Hello, I am Paige Albania, editorial director of Promax and this is the not so Daily Re podcast. Today I am super happy to be joined by Brian Coleman, who is chief Creative officer at We Are Royal, often known as War and War. And we are going to talk about Audio first and audio focused marketing. Hello, Brian.
Welcome to the podcast. Hey Paige, thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. I haven't had this conversation before, so I'm interested to see what you have to say or to hear what you have to say.
And I'm not a big consumer of audio media, so from a consumer point of view, I'm interested. Absolutely. It's also just, it's, you know, up and coming on the rise. Podcasts and audio based content, it seems like.
It's just I was thinking about it and I'm like podcasting is really not new and the term I guess was first coined in 2004, so it's almost a 20 year old thing, but I feel like it's still being treated like it's new. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I think it's just finding new audiences right now is really what it is.
Right. Because like you say, there's a lot of podcasts that I listen to have been going on for years. Yeah. But I think just, you know, people are looking for different ways to consume media and I wonder if it's also ties into this idea of like content creators.
And you know, again, we're kind of speaking to my kids who are like just looking at people making content constantly and seeing their opinions and watching their opinions out there in world, listening to podcasts and getting information that way and following your favorite content creators who are out there just talking. Like there's some podcasts that go every single day. There's this kind of like, it's like comfort food in a way. Right.
And I also kind of challenge and say it's kind of the new radio in a way. Right. We don't really listen to radio that much. Right.
But we can like the radio advertising bureaucracy, they will still tell you that they're reaching out. I'm still a die hard K Rock listener in la. Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong.
But again, it's just, you know, generations come up and they have their own things. So yeah, I think podcasts are like the streaming. It's not streaming, but it's kind of like the radio disruption that TV is experiencing right now. It's on demand radio.
But then there's that other Piece, which I think is the appeal of influencers, is that the intimacy, the conversation, it's like hanging out with your friends, even though those friends don't actually know who you are. Totally. Hanging out with your friends. Yeah.
And honestly, if you really, like, pay attention to some of the more successful podcasters that are out there, they literally, like, address their audiences like that, don't they? Yeah, like, you know, hey, how's it going, friends? You have no idea. The millions of people are listening to you, but.
But it feels like you're being welcomed into their world for the time that they're on. So it's really not that different than, like, tiktokers, except for that. That's a lot shorter. All right, let's back you up.
So I know we are royale. How do you say it yourself? We are royale. We really do go by war a lot more these days.
I have acronym itis. I like to use the year. But in any case, what I've really covered you guys for is your video game stuff and esports, and you guys do really cool work in that area. That's what we're talking about today.
But, Tommy, I know that a few years ago, and because time is a flat circle and I don't know how it works any, but you opened your Seattle office at some point. Is that decade or so ago? Probably a decade ago. Okay, that sounds right.
So anyway, and I know you do a lot more for Audible and they're in Seattle, I believe. So I just wondered if that's how you got into doing work for audio content or how did you sort of first break into this area? It's fun, right? That's a multi threaded question there.
One. Right. Like, the game marketing size at that time is relatively new. Relatively.
Right. Again, like you say, the pandemic just sort of erased the concept of time for me a couple years before the pandemic, I'm a gamer at heart. And so when we were sitting around campfire going, like, what kind of work do you want to be doing? Gaming and game marketing kind of rose to the top of just something that we want to offer and get into.
So we made a conscious decision to push into it. And you know how it is in the industry. The work that you put out there is the work that you receive. And so the more gaming work that we put out there, the more we're getting called for gaming time, which is wonderful.
But at our core, we're still a very diverse company. Right. That was always the intention. What, 16 years ago?
Ish. When we set up the studio. The idea was to just keep doing different things. And so we started in entertainment, we started in broadcast design, then we branched out into some commercial, branched out in techniques, branched out in industry.
And so we touched a lot of things over the years, kind of getting an opportunity, man. We've been working with Audible for years now too. And quite honestly, blinking the first thing that we worked with Audible at this point, I think it was some true crime shows that we started in with Audible. The team that we worked with Audible, just sort of like figuring out how to bring the visuals of a true crime theories to life and the delicate nature of that.
