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Creative Director’s Choice: Torin Geller of One Thousand Birds on Amazon Music’s animated voices

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By Kyle O'Brien, Creative Works Editor

February 6, 2020 | 3 min read

Creative Director’s Choice gives creative directors a chance to highlight the best work and spotlight campaigns that are making a difference.

Taylor Swift for Amazon Music

Taylor Swift is animated for Amazon Music

This week, Torin Geller, lead sound and interactive designer at One Thousand Birds, explains why sound and voice are important in marketing, as it relates to Amazon Music's 'A Voice is All You Need' ongoing campaign.

Torin Geller

Sound is often overlooked in the media industries. Film and online content is primarily visual after all, and that's especially true as more and more people consume media on their smartphones, which lack high quality audio playback. Additionally, there is no regulation of audio levels on the internet, leading many online ads to sound too loud and unpleasant.

That's what makes Amazon Music's ‘A Voice Is All You Need’ campaign by Wieden+Kennedy that much more refreshing. The ads highlight the raw talent of the featured musicians by using only the vocals from well known songs, like Somebody To Love by Queen or I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston. Using iconic music is one thing, but using just the vocal track gives viewers a new perspective on a classic song, and showcases just how talented these singers are. It's an ad you undoubtably want to listen to, even sing along with (I know I did).

Coupled with the bright, trippy mouth animations and pleasing, subtle sound design, the piece further highlights the voice without distracting from it, all the while building momentum to the Alexa tie in. A voice really is all you need to make beautiful music, be it by singing like Freddy Mercury or asking Alexa to play a song via voice control. Finally, the full song comes in to close out the spot, which is both satisfying in its conclusion and leaves you wanting to hear more. It's a wonderfully simple ad that elegantly drives home its point while creating something that sounds, and looks, beautiful.

Torin Geller is lead sound and interactive designer at sound and creative tech studio One Thousand Birds and is based in Brooklyn.

See the work by clicking on the Creative Works box below.

To see the latest creative ads and campaigns, visit The Drum’s Creative Works section. If you or your creative director would like to be featured in our Creative Director’s Choice, please contact Creative Works editor Kyle O’Brien.

Amazon Music: advert-body-2 by Wieden+Kennedy

By Amazon Music

Overall Rating 4/5

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