren’t generating store visits, phone calls, or web site traffic? Most often, creative is the issue and your campaign is failing to “brand early and often.”
Advertising creates memories and memories generate sales; Clicks don’t generate sales
Jon Lombardo, former Global Head of Research at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the founder of newly launched AI-driven Marketing strategy and measurement firm Evidenza, reports, “One of the primary things people misunderstand is how advertising works. People think they just put an ad in front of you and you immediately buy. That’s not how it works. Generally, you don’t generate any sale from an ad, what you do is generate a memory and then at some point later they consult their memory.”
Conduct a “brand early and often” creative audit: Watch/listen to all your client ads; Check off if your brand is mentioned in the first two seconds and if there are at least five or more audio track brand mentions in 30-second ads
Conduct a branding audit of all their ads: TikTok, Meta, TV, AM/FM radio, podcasts, social video, connected TV, etc. Create a grid where you mark down if the brand name appears in the first two seconds. Indicate how many brand mentions occurred in the ad. Note down the number of times your visual logo appears in ads and how often the brand name occurs in the audio track of your video ads.
How did the “brand early and often” creative audit perform? The goal is for all creative executions to have the brand in the first two seconds and at least five mentions in a thirty-second ad.
You can fix weak branding by replacing the word “we” in your ad copy with the brand name. The key to fixing the brand linkage of your ads is to ensure the audio track has lots of brand mentions. Visual logo flashes in video ads have weaker impact.
You can look away, but you cannot shut your ears: Why audio branding does all the brand recall heavy lifting
A major TV study from DVJ Insights found that the more times the brand name was said in the audio track of the TV ad, the greater the brand was linked to the ad. One or two visual logo flashes in the ad have modest brand effect. Increasing visual logo flashes after the first instance shows weak improvement in brand recall.
Why does increased visual branding generate so little lifts in brand recall?
Attentiveness studies reveal that only 40% of TV ad occurrences are seen. Most of the time, TV ads are only heard or play to empty rooms. In video ads, audio branding does all the heavy lifting to drive brand recall.
Hundreds of brand effect studies reveal that the greater the number of brand mentions, the stronger the brand equity and brand association
Thousands of brand effect studies find the more you say your brand name, the greater your advertising brand recall. If you say your name a lot, more consumers can recall your ad and correctly tie the ad to your brand.
Want your brand association and recall explode? Use a jingle with melody that says the name of your company
Famous marketing professor Mark Ritson exclaims, “The king or queen of them all is the jingle. It smashes all the other distinctive assets.”
Veritonic studies reveal two best practices for an effective sonic identify: have melody and say the name of the brand. Veritonic reports that jingles with the name of the advertiser are 7.5X more likely to be corrected associated with the brand. Jingles with melody are twice as likely to be correctly associated with the brand.
The brand that’s remembered is the brand that is bought
The job of advertising to creative positive memories, reports Ty Heath at the B2B Marketing Institute: “The brand that’s remembered is the brand that is bought. The goal is not to create a lead, the goal is to create a memory. Lead generation is short term. Memory generation is long term. Win the mind to win the market. Mind share equals market share.”