Specifically, we'll talk a little bit more about just visuals in general to an audio only format. But on top of that, layer on how delicate you have to be with true trends. Right. So we started there and then we sort of built that rapport as we do with a lot of our clients.
Right. Because I'm really in the business more to have built in relationships, have fun working, you know, like, I want to enjoy doing the things that we do. And so building up that rapport, seeing it Audible has been great and it's just sort of led to a good relationship of us being able to experiment a little bit by, explore, push the creative a bit. So here we are.
Right. We still do a ton of game marketing, but my interest genuinely is in trying to change it up. And Audible gives me a fantastic avenue to change things up. So is Audible.
I mean, the campaigns that I have looked at have all been with Audible. Do you have other audio focused clients? So in the past we have worked with Sonos in a really interesting way, doing a lot of like animated content and bringing their brand to life, which is awesome. And then we did a little bit of work for Spotify, but in the same way.
Right. It was mostly for just music and music genre. It's not specific to like narrative stories. Back in the days when we were working with them, it was mostly about again, like, you know, visualizing out a little more commercial focus.
The interesting thing is Spotify just announced that they're going more heavily into audiobooks. And then. Yeah. And then they also do do quite a bit in the podcasting.
They do. And I mean, they recognize how well Hob was doing instead of getting into. And I think that's cool. Right?
Like, you know, healthy competition is good. Oh, good. I'm biased here. Right.
But what Audible is trying to do, if you look just purely on like the original standpoint, they're pushing towards like war of the world stuff. Right. Like, remember that whole thing back in the days before either of our time. But that was.
Yes, but. But we heard about it. It's. But they're pushing towards is like really, really well done original content built for the platform.
And one of those that we worked on was Impact Winter. Impact Winter. It's. The story behind it is a vampire.
It's a retelling of Vampire, but it comes from a written series. And so it's. The way that they produce it is pretty incredible. If anybody here's listening is any interest in just sort of like audio storytelling, they combine sound design, music course, voice, because they're kind of like telling the story, but it's not like a narrator is speaking.
You're just. You're hearing the voice dialogue of the actors kind of acting up. And it's like 360 immersive audio. It's like they put some effort into it.
It's pretty amazing. It's funny, it reminds me of like back in the day when they would do like you would see audio being recorded. Like back in the world of world of time. You have the guys standing over there with like clappers and horse holes.
You know what I mean? But so it's not like it's a new format from that point of view, but just that like, that kind of went away. We didn't listen to scripted audio. And now that's the thing.
Yeah, it's a lost format. Isn't that interesting? Say that in a lot of ways, right? Yeah.
Things are like. Things are cyclical. Right. Filed or cyclical, but people always interested in things cyclical.
And there's always kind of that ebb and flow to things. It's really interesting when you try and like anticipate what's going to come back in like fashion trends. So nobody knows, but they do come back. Yeah, I think that's what's happening with audio.
Maybe that also explains the whole podcast research. And I think it's also about wanting to be able to like have entertainment or news or whatever in your being input to you while you're doing other things. I think that's very appealing. And you know, that maybe used to be something that radio served, but I do think people like that idea.
I can listen to what I want when I want to. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's dive into this a little bit. So I think the thing that's interesting, when I was first thinking about this, I was thinking about audio.
First campaigns or marketing would be audio, but that's actually not true. You Guys create probably as much video as if you were doing a campaign for a video based piece of media. But so is the approach different when it's something that's audio first or do you find that generally like ideating a campaign for an audio first or an audio only production is the same. There's different caveats.
Right. The creative process is kind of the creative process that we take across the board. But when you're dealing with audio first, you have a little bit of liberties. Kind of nice.
And it is kind of a double edged sword in a way. Right. Because everything is a blank slate from a visual standpoint. So the work that we do with Audible, you know, we get the series, we get the scripts, we can read through what the content is, but there's really no visuals to back that up.
Right. Whereas, you know, if you do, you know, any kind of work on the, you know, network space, you're going to get, you know, well, this is the celebrity talent that we need to feature and this is kind of like the set design. This is this. There's a lot of things that are baked into the series with audio first marketing.
Right. Like completely blank slate. Cool. I don't have any celebrities that are deal with and if I do, it's their voice count, right.
That they're bringing to this. Not necessarily their image. Right. Their image doesn't necessarily need to be in the prison.
