What do they do all day? BBH London’s Daniel Olaifa on the role of a music supervisor
As part of our new series demystifying the many job titles that make up adland, Daniel Olaifa – who splits his time between a gig as a junior music supervisor at BBH London and as a touring sax, guitar and bass player – explains how he brings the right music to an ad.
Daniel Olaifa explains the role of a music supervisor / BBH London
You can’t see it, but music impacts how we interpret a thing. It affects our emotions; music can change everything about something. A happy song can make a visual happier and a sad song can make a visual sadder, no matter what the picture is. A good song can make or break the work.
I’ve been a music supervisor for just over two years now. I’m still relatively new to it. I didn’t train for the job; I actually have a background in neuroscience. Growing up, music supervision wasn’t something I knew about. But as a musician, I’d done a few things around sound design. That translated into a mentorship and from there I started working in ‘sync’ at Concord [the music publishing company]. And then I landed my first role here at BBH. I’ve just been able to translate the skills that are necessary and make it work.
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The core thing that I do is music curation. I’m here to help clients and creatives with what they’re looking for and give them some options. Sometimes that’s with commercial music; sometimes that’s a composition. Sometimes it’s a mixture of both.
I’ll present them with some options, create a playlist for them and from there help choose the songs and work with composers. And there’s the less creative side: researching and finding out who owns what for media licensing.
Usually, we’d work directly with a producer since they’ll coordinate everything. We’ll also work with licensing – we have our own in-house licensing person (Helen, she’s amazing) and with business affairs so that different options of an ad can be done. And, of course, we work with creatives.
We’ll have one or two meetings with them per project. For example, they might want an indie track. We’ll ask them questions such as whether they want guitars to be more present, whether they want heavier drums, about the tempo: everything and anything to help them to get the final image they have in their minds.
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It’s cool working here. Sometimes we do showcases. Last year we had Izzy Bizu, Yazmin Lacey and Dylan Fraser come through. They perform at the agency for 20 minutes or so. Sometimes that’s done through labels and sometimes it’s unsigned talent via the Unsigned Union.
Sometimes, I get directly involved in the music – last year, I ended up doing some vocal direction and warmed up with some singers on set – but mostly, the music I do is outside of BBH.
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I just got back from touring with Biig Piig. We did around 12 days, six shows. We went to the US – Denver, Chicago, San Francisco. That was amazing. Then back to London, then we drove to Germany before going to Ireland. I really like the balance between being able to go and do music and then come back here. Traveling is crazy. And I feel so fortunate to have the option to do both.
As told to Sam Bradley.