37 | Building beyond social
and the advantage in a coherent audio strategy.
Look, the sun didn’t break out at the beginning of Gilles Peterson’s set during Not a Playbook’s launch at a newsstand in London a couple of weeks ago. But in my mind it sure did.
As the all-world music curator laid down danceable track after danceable track (most of which I couldn’t Shazaam quick enough), a group of our London friends and colleagues, plus some Central Saint Martens students emerging from their final presentation shows, gathered. Some would later participate in the life drawing class organized by Daisy Collingridge, sketching with pen and paper as she posed on a small carpet in one of her fantastical “suits” made of different flesh-colored fabrics. Actor, podcaster, and Stone Island brand ambassador Russell Tovey joined later to talk about trust between brands and their artistic collaborators. DJ Cosmic Sofie laid down tracks later.
I’m not even within shouting distance of the 1960s, but dammit if it didn’t feel like A HAPPENING. Creatives and founders and artists mixed and mingled, drinking unnecessarily strong canned cocktails for several hours as the cold sun faded. Among them, a high energy Frenchman in a fashionably cocked baseball hat, who stood behind a tripod, filming the newsstand.
His newsstand, actually. Gautier Robial’s News & Coffee is now in its fifth year. He launched it in Barcelona, seeing an opportunity to take over a small stand his neighborhood and inject it with a bit of the branding savvy he’d learned at stops with Diesel and Wrangler. His partner is a master curator of magazines and speciality books, and he worked to get the coffee roasting right.
From there, it’s grown: newsstands in five European cities, mobile pop-ups at design and photography fairs, and the realization that the “community” brands seek in real life looks strikingly like the newsstands he’s been carefully curating all these years.
Above is a post showing the pop-up he did with city of St. Moritz. The video, though, was another element. On News & Coffee’s web site, you can watch clips from DJ sets conducted at their other newsstands, from Marseilles to London to Barcelona, and listen to a steady stream of hip-hop sets put together.
For Gautier, the music sets are far more than social fodder.
They add to News & Coffee’s curatorial credentials
They serve as a pillar on which to build a bigger digital community
and, most importantly,
they bring lovely vibes to the newsstands.
Brands are desperate to attract their audience to places they own, not rent.
Instagram and TikTok can chew up big budgets. YouTube offers a better deal (and is increasingly more ubiquitous) but requires higher production value and dedicated experts (OR ARE YOU JUST GOING TO DESIGN THOSE THUMBNAILS YOURSELF?). Plus, it’s still Google’s apartment building.
Home pages with words and images offer SEO advantages, but don’t have the same magnetic pull and repeat visits. And … well ... have I argued myself into a corner here?
No, wait. Audio, yes. Not perfect, of course. Podcast discovery remains a real challenge and everyone is turning into a Bro with a Shure Mic.
But a coherent audio strategy can work well, offering a brand storytelling touchpoint, and community-building potential at a smaller investment than the other mediums. It enables brands to build unique networks of collaborators, and bring people together, because audio is the kind of content offering that people will show up to see live and in person. Below, a couple of examples.
FFern ⛸️ Some time this past winter, I got served up an Instagram ad of figure skaters cutting looping tracks into a wintery pond. It was mesmerizing. I bookmarked it. It’s only later I found out that the ad belonged to a small company based in Somerset, England, that makes one-off perfumes on a seasonal cadence. Successfully, as well, it seems, as Ffern has sold out of every batch of organic perfume since it launched in Winter 2019. The brand’s visual identity is dreamy and esoteric, like a still life painting coming to life. And its setting seems rooted in a lilac and wooded mood board that recalls the French and English countryside. But it’s the sonic identity that sets them apart. Ffern creates not one, but two podcasts that explore the natural environment, craftsmanship, astrology, and the interconnectedness of life itself. “Found Sound” follows sound artist Alice Boyd as she travels around meeting people working in heritage crafts and tending to ancient landscapes to create “a sonic scrapbook of their practice.” In addition, Ffern offers “As the Season Turns”, an ASMR delight narrated by the storybook voice of Lia Leendertez, author of the Seasonal Almanac. The series explores the change in the flora and fauna of the U.K. and Ireland each month, and features sotto voce poetry, ancient English hymns, and all the solstice news you ever needed. It’s the sonic equivalent of a freshly quilted blanket and a cup of tea. There is absolutely nothing in this storytelling strategy that was the result of a consumer insights study. Nor data that showed the purchase drivers of small-batch organic perfume could be activated by esoteric podcasts about blooming flowers and English folk art. Rather this is Ffern providing the soundtrack to an intricately woven brand universe. It enables them to offer another touchpoint to their community as they wait patiently on the waitlist (of course Ffern calls it a “ledger”) for the next batch to drop. The content, even the cadence, of the episode releases, emphasize the slow, connected ethos of a brand whose goal it is to “connect our wearers to nature through perfume”.
Monocle Radio 🎙️ The brand born in London’s Marylebone can feel like Tokyo. Not just because of founder Tyler Brûlé’s obvious fascination with the city and culture, but in the retro futurism of its media strategy. When he launched Monocle Magazine on February 15, 2007, the digital revolution was just beginning but the doomsday alarms for print were already sounding. Tyler added to the offering a few years later, not with a dynamic Parallax enabled web site, or a social media storytelling operation, but a 24-hour-a-day radio station. This was seven years after The Guardian printed the word “podcast” for the first time (2004), and a solid decade before everyone beginning spinning off AM Radio-like shows from their kitchen table. And it was their only gesture to the frantic digitalization that was consuming their peers and competitors. They had the last laugh of course, their raft of Monocle branded content verticals (from Entrepreneurs to the excellent Culture Show by friend-of-the-letter Rob Bound) building audience and working out the kinks a solid decade before most brands (and I consider Monocle a brand) started asking their social people if they knew how to edit in Garage Band. Almost 15 years on, audio is as an important pillar for Monocle as the magazine, and their expanding retail footprint. I caught up with long-time editor-in-chief Andrew Tuck a month ago in London, and he talked about their recent pop-up at a conference in Dubai. While CNN and other broadcasters beckoned guests to the top of a high-rise, Monocle Radio had its mics set up near its cafe on the ground level, putting their brand front and center and giving everyone an idea of the quality of guests that were cycling through. A Paris Air Show pop-up is incoming soon. But the most beautiful expression of the audio strategy came two months ago, with the opening of their Paris cafe in the 2nd arrondissement. Tucked away behind the restaurant portion (a new venture for the brand, by the way), is an area for Monocle correspondents to pick up headsets and be connected directly to the radio studio in London. From there, they file reports and discuss topics on air, presumably before heading back into the restaurant for a glass or two of wine.
Your brand examples are always so enticing. I think Monocle’s Entrepreneurs podcast was one of the first I subscribed to!