Pro audio advertising hasn’t exactly lived at the cutting edge over the last half century but it has been evolving. When you look back at ads in the trade publications from the 1970s and earlier (like everything else, they’re up there online), you’ll see pretty staid graphics and copy, mostly nerdy product shots and verbiage that consisted mainly of dry data taken directly from spec sheets, such as the 1952 RCA BA-6A vari-mu compressor ad shown in Fig. 1. No CLIO Awards for this bunch.
And quite honestly, that’s all that was required, for the most part. It was a relatively conservative culture on the tech side, even as the rock bands ran rampant in studios and on stage. It was the very beginnings of gear porn, with sheet-metal form factors that laid the foundations for tech fetishes to come. Sepia-toned equipment shots evoked naughty black and white 1940’s pin-up pictures and playing cards. It was all about the box back then, and you might go pages without seeing a person in the picture. A mid-1980’s dbx ad (“The World’s Greatest Noise Gate/Expander”) has a disembodied Addams Family Thing-like hand approaching it from the side pulling one of the modules out (Fig. 2). A full-page Harrison console ad from the same year in the late R/EP magazine has no humans and offers the puny pun “Worth Its Wait In Gold,” with the homonym underlined to make sure you “got” the gag. This was pro audio’s adolescence and the language reflected that.
Then, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the specs started to disappear. In their place came more imaginative graphics and increasingly clever copy that presented products that now were developing catchy names instead of alphanumerical monikers. It was a slow transition, but a clearly evident one: as the number of product categories proliferated in the digital era — who besides Ray Kurzweil or Bob Moog needed a DAC or a hard drive in 1975? — and the number of products within them grew exponentially, it became increasingly necessary to differentiate products and brands through advertising.
Getting Racier
The Mad Men of pro audio stepped up. Graphics began to convey a sense of motion and kinetic effect, especially in ads for live sound products, where the setting for the product shots moved from the test bench to the stage itself. Then sex reared its really, really attractive head. Shots of chick singers with handheld microphones began to get increasingly provocative and the atmosphere became progressively more libidinous. Next came a kind of post-modern streak, reflected nicely by the subscription renewal ads for this magazine that threatened to kill the mixer if you didn’t renew. (It borrowed the idea from a National Lampoon cover from the 1980s promising that if you bought the issue, they would refrain from shooting the puppy.)
Since then, we’ve seen pro audio advertising become much more creative, with more risk-taking, more self-awareness, and lots more irony — all necessary ingredients for adapting the business for a highly media-intense world, one where the overall brand often transcends the individual products. That’s especially important as pro audio increasingly crosses the line into the consumer domain, where ads from brands we know assert that you can make professional recordings on your iPhone, or that your iPad can replace an entire band on stage and live-mix it, too.
Enter The Germans
So when I first saw the advertisement for Berlin-based tour-sound and event production company Black Box Music (BBM) in the June, 2014 issue of this magazine, with its ear-shaped urinal and the caption “If it sounds like piss…” (See Fig. 3.) I wondered if we had turned the next evolutionary corner. The full-page, full-bleed ad was shocking and comical at the same time, a pro audio iteration of the notorious 1913 New York Armory art show that introduced the modernists like Picasso and Munch to an America that still thought the Dutch masters were edgy.
The company, on its second high-profile U.S. tour, this year supporting Cher on the road (they passed through in 2012, the year of the company’s 20th anniversary, with Rammstein), was letting us know they were here. Yet they also helped push the technical side of the industry further down the brand-awareness road, and that’s good. Because as we get deeper into a technical environment where forward progress is measured in the decimals of software versions instead of new physical shapes, where the algorithms change but their containers rarely do, the perceptual packaging of a product or a brand is the last frontier left for them to make radical changes.
BBM likes to come across rough, from the skull-and-crossed-mics logo to the all-black ensembles the crew wears. It’s a look that harkens back to the heyday of pro audio dealer Mercenary Audio, when owner Fletcher, a one-named, one-man Ken Kesey/Merry Pranksters gang, committed subversive acts of guerrilla marketing that made heads snap. It’s a vibe that’s infusing the culture beyond pro audio. Take Vice Media, the Brooklyn-based rabble-rousing video news company that sends its reporters into places like North Korea and Afghanistan with Go Pro cameras and little else, and who come back with compelling stories that you can’t get on CNN or Fox News. That kind of brass has gotten them over a half-billon dollars in investment just this year.
It’s not enough to be simply be a brand anymore. Cutting through the information clutter these days requires sharper strategies and a 24/7-360 mentality. Yet somehow, while mounting a media and mindshare assault, companies still have to develop new products and platforms. If it’s not easy being green, it’s even harder to be successful in a pro audio business that’s undergoing enormous change. But the evolution of pro audio advertising suggests that the same creativity that these companies and products have all along supported on stage and on tour is up to the task. It took the business a while to recognize the need for proactive advertising and marketing, but once it did, the results have been creative and effective. And they make for a good read.