And so the double edged sword is. That's awesome. It's also just a blank slate. So we've got to like generate everything.
And so then you talk about like how abstract are we going to go with the creative to promote this piece? You want YOI in pr, right? I mean across the board of marketing you want something really engaging. But I think there's liberty and I give credit to the team at Audible for this too.
Right. They really want to make some thought provoking imagery. Right. This isn't just, it's not like, you know, junk food TV or anything, no offense to junk food tv, that's awesome too.
But when you're listening to like an audio first show or series, right. Or like impact link or content, you are, it sort of demands the user have a little bit of their imagination. They bring their imagination to the table. It's undoubtedly you're going to need to pay more, a little bit more attention and kind of digest it if you're going to get the fullest experience.
But what that means though in Balcony the creative is we have room to experiment a little bit more. We have room to like layers of Meaning in there we can pull out like instances from the series that might be more kind of like written by the fans than something that like foreshadows what's going to happen. And yeah, I think just sort of like maybe creatively liberating in a way. When you're working on this kind of work, you find that when you're given probably not a fully blank slate, but the one that I looked at a bit was Sandman.
So Sandman is definitely original animation that you guys did and it's kind of characters that are flowing in and out of sand. But yeah, so did you. Is it good to have that kind of freedom? Like how sometimes I feel like I like to be sort of in a box because I have less choices.
But how do you guys feel about approaching it? Like, you know, when it's like, yeah, good luck to you. That certainly is the double edged sword, isn't it? Creatively, I've always, I've always been amazed at artists and designers who can just sort of like open up a Photoshop file and you're just sitting there with that blank page.
Right. And then somehow they're going to generate something in there that's going to be like amazing. Right. I've always been fascinated and respectful of that as a process.
And so there is, there's, you know, there's some there with Sandman specifically. Right. Sandman was, you know, there were seasons before that we're pulling inspiration from and bringing that forward. So there was, in that instance, there was some things for us to play into.
At the end of the day, it's Sandman. Of course you're going to have things made out of Sandman. You know, like it's almost a given at that point. I'm going to have some particle dynamics system that's creating things that seem with other stuff that we've done with Envelope.
And again, I kind of go back to this thing. There really is no background to it and that really is a blink canvas. So yeah, I think from the creative process, when you're presenting with something like that, the first thing that you have to do is start to define the box. Right?
You have to define the box for. Instead of making a client brief. Yeah, exactly. And you know, you do that through pull in some reference and kind of just defining what, you know, where we want to go creatively.
What is that? North Star. That becomes the box that you then can direct your team to start to like explore within this. If anything it starts to like defining that box is just a little bit more of a malleable experience with client.
Because there's multiple different ways that we can approach this task. Here's a handful of them. Let's talk about what's appropriate and what's not. Kind of arrive at them and then once you do, then you can start to generate.
You can generate content. Can you talk a little bit about what wars process is creatively? When you, when you start approaching a project, do you have a standard way that you approach things? Yeah, yeah.
And it sort of, you know, mirrors probably a lot of you use out there to be honest. But most popular creative. Typically we're going to get a brief from a client like, you know, it's a crap on how detailed that brief is going to get. Audible has some really good briefs, which is great.
Really thought provoking. Again, asks the right question. Some of our clients, you know, aren't there quite yet and we need to help them engage in that. We have another client who write games like they can to be a game break.
But Riot like presents the best damn briefs I've ever seen. To the talking about like defining a box. Riot Games has a box that is clearly defined. Audible purposely leaves a little room for us to define the box.
If you think about it, the first thing that is instilled in our process, and I really do feel like it's instilled in all of the creative processes. Just we've got to like, we've got to have a conceptual center. And it's fun to really like speak of that as like, you know, we gotta define that box. But there is a little bit of creative strategy that isn't everything that we do.
There has to be a reason why we are approaching it this way. And that's, that's one of the things that, you know, I encourage with our team even when we start to get into design is like, you know, great. If there's like techniques that they want to bring to the table, that is fine. But there has to be a reason for us to use that standard.
Right? Like it's awesome to say that I want to put some like, you know, dynamic system or sand peeling things away, but there has to be a reason for it. Even though the reason is kind of staring you in the face, you know it's right. But you still need that kind of like conceptual center.
