Behind the scenes: scoring a national campaign for Boska
Daan Koekelkoren started Studio ZK in Amsterdam in 2016. He's a producer, and he's been making audio identities for brands, NGOs and cultural institutions ever since.
Boska makes the kind of kitchen tools that end up being the one cheese knife everybody grabs first. Practical, well made, and a bit proud of it. When their ad was about to run on national TV for several weeks, the brief was easy to say and a lot harder to pull off: make it feel as warm and confident as the product.
Starting with the brand, not the brief
Before we wrote a single note, we looked at what Boska already does well visually. Clean, tactile, no fuss. That ruled out anything too slick or "corporate" straight away. So we went warmer and more handmade: real instruments played by real people, and nothing that sounded like it came out of a laptop.
Production
The music for the spot was all ours, from writing to recording and arranging, and I timed it to the edit down to the frame so each accent hits a cut or a product shot rather than just tagging along underneath.
Post production, mixing, and mastering
Campaign audio has a different technical bar than social content. There are broadcast loudness rules, the mix has to work on all kinds of TV speakers, and it has to hold its own next to whatever ad plays before and after. We did the audio post production, mixing and mastering in house, so the final spot went out broadcast ready and nobody got a nasty surprise at the technical check.
What does a TV campaign demand technically?
This is the part that works differently for a national broadcast than for social content, and where most surprises come from.
Dutch broadcasters work to the EBU R128 standard: the average level of a spot has to land at −23 LUFS, with peaks staying below −1 dBTP. And that's not a friendly suggestion, it's a requirement. Mix it too loud and the broadcaster turns it down automatically, at which point it doesn't sound louder at all. It sounds flatter than the ad before it.
What that means in practice is that the punch has to come from the mix and not from the volume knob, because a spot that relies on loudness loses every bit of it the second it gets normalised. A spot that relies on contrast (say, a quiet moment right before the product shot) keeps it.
How do you write music to an edit?
Not by laying a track underneath and hoping it lands. The order we follow:
- First, watch the edit with the sound off. Write down on which second each cut falls and where the product shot is. Those don't move, so everything else hangs off them.
- Pick the tempo from those points. If the cuts fall every 1.7 seconds, there is a tempo that lands on them. Then nothing has to be stretched later.
- Write towards the ending. On a thirty-second spot the brand logo sits on the last two. Everything before it works towards that moment.
- Deliver multiple lengths at once. Thirty, twenty, ten and six seconds. If you leave them for later, someone ends up trimming in a place where you really can't trim.
That last one is basically the difference between music that fits the edit and music that just sits under it.
How does that differ from a social cutdown?
| National TV | Social | |
|---|---|---|
| Level | −23 LUFS, peaks below −1 dBTP | Typically −14 LUFS, varies per platform |
| Listening situation | TV speaker, room, at a distance | Phone speaker or earbuds, close up |
| Sound on? | Almost always | Often not; the edit has to work muted too |
| Length | 20 or 30 seconds, fixed | 6 to 15 seconds, variable |
| Where attention falls | Build towards the end | The first second, or people scroll past |
The same music, two different mixes. A TV mix put on social unchanged sounds thin and too quiet there. The other way round, a social mix on TV sounds squashed.
What actually gets delivered on a campaign like this?
Not one file. A national spot usually ships about ten: the main mix at the length that airs, the same mix in the shorter cutdowns, a version without voice-over in case the script changes later, the separate music stems for future use, and a broadcast master that meets the station’s delivery spec.
That version without voice-over looks like overkill, but you always end up needing it. Campaigns get extended, scripts get rewritten, and if you've already got the instrumental you don't have to come back to the studio for it.
When do you bring a studio in for this?
Not at the mix. That's how it usually goes, and it's also the most expensive way to do it.
Once the edit is locked and the music still has to go under it, every musical choice turns into a repair job. The tempo has to fit cuts that are already there, and the build-up has to land on a product shot that's already in place. Can it be done? Sure, we do it all the time. But you almost always end up with a compromise.
The cheapest way is to get us in at the first rough cut. Then a cut can still move half a second to land on the music, instead of the other way round. Costs nobody any extra time, and you can hear the difference.
So in practice, send us a rough cut as soon as you have one, even if nothing's final yet. Usually we can tell you within a day whether the tempo's going to work.
What we take from this
The lesson that keeps showing up on projects like this: the brief is rarely "make it sound good", it's "make it sound like this specific brand, in this specific context, would sound." Getting that second part right is most of the work.
Read the full Boska case study for the complete brief to broadcast story, or explore our music for advertising service if you've got a campaign that needs the same treatment.
Planning a spot yourself? Start with what music for an ad costs, the briefing template and the delivery specs for TV, radio and online.