Send us twelve months of everything you published that makes a sound. Video ads and social cutdowns, brand films, podcast intros, event openers, the app, the hold tone on your phone line. Do not filter for quality. The forgettable assets carry the finding.
Nobody signs off a logo in the wrong blue. Plenty of marketing teams sign off a video with whatever library track came up first, under deadline, with no brief to check it against. That gap between the care on the visual side and the care on the audio side is most of what an audit of your sonic identity turns up.
Does the sound match the message
We are not scoring the track. We ask whether it belongs to this brand, saying this thing, in this campaign. Good music in the wrong register still reads as somebody else’s.
Made for you, or picked
Library music is a fair choice. A brand that only ever picks has no sound of its own to pick from, and every editor starts again from zero.
Is there a signature at all
Anything at the end that signs the work as yours. Most brands answer no. It is also the fastest thing to fix, so we look for it first.
Two checks anyone can hear
Whether your audio logo and the bed underneath it sit in related keys, and whether the music lands on the bar or gets cut mid phrase because the edit ran out. Both are audible on a laptop speaker, and we hear them in most brand video.
Where the audit leads
The audit answers what your brand sounds like now. The next question, what it should sound like, needs a strategy conversation. Here is the route from one to the other, and you can stop after any step.
1. Audit
You find out what you have: which touchpoints agree with each other, which contradict, and whether a brief sits underneath any of it. Free, and it commits you to nothing.
2. Direction
We agree what your brand should sound like before anyone writes a note. Register, tempo, instrumentation, and what stays off limits. Most of the risk in a sonic identity gets removed here.
3. Identity and guidelines
The sonic logo, the anthem, the UX sounds, and the written document that keeps them consistent once agencies and freelancers brief from it. See what we build.
4. Rollout
We brief your editors, agencies and internal teams so the sound survives contact with everyone who has to use it. This is the step that decides whether it still exists in three years.
The whole picture sits in the sonic branding guide, and we wrote down what it costs as well, so you can price the road ahead before you take the first step on it.
Two ways to run it
Quickscan, free of charge
We collect what you published in the last twelve months, listen to all of it, and write up what we find. You get a report you can send round internally, a session where we walk your team through it, and a list of what to fix first.
Two weeks from the moment you send the links.
Full audit, priced per brand
Everything in the quickscan, plus a benchmark against the brands you compete with for attention, measurement of what a laptop speaker hides, and a look at how your team briefs music in the first place.
It also comes with creative direction: sketches of what one sound for this business could be. We price it per brand, because a company with three videos and a company with three hundred are not the same job.
Any brand can book the quickscan. It works best when there is something to play back, so if you run ads, post video on social, or ship an app that makes a sound, we have material. A business with no advertising and no social output has nothing for us to listen to, and the audit would tell you little you do not already know.
How the audit runs
1. You send the links
Twelve months of assets with audio in them. Collecting takes longer than you expect, and if it costs you a full day, you have more audio touchpoints than you thought. That is worth knowing on its own.
2. We listen
Back to back, in order, without skipping. Three questions per asset and the two technical checks, plus the visual side of the same assets so we can measure the gap.
3. Report
A written account of where the sound holds together, where it falls apart, and whether a clear brief sits underneath the work. Written in solutions, because whoever picked those tracks will be in the room and made a reasonable call under deadline.
4. Session
We walk your team through the findings and answer the question everyone asks: what would we fix first. If you want to carry on to step two, we talk about scope and cost at the end of that call.
The audit, explained
What does the quickscan cost?
Nothing. The collection, the listening, the report and the session are free. Most conversations about sonic branding start with a brand hearing its own assets in a row, so we would rather you hear that first.
What happens after the audit?
We walk you through the findings and stop there if that is where you want to stop. Plenty of brands take the list and fix it themselves. If you want to keep going, the next step is a direction session, and we talk about scope and cost at the end of the walkthrough.
Can we run the audit ourselves?
You can, and we wrote down the method: three hours, no software, the same three questions and the same two technical checks we use. Read the how-to.
What if our sound turns out to be fine?
Then you have that in writing and you have saved yourself a project. We look for a clear brief underneath the work, and plenty of brands have one even when the execution wanders between campaigns.