Most ads build. The music swells, the drums kick in, and the logo lands right on the big moment, and to be honest that formula works more often than not. For Museumkaart, in the middle of the pandemic, it would have been exactly the wrong thing to do.
An awkward brief
The campaign was asking people to renew their museum card at a time when every museum in the country was shut, so in plain terms you're asking someone to pay for something they can't use yet. That's a strange thing to put music under, if you think about it. Go too cheerful and it comes across as tone deaf, as if nobody noticed what was happening outside. Go too sad and it starts to sound like a farewell, and saying goodbye was the very last thing the museums wanted.
What we left out
The direction that ended up working sat somewhere between those two: warm, but with room in it. We kept the arrangements small and used acoustic instruments where you can actually hear fingers on the strings, because it needed a human hand in there, and we deliberately kept the tempo slower than you'd expect from an ad.
What we left out probably mattered more than what we put in, though. There's no build-up to a climax and no drums pushing the message forward, and the spot actually finishes quieter than it begins. I'll admit that felt a bit risky at the time (ads aren't really supposed to fade away) but this was an invitation rather than a sales pitch, and the music had to feel like one.
What happened
In the end 85,000 cardholders turned their unused card time into more than €1 million for over 400 museums. The audio was only one piece of that campaign, obviously. Still, I'm fairly convinced a big rousing score would have turned the invitation into pressure.
The takeaway
If your campaign is asking people for something delicate (money, trust, a bit of patience) it's worth stopping to ask whether the music should be pushing at all. Quiet is a choice as well, and quite often the braver one.