Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #43 w/ Nike's World Cup Football Campaign⚽, Ringo🔊, How to With John Wilson📜 and the sound of VanMoof😠🚨🚲.
Hi there reader.
Back once again for the renegade master. I hope this bi-weekly-ish newsletter edition number 43 finds you either relaxing on the beach, having a break on a mountain hike, or nurturing some sort of festival hangover.
This edition includes Nike and the World Cup Football, my company Ringo, my favorite new docu-comedy gem How to With John Wilson and why the sound design of Dutch e-bike brand VanMoof helped the company go bankrupt.
Enjoy!
1. Truly Championing Women's Football
Nike's World Cup Campaign
The Women's World Cup Football is currently underway in New Zealand and Australia. I wrote an item around the advertising man's world cup a little while ago, comparing the comparing the Nike, Adidas and Puma campaigns. Doing that now wouldn't make much sense since there is but one clear winner: Nike.
Women's football has been plagued by the notion that it is inferior to men's football, leading to unequal recognition and pay for female players compared to their (absurdly overpaid) male counterparts.
Recent campaigns have highlighted these issues, including one by Dutch insurance company ING, which used misshaped goals to challenge this inequality. Another campaign by Orange, through the Parisian agency Marcel, cleverly replaced female players' actions with male players' bodies using VFX.
Although these campaigns intend to address real issues, they unintentionally perpetuate a comparison with men's football, which takes away from the unique accomplishments of women's football.
However, Nike takes a big step away from this by understanding that an engaging narrative draws in an engaged audience without the need for comparison. Their Women's World Cup campaign features an overarching film showcasing the heroic and unique stories of Nike-endorsed international football heroines (linked below) and is carried through by a series of all too clever and very well-produced individual videos of the women.
Most notably, there is Megan Rapino's hommage to 80s action cartoons and Alex Morgan's perfect faux Perfume ad called "Effort Made Effortlessly" (both also linked below). Meanwhile, the Sophia Smit, Wang Shuang, Grace Geyoro, Debinha, Ada Hegerberg, and Sam Kerr films are also worth a watch and something you should probably do because their current average view count is only 30K, and that’s the first gap we should overcome.
2. Big Personal News Announcement!
💥 My Company Ringo Closes 350K Pre-Seed Funding Round!💥
Two years ago I co-founded Ringo with my friend, former bandmate and long-time collaborator Nicholas Van Den Doel. Our goal was simple: eliminating content creators' obstacles when sourcing music for their audio-visual stories.
What we’re building is a B2B music procurement platform that makes licensing existing music for moving media (ranging from ads, films, tv, trailers and games) simple, safe, and stress-free by utilizing Ai en web 3.0 technologies.
With this modest war chest, we are able to build and launch our first product later this year. Our product will enable users to upload tracks through a Spotify link. They can specify the terms of usage and get a pricing estimate generated by algorithms to assess the feasibility within the project of these tracks.
If you want to learn more, schedule a demo meeting with me.
Needless to say. We are over the moon!
Getting to this point hasn't been easy, to say the least, and apparently, 90% of start-ups fail before even getting to this point. But with the help of the Innovation Fund North Holland and a select group of informals consisting of agency owners, music people and film producers, we now have a financial foundation of what we believe will become the future of music licensing for an ever-growing amount of content.
3. How To With John Wilson
A Quirky Guide to NYC's Hidden Secrets
I recently discovered the delightful world of "How To With John Wilson," a docu-comedy gem on HBO. This unique and surprisingly poignant show takes us on a gonzo-ey journey through the streets of New York, led by the anxious yet endearing documentary filmmaker John Wilson.
In each episode, John explores the lives of his fellow New Yorkers while offering everyday advice on seemingly simple and random topics, from "How To Split A Check" and "How To Put Up Scaffolding" to "How To Invest in Real Estate." The show's running joke is its "how to" angle, as each episode veers off into loosely connected topics, leaving viewers unsure of how they got there. However, the common thread is Wilson's humor and his neuroses and experiences, which are subtly intertwined.
HBO recently started airing this series's third and final season, beginning with an episode titled "How to Find a Public Restroom." The trailer for season three is below; full episodes can be found here and (questionably) here, and a behind-the-scenes and interview on the man's modus operandi here.
Enjoy!
4. VanMoof's Audio Spectrum
The Unintended Impact of Sound Branding
The hottest business news in Amsterdam last month was that bicycle manufacturer VanMoof went belly up.
Full disclosure: I own a VanMoof bike. I got it as a gift from them a few years back because I asked for one charmingly, and they surprisingly said yes. I have nothing bad to say about them; I still have that bike, it is sturdy, and its integrated lock, almost six years later, prevented that bike from being stolen.
However, in the last few years, the company started releasing e-bikes so exorbitantly expensive that they have become the symbol of the changing relations in Amsterdam and the transportation of choice for the haves, in a gentrifying city with a growing amount of have-nots.
Businesswise, VanMoof had many problems relating to expensive and often unavailable self-produced parts, likely due to ambitious Venture Capital banking on unrealistic financial expectations.
In a recent column, my fellow Audio Strategist Niels de Jong of the audio branding company Tambr cleverly outlined VanMoof's problems in the, now memefied, audio spectrum of the brand, and how this added to its demise.
He explains that VanMoof has a carefully thought out a recognizable sound design, ranging from an anti-theft alarm to start-up sounds to digital bells. He writes:
"The infamous alarm consists of a three-stage rocket. A friendly warning at the first touch, accompanied by a cozy skull that lights up, a more disturbing sound at an ongoing attempt, and in the third level, your bike turns into a flashing SOS Christmas tree."
These alarms, bells and start-up sounds are too sharply tuned. The slightest rustle on the frame has the bicycle "bite back" so that the brand actively claims a place in the public space, similar to how gentrification uninvitedly seizes an ordinary working-class neighborhood. This way, the alarm sound, also triggers a range of associations with an inaccessible housing market, a city becoming increasingly expensive and developing into a uniform cultural blob. Niels continues:
"The alarm is also intrinsically annoying because it is a non-linear sound. Sounds are classified as non-linear when they suddenly become loud and unpredictable. That's precisely what happens when mammals scream in distress."
Our brain has a natural aversion to this and places this sound directly in a negative corner. Playing with this type of sound design is a proven tool in the cinema, but it simply comes across as unpleasant in the public space.
All this might not have been why VanMoof went bankrupt, but this sure won't have helped and, ironically, are a great example of the power of sound in a branding context… especially when you get it wrong!
Full article here, in Dutch, but ChatGPT is your friend.
Thanks for reading.
As always.
Be kind, be sweet and enjoy your holiday!
Marcel