And I feel like everything sort of starts there. Right? Have a good reason for what you're doing. Define what that reason is.
Sometimes it's gonna achieve a better client than brief. Sometimes you can elaborate on it just a little Bit more, right? And then in typical creative fashion, you're like, you're pulling a lot of references of what you see out there. You're trying to, like, mix and match things in an interesting way in an ideal place.
And this happens. This happens a lot, right, is that it's really hard to find, like, a reference to the one thing that you want, right? Like, you have this in your head and you can't find the reference for it. That's a wonderful place to be in because it means that you're thinking about something actually original that you haven't seen out there in the world.
And so trying to get you to the place where it's like, what you're thinking about is something that's really hard to get. That's awesome. That means that you need to bring on some conceptual artists, depending on what the medium is. But I really love working with concept artists.
Concept artists. So, yeah, working with pure concept artists who, again, can open up a Photoshop and it's just blank, and then they can paint an image, right? They can paint the scene of something that, like, you maybe had in your head that can get you closer than maybe some references to your finding. So I find that a really interesting hack to try and solve the.
If I can find some reference grade, right? If I can, like, find a couple pieces of reference that feel like what I want to convey, and that's awesome, but it's not, like, work or some concept artists. Can I ask you a question about that? So I've been playing around with this, but I find that I'm not that creative in this way, which is sad for me, but just playing around with AI, like a little AI in Photoshop, which is Firefly or a little bit in mid Journey.
But talking about concept artists, it is kind of fun to do concept stuff in those apps. However, I recognize that why it is problematic. I just wondered, are you guys doing, like, are you using any of that to do concepting, or how are you approaching AI? Yeah, it's like, you know, let's just.
Let's just sneak the AI conversation. No, it's undoubtedly, you know, AI is really powerful when it comes to trying to find that, like, the piece of concept art, right? The lipi. What's in your head?
We're in this heyday of AI where it's like everybody is very captivated by what it can do, and I do feel like there are limitations to it. Just about everything that I see that comes out of AI is something that we're at the place where we can start to identify it, but there's limitations to it. It's like, you know, you got to get really good at the prompt engineering of it in order for it to generate something that is, like, usable. It's intriguing from like a pure reference standpoint.
Yeah. What I find really interesting about this too is that it's kind of permeating image searches too, right. So when I'm trying to pull reference for anything, right, like job comes in there, I pull some reference, I like, type in whatever, you know, it's top of mind. Like I do.
I'm still kind of a diehard user of interest myself. I can go down. I can just go down a rabbit hole and eventually find exactly what I was trying to do my head. But still, any tool that you use, even like, you know, jumping off like Adobe stock and just seeing what they've got, you know, at this point, just about anything.
It's crazy to me how you're going to run across an AI generated image at this point. And I've done it before where it's just like I'm, you know, I'm just on the cycle and I'm pulling things to folders and I'm like, you know, assembling this deck and once I get it in the deck, I give a good hard look. I'm like, man, that was an AI generated image that I just pulled in there. It's kind of there, right?
And whether, whether we know it or not, you're actually kind of using AI generated images just because of how proliferated it is. There's certainly an art to the prompt engineering to get it to do the right things. I feel like we're very quickly approaching a place where, you know, your ChatGPT is going to be linked to administrators. You can actually naturally give direction to the robots to like make the little bit of wild west that we're in right now.
Everybody's figuring it out, but I will challenge this that like, everybody is using it to some degree, whether they know it or not, I think. Sure, right. Like, there's a. The aspect for me is just keep it, keep it on the, on the reference side.
And maybe that's me just trying to like protect the creative process or just respect the creative process. I think, like on the writing side, which is where I'm more familiar and comfortable. But like I used. I think it was the AI in Google.
I might find it in Chat GPT too. But anyway, I was using it just to see I was writing like a short story for my nephew. And I gave it a prompt and you know, I spit something out and I'm like, this is fine, but it's very generic and you would, you could take this and then like you jump off of it to create something actually interesting. So I feel like, you know, the images and stuff you generate in generating AI apps are interesting, but if you look like I was watching this presentation the other day and it was like the hand on this is actually really weird and wrong.
So it's the same thing, right? You're generating drafts or ideas or you're ideating or just making concepts that you can then take to artists to actually create, you know, and apply humanity and originality and creativity to. And I mean that's what it works. I think it lives now.
