Song Zu’s Ramesh Sathiah, president of the LIA Music and Sound jury: Why the jingle is back
Ramesh Sathiah of Song Zu Sydney wraps up his week as Jury President for the London International Awards Music and Sound categories, judged last week in Las Vegas.
So I survived a week of Vegas LIA judging… five days of never seeing the sky, trapped in a giant upmarket shopping mall, recycled air, endless buffets, Steve Wynn’s dulcet tones speaking to me on loop on the information channel, free pour drinks and two hundred and forty plus music and sound entries to judge… it really was a blur and it was awesome.
The location really sets the tone. Wynn Encore Las Vegas is a behemoth that never ends… pools, golf clubs, massive night clubs with superstar DJ’s, the lake of dreams… it has it all, with a glowing red hue as far as the eye can see. The music and sound jury was made up of three composers, a New York agency music producer, a New York based music company EP and a UK based Sound Designer.
There were definitely a diverse range of opinions here, not an easy jury to impress and we set ourselves the criteria of really looking to award work that exceeded what is expected of top professionals. We are not awarding people for doing their job well… that’s what they get paid for. Did the soundtrack exceed the brief and make the spot better? Could we not imagine it being done any better? How did the craft and the idea interact?
Day one was the hardest, we had to listen to each spot and mark it ‘in or out’. There was definitely quite a bit of ‘chaff’ here and we had to do a fair bit of sorting of categories. It’s amazing how many tracks were entered into ‘song’ that had no singing or vocals. Shazam and Google helped us figure out when licensed tracks were being entered as original and It was also helpful to find the original versions of tracks to judge real arrangements, not just re-records or edits.
Day two was a breeze as we had reduced the original list by 60 per cent and had to judge the remainder with a score of 1 to 10. We agreed a formula for what each score was worth in regards to statues. This is still a silent judging session so there was no real discussion at this stage.
Day three is when the fun really begins with statue discussions. As expected with a group of creatives there were some fairly strong differences of opinion, but to be fair most of our statue judgements were usually within one of two bands of each other. You can’t please everyone with music or sound and that was apparent here. Original song was a strong category and there were some very strong arrangements. There was also some excellent sound design with some difficult briefs handled deftly. We had some good discussions about separating the idea from the craft, it’s hard not to judge a piece of music higher if you love the spot, but is that always a bad thing?
There were one or two judgements that I know will be controversial, one was for a spot that has done extremely well this year and that might have been assumed to be a shoo in for a black LIA.
I was surprised to realise that my fellow jury members had never heard of the spot or knew the back story regarding its viral reach etc. I made the judgement as the chair of the discussions that I was not going to steer the jury’s decision based on my knowledge of the spot and it’s success. Our job is to objectively judge this entry as a stand alone piece of craft and that is what happened. The results may surprise some.
A few trends I noticed from this years entries.
1. The jingle is back… some of the most awarded work is essentially a great jingle. A catchy tune written for a brand… sometimes disguised well in layers of quirk and cool.
2. The great folk scare may soon be over. There was less ukulele and glockenspiel than might have been expected.
3. Dubstep and EDM is not represented in advertising as much as it is out in the mainstream world. I was thinking with the advent of Skrillex and some new cutting edge styles we would hear more of it… but there was very little. A couple of slamming tracks cut through quite well though.
4. The brief of making sound tracks out of the sound of the product keeps coming round year after year. Banging cans, blowing bottles, car engines playing melodies, blenders playing Beethoven’s 5th… the list goes on.
I would like thank Barbara Levy and the LIA team who do an amazing job. The LIA ‘Creative Conversations’ was also excellent and I met some awesome young creatives that I am sure we will be hearing more from.