A Sonic Window of Opportunity

The limited attention spans of online audiences are well-documented. Whilst there’s only so much control a brand can have over how long their audience sticks around, what brands can do better is to own the time they do have.

Online/digital advertising platforms are time-critical for brand attention. YouTube’s ad-skip function creates a 5-second window of opportunity to capture attention and make an impression, and viewing behaviours for Instagram Reels indicate brands have a matter of seconds to hook the viewer.

Research has shown that we – as humans – react to sound up to four times faster than visuals. It’s one of the primal instinctive abilities that we’ve kept hold of. This means sound taps into the subconscious – essentially, your body has started responding to the sound before you’ve had time to consciously register what you’ve heard. Another study found ads that included sonic brand cues were on average eight times more likely to be high performing on branded attention than ads relying solely on visual assets, but that less than 10% of the 2,000+ ads tested featured brand audio assets.

The combination of these two findings points to a hypothesis that for brands advertising across these fast-paced channels, sound is one of the most powerful (and underused) tools available. And one way to harness it is through a short, impactful standalone brand asset: a dynamic logo. The gaming sector is a great reference point for this: where historically most brands have placed their dynamic logo (sonic + motion, i.e. Netflix) at the end of ads and content, every official game trailer released by PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo opens with the brand’s dynamic logo sitting upfront, much like the 20th Century Fox ident opens a film.

Irrespective of whether the trailer’s seen as an ad or viewed organically, the brand is sonically and visually asserted within that crucial 5-second window. In that moment, as it catches the eye and the ear, the dynamic logo leaves an imprint that builds brand awareness and recognition, and serves as a hallmark of ownership and authenticity, all before the viewer is either plunged into the world of ‘the product’ – in this case, the game itself – or given the opportunity to skip on to the next. I don’t know which of them moved first, but the rest have followed suit presumably seeing the importance of asserting their brand and laying claim to their games as a non-negotiable, necessary play.

Of ‘the big three’, I’ve always liked the simplicity and tactility of the Nintendo Switch dynamic logo - I think it’s distinctive, of the brand, and instantly recognisable. It’s clever in that it’s derived directly from the product experience, yet its effectiveness doesn’t rely on you having experienced the Switch yourself.

Click here to hear the Nintendo Switch dynamic logo.

The sonic logo mirrors the actual acoustic ‘click’ of the controller slotting into the console screen in a way that simultaneously cues preciseness (tech) and human influence (finger clicks). The motion counterpart mimics a similar movement: two controllers coming together with a soft (playful) bounce. This nods both to the Switch’s power-up moment signalling play is about to begin, and also to its ‘local’ in-the-same-room multiplayer features - a USP of sorts carved out against the backdrop of PlayStation and Xbox focussing on single player and online play. I’d speculate too that the sonic logo intentionally sounds like multiple (i.e. two) simultaneous clicks, in order to echo this functionality. Overall, a strong encapsulation of the brand and its product.

But back to the bigger picture, any brand with a presence in digital advertising can take a leaf out of the gaming brand book.

The overarching sentiment here is that it’s in the way you tell ‘em. Creating the right asset for the job is one (important) thing, but giving it the right platform and placement to perform is equally important. The big three in gaming have tooled up to adopt a new behaviour that delivers both; one that contributes to maximising impact across their most valuable channels.

As the channels and formats within the advertising landscape continue to grow and evolve, brands must interrogate whether they have the right assets to thrive across them, and actively leveraging audio as a pillar of the brand ecosystem should factor high on the agenda.