This is the beginning. Like it might change and really be able to imitate what humans can do. I don't know, but I think that's what it is right now. But there's some awesome uses of the tech, right, in supporting good old human being creativity, right?
There's Moss muses of that. I was demoing a handful of that stuff with the team of Adam Adobe. That's genuinely impressive of like, you know, wow, that's gonna help me when I'm on a like scrappy light action shoot in that way, when it's supporting your creative vision, I'm kind of all for it. But when it's taking over, that's the thing that just, it's just, it's always been bothering me, right?
Is that like the robots we're supposed to, we're supposed to like do the remedial things that we as a human, like just don't want to do anymore so that human beings can genuinely be creative, right? More creative versus have more art and expression out there. And instead what we do, the first damn thing that we do when we have like, you know, AI is we get the robot to do the creativity for us. Guys, we did it, we did it backwards.
We did it backwards. But I do think, you know, we're having like the actors are still striking for the very thing. There has to be some regulation protections or how disruptive AI could be. But once we get over this and start to figure out how we incorporate it into our process, I think it's going to enable us as artists to do more than the disadvantages I think that it might bring.
I think that we could go down like a massive rabbit hole. So I'm going to try pull us out. And it's my fault. I think it's like social Media, like social media came along and, you know, I think there were good intentions of social media.
But then when you get unregulated discourse, global discourse, of course there are bad actors. It's just sort of the nature of things. So it's similar to AI in that there are probably very helpful uses and there's probably doing evil political novel. Yeah.
Like fake news are fake. Yeah. And that's definitely going to be a thing. Yeah.
Okay, let's leave that. Maybe we'll do another podcast. I would love to, but I have no idea what we're talking about. We went on this next tangent, but I'm gonna bring it back now.
You guys have done traditional entertainment marketing for linear channels. I'm sure you've done for streaming as well. You've done a lot of game marketing, as we've discussed, and audio. I just wondered if your.
The way you view the role of audio and marketing in general has evolved or changed as you've worked through those different verticals. Yeah, it's a. It's a good thing to bring up because I am going to always be a huge proponent of us trying to think about things from. As audio first as you can, Admittingly, in our historic.
In the past, you know, audio is always something that sort of takes that. Or always has been something that takes it back to you. Sort of like you pull some scratch, you do some scratch, and then it's like it's good enough. And then what you do is towards the end, when you have a pretty good semblance of what the animation might be, the piece might be, or.
Yeah, might be. Then you start to like, sort the music or get into music. And so it was for a time and for a long time and kind of across my career, not just like at war, but other places we were working with, it kind of became like an afterthought in a way. And I'm trying to change that philosophy in what we do because I can start to see the sheer benefit of being more audio persuaded and look like talking with a client early about music, about tone, about what we want this to be digging into, like the inflection of the voiceover artist that we want to bring into this.
All of that starts to. It starts to set the tone of the piece as much. It's as important as the animation of the design. And so if we can reprioritize things so that music, audio, sounds, lines that mix, all of that is an equal contributor to this piece.
I think you have a more rich piece. Music can convey a ton it's super important. So it just makes. It makes no sense that we just sort of like, you know, oh, yeah, we'll get there.
It doesn't make sense. You know, like, bring it in, fold it into the process. In the very beginning, you know, the box that I was talking about, right, like defining the box, it's like, you know, in defining that box, Audio should be a part of that discussion, I think. How has that process been with Riot in any other game developers 84 because I do think sound is really important in games.
Yeah, Riot is a good call out because they're. They're so good at this. And case in point, right, Riot has music director. They have a whole music department and they have people who have.
I think this entire department is dedicated towards music sound, getting the voiceover talent kind of involved in as many much as they can. And what it means is just like, you know, Riot, out of any client that I work with, honestly, probably aside from Audible guys, because I was 100% idea. Riot respects the craft of Music Sims and the power of it. What we, what we often get with them is they understand their IP so much that when we're crafting one of these, most of the time we're working with Riot is like character reveals or reveals of stimulants or things.
But all of that is tied to the lore of the games that they have. There's an underlying story and there's an underlying purpose to everything that Riot does. When we're in the room with them talking about, like, music and sound design, they'll pull forward things that have. That have, like, meaning to them.
