LIA Report: Song Zu’s Ramesh Sathiah delivers the best of the Music and Sound category 2015

Song Zu Sydney composer and creative director Ramesh Sathiah sat on the Music & Sound jury this year in Las Vegas for LIA 2015. Here’s his report.

Once again I was privileged to be asked to judge at the 2015 LIA Awards for Music and Sound. There are many aspects about being involved in judging that I love. Firstly, getting to meet and hang with such a diverse and interesting group of jurors with a wide range of skills and experience from within the music and advertising world.

Rani Vaz, SVP/Director Music BBDO New York, was our jury president, an incredibly accomplished woman who has worked on some of biggest campaigns in the USA.

I believe LIA have become one of the best international award shows for Music and Sound. It has the categories and definitions just right. It covers all the main aspects of Music and Sound in Advertising and they are clearly defined. I also believe having a specialized music and sound jury that are present in a room (not online) and the three part judging process (in or out, scoring and finally statue discussion) is extremely thorough.

The definitions were something we discussed in detail last year, as we were privileged to have juror Rich Meitin who is a professor of music helping drive the process of really tightening the definitions. So this year we saw the pay off as we saw work put into the right categories. This year I believe the the overall standard of work was outstanding. The first two days more focused as we were not dealing with trying to re-sort entries into their correct categories, and the final day or statue discussions were much more difficult and contentious as we had so much great work.

So what makes something a winner? It of course needs to be exceptional, as we are paid to do great work – to be worthy of a winner it needs to be beyond this. Jury president Rani brought forward the idea of the work being ‘brave’ which was something we used and an anchor for judgement.

We also needed to remember we were judging a ‘craft’ category. There was some discussion about how the whole concept is working together. The way the overall messaging and integration with the concept definitely has bearing as we are not judging music and sound in isolation here, but on the other hand, it’s a different category to people judging the whole concept. This was a balancing act.

A stand out category this year was Sound Design and there was a high degree of creativity and skill shown.

One campaign that was the perfect intersection of craft and concept was –

Honda Civic Type R – “The Other Side“

This concept of showing two sides of the car is portrayed brilliantly with a large amount of non-literal sounds marrying with the more traditional. I love how you don’t know exactly what is music and what are sound fx and the use of tonal elements as atmos is brilliant. This is the definition of ‘Sound Design’ for me.

Facebook – “Factory“

This spot was very contentious in the jury room as it was entered into both Original Music and Sound Design. It was my feeling, as well as others, that it was a very creative, unusual and extremely detailed piece of work. It included both music and sound design elements, again with the line between them being blurred.

In the end it was awarded for both.

Onto Music ‘Original Song’ and absolute standout for me was –

Loctite – “Positive Feelings 12 – Dance Mix“

There is so much to love about this. It’s brave, it’s funny, it has top notch musical chops/taste, and it’s weird!

As one of my fellow jury members said ”Next time I am buying glue, I am buying Loctite!”. This is an example of extended duration branded content that really entertains.

There were some other excellent spots that used long form songs extremely well. Musicality is back, genres were diverse ie not all well-trodden hipster tracks. Some spots used popular music styles that might not seem typically  ‘ad-cool’ but used them so well that they would connect with the mainstream consumer musical tastes.

McDonald’s – “Popov the Clown“

Also in Original Song, this beautiful emotive piece from McDonald’s had everything you would want. The vocalist selection and performance is evocative and mesmerizing, the lyrics tell the story, riding the line between literal and metaphoric, and the quality of the arrangement and recording is absolutely first class.

In Music Original ‘Underscore’

Mumbai Mirror – “I Am Mumbai 2014“

A very powerful piece from India, was an outstanding piece of communication overall, but also a very deft, intense and tasteful piece of scoring that absolutely hit the mark for me. Amazing space, seething build and excellent pay off. Fantastic scoring.

Another great spot with an excellent score was:

Pepto-Bismol – “The Boy Raised by Goats“

Again an extended piece of content that keep us engaged all the way. It was an offbeat but warm and charming story that would have been a real challenge to score. This is an example of both skill and taste, the tone is bang on and the evolving mood of the story is handled with a delicate understated touch that is harder to do well that it might seem.

Now onto use of Licenced Music:

Vorwerk Kobold VR 200 – “Vacuum Love“

This category can be a tricky one to judge. The music choice really needs to elevate the idea, but it can’t be doing all the heavy lifting either. For example it can’t just feel like they have made and alternative music video with a logo on the end. This spot for Vorwerk didn’t win the highest award in the category but it was my favorite. I loved the spot. It’s entertaining, heartwarming, funny and the music is totally integral.

Music Adaptation – Song

Qantas Airways – “Feels Like Home“

Lastly I would like to mention a job I was involved in (of course abstaining from voting). The reason I am giving this a shout out is it’s an emotional win for all involved as it was the last campaign completed by a legend in our industry, Neil Lawrence, who passed away suddenly this year. This idea and song choice was driven by his insight, passion and intuition and it warms my heart it was appreciated by the jury. This one is for Neil.

One interesting discussion we had was about how to deal with work that was not clearly or identifiably advertising/marketing related. Fo
r example this year there was an  inventive sound design piece that was part of an experimental short film as well as an  impressive score to a 4D theme park ride. Its very hard to judge this work against TV/Online commercials, or normally branded content for number of reasons. As LIA is no longer exclusively an ‘advertising award” (Advertising has been removed from the title), and it included non advertising categories like ‘Music Video’, it was decided that next year a new music category called ‘Experiential’ will be included to cover these less traditional/non advertising pieces.

So to wrap up: There were many other outstanding pieces of work this year and I encourage people to have a look at all the winners, as I mentioned the standard was very high and I was really pleased to see an extremely diverse range of genres being used. Over the last fews years some musical homogenization was going on, but it now it seems musical colour and diversity is back with a strong rally in the category of sound design. Congratulations to the all the winners and finalists and thank you to my fellow jury members and LIA – it was a blast.