And so it might just be a riff of like a chord in a string music, right? But that riff goes back to like a trailer that they released three years ago that had some of this character that continues the thread core, right? In particular, their audiences to sort of eat that stuff up. And so they're thinking about ways of pulling in like Easter eggs into the audio and sound design.
But then they're also thinking about how they can like, thread character reveal into it too. So they'll oftentimes purely just with an audio signature. They'll be like revealing a character for the first time in like a visual medium in the reveal. But that voice artist was in like a prior trailer or something in the background saying a particular line.
That won't get paid off until you see the, you know, the full reveal of it, like, you know, a year later or something. They're really good at doing that and respecting it. And it just Sort of. I mean, honestly, it just sort of like makes the piece that much more rich, right.
When everything has a purpose in it. I think also this is a little. This is oboception of war specifically. But like Apple, I think, because they have Apple music, but they do a really kind of a cool job of integrating new music pieces with actually crime does it.
I mean a lot of people do it, but like I think of a trailer recently that had a Taylor Swift debut in it and then another one had an Olivia Rodrigo song and a very recent one. So I think that's also just a way to sort of signal to your audience, you know, who is this for? And when it's Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, you're sort of saying like, hey, this is young, this is new, this is hip. So just an interesting way to.
Yeah, it's interesting because we've done work with, with Apple way in the past. At the very beginning of royal time there, there was an initiative over there internally where they wanted to find the new up and coming artists and like shed light on them. And it was from at least the teams that we're talking to over there. It was, it felt like it was an effort to do some good.
Like they're like, you know, look, guys, like there are some incredible artists out there on the indie scene who don't have a big giant spotlight on it. Let's put the spotlight on them, right? Because as soon as like Apple uses a track on their, like on any kind of marketing material, right, that shit's like, you know, in the top 10 on. That's actually how I first heard of Billie Eilish was she had a song on an Apple bot I think actually was released in the UK.
But like really early on she was like 16. They picked her up. So. Yeah, yeah, it's cool.
I mean it's. It's cool when companies sort of recognize the pull that they have and instead of just, you know, I mean, Apple is also guilty of the, you know, Taylor Swift of it all and the YouTube have it all. Right. But it's nice when they use their poll to sort of highlight up and coming artists.
I think it's interesting too in that like pieces that people do that are marketing pieces that actually have a lot of creative value and buzz on their own. You know, they're not like, like there's a TV show and then there's marketing and people sort of go, whatever, it's promo. But sometimes those pieces are very, you know, are worth like Ted Lasso for example. So Ted Lasso started as NBC Sports content piece and became this show.
But you know, I think that it's very interesting to think about how marketing can be both things. I think you're bringing up a really good point on where at least my perception, right. And opinion, and maybe my desires too is that marketing does start to become more content driven. I love seeing the rise of like branded content.
We hear that word, those words put together a lot and we see it sometimes, sometimes, sometimes brands will kind of embrace it to sort of like create some marketing that stands on a film that has, that has like a deeper narrative. And I always try to encourage clients to think about all the different platforms that they, that they reach in different ways. And it is more of like a content approach where we're going to make a 32nd spot, we're going to spend all the money, time and energy in crafting this, you know, whatever it becomes, whether it's like action driven or CG for servers, you spend a lot of time making money making this 30 second spot. You could be thinking about making a 30 and making like a bespoke social elements that tie into the same narrative.
Or on the flip side, what happens so much that I'd like us to not do so much more is we just do cut down. Yeah, the deliverables, it's like, like, okay, we're going to do a 30 second spot. I'm going to do a 15 and a six, three and pretty soon it'll be worn and it's like there is fatigue right. In seeing this stuff.
You're asking a lot from an audience to continue to see the same thing over and over again too is I see a commercial and If I see a 15 cut down of that in my feed or something, I am scrolling past it because I've already seen it. If it's different, fundamentally different, and it tells like a deeper story or something that's connected, you know, has a really interesting character that can kind of read through. And brands, there's plenty of examples of brains that do this and do it well. But I think that's the stuff that really starts to cut through and that's the stuff that gets more traction because there's just difference telling a little bit of a deeper story.
That actually leads me into. So when you're doing bots for pieces, for audio first content, where are you, where do they get placed? I think you're the person placing them. But what kind of platforms do they get placed and so on, how do you find that they are played or distributed?
It's so, it's interesting for Audible and again, it's like almost one place. We produce the content, we hand it off. I've always been interested in like the media buy aspect of industry, having a more kind of strategic approach to that. I find that a lot of that is already pre bought time, you know, so the strategy is, oh, we have some assets, we're just going to throw them into all of our channels where we already have this time to buy.
That's a, that's a tangent with Audible in particular though. Audible, you know, it's mostly a digital first release. There's been some things that we have done that have gone to air, but for the most part you're talking. I see a lot of Audible via social again like scrubbing through Reddit and I hit up a lot of that.
Mostly the machine's just listening to me. But I see a lot of social. I see it a lot in you know, like YouTube pre roll and stuff. Yeah.
And I think that's primarily where they're getting the reach, which makes sense. Yeah. But again, listen to podcasts advertise where your audience is. One thing that you mentioned in sort of the, in the pre before we recorded, but we were in the pre information that I'm given that was about the challenge of putting these kind of things on social media because the audio is often blocked or muted or being listened to.
So how do you deal with that? Again, I'm gonna give the, I'm gonna give the theme a lot more credit for this because the thing that I was speaking to before of like, man, you gotta, you gotta be, you gotta do something original on social and not just like a 15 second cut technique. So we do, we do those big meaty, you know, slots for the pre roll that you'll get. But then for social specifically we do things called audio brands.
And that's a fun term, takes me back a bit. What they really are is like, it's fully original content and what it is really like a sound bite. It's like a little, little bit of narrative beat or something that sort of is engaging, gets you into the property, Right. And so we take that sound bite and here's the challenge, right?
Is that most social media marketing, advertisements, whatever, most of that stuff is not gonna have the audio on. Most people don't have an audio. But that's what we have to do when we're trying to push an audio first format is visualize the, visualize the script in an interesting way. So everything that we deliver for the Most part that's narrative based for Audible comes along with just a roster of these audiograms that we produce that is taking the branding system that we've been living in.
Right. And you got this awesome looking fan, you got this like, you know, world that we're creating. Same with the type of. And you're visualizing, it's like good old fashioned art school me kinetic type in a way that is.
That is just sort of like visualized as they're saying it. It has a little interesting effect. So it's not just like what you see on Social, but you see it a lot on Social too. People will just sort of reiterate what is going on in the videos that they post with.
And they have to, because otherwise. Yeah, most people aren't listening to it with them with the audio on. It's interesting because on one hand we just talked about how important audio is and some extent and sound design and all that. But on the other hand it's like Social is kind of a visual world.
So you really have to. You can't really ignore any piece of it. You have to have the whole package. Yeah, absolutely.
Do you ever do audio only promos? Like just algorithm audio only promos or they all have visuals? I mean, they do, yeah. But that's outside of our preview at that point.
I think they just internalize all that because that's the real house. And I think at that point they're working more directly with people producing shows. Does we at Royale have its own like sound division or do you guys work with contractors to do this or how does that work for you? We do.
We have like roster of partners that we work with that we bring in and again try to bring them in as early as we can. Yeah. That being said though, you know, when we go into like our editors are really good with sound, music, audio, kind of pulling in and finding. Right.
The right tonality that we want to land on early on is a thing that our editors come to the table with it. Okay, okay, I'm gonna wrap it up, but I'm gonna ask you, do you guys have anything cool coming up on the audio side or in general that you want to mention? No, I mean specific to the audio thing because let's just sort of like keep on theme. I was mentioning that there is a lot of work that we do with Riot Games and we continue to do a lot of great things with Riot Games.
And so particularly there's another trailer that will come out. Right. That does not the exact thing that I was talking about, but is really driven by audio and character reviews. So that's that's really interesting.
That's coming out at some point before the end of the year. But, yeah, that's the right work that we do. I mean, it's a pretty gold standard on incorporating audio. Okay, well, we'll look for that.
Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate it. Thanks again for having me on. My pleasure.
Have a great day. All right. You as well. Take care.
Bye. That's it for this episode of the Daily Breathe podcast. If you don't already, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments, questions, or ideas for conversations, please feel free to reach out to [email protected] and as always, thanks for listening.