Getting to Know… Sounds Fun

Sounds Fun is the creative innovation partner to some of the world’s biggest and boldest brands, from Lenovo and Microsoft to The Coca-Cola Company and Coors Light.

Founded in 2023 by industry veterans and rising stars, Sounds Fun focuses on product development, brand platforms and partnerships, cultural programming, and innovative experiences that connect the real world to the digital one, utilising new forms of media and technology across every aspect of the human experience.

Chief executive officer Isabel Muñoz-Cadilla and chief innovation officer Iain S. Thomas spoke to LBB about the company's origins, their dedication to innovation, and standing out in an industry embracing AI.

LBB> Tell us a bit about Sounds Fun – when did you form and why?

Isabel> We started Sounds Fun in 2023 because we loved working together and felt like after years and years in the industry, the four of us, the founding partners, discovered these incredible complementary skill sets in each other.

We always say we only want to hire people we’d rob a bank with and that comes from us and how we work together; we’re a team of specialists with a global network behind us. Each of us brings something we haven’t found anywhere else. I think the trigger for us was this kind of singularity moment in the industry where we saw this huge increase in demand for our unique point of view on culture and technology.

So we started Sounds Fun with this really clear purpose: to create things in culture that could only be made today for the very first time.

LBB> What’s the story behind your name?

Iain> We’d settled on a different name and right before we were about to sign some incredibly important piece of paperwork, we discovered there was another creative studio with the exact same name we’d settled on, so we all started brainstorming new names in the chat in full-on emergency mode.

Someone suggested something and someone else said, ‘sounds fun’ - and we all knew immediately that was it. It felt right as soon as we saw it and it gets us lots of comments which is great, because the name ends up doing a bunch of the work for us in terms of explaining what we do and how we do it - it’s something you say when something makes you curious, when your heart says yes before your brain can catch up.

We wanted a name that was open and human, a nod at the idea that serious innovation should come from a place of empathy and emotion. It also reflects the kind of work we want to do: resonant, culturally charged, and playful at heart - things you can touch, taste and feel, whether they’re in the real world or the digital one or somewhere between the two. If we don’t feel that, we start again.

LBB> Which campaigns epitomise what you do as a company?

Isabel> Make Space - ‘Make Space’ is an ongoing partnership platform from Lenovo Yoga focused on young creatives and giving them the tools and access to incredible mentorship, thought leadership opportunities and experiences to ensure that together, AI can mean more creative opportunities, not less.

We want young people to be actively involved in the conversation around what generative AI means and that’s the spirit of what ‘Make Space’ is - we’re actively bringing them in for important conversations, experiments and more.

We’ve created interactive fashion runways for New York Fashion Week, lab experiences that control and shape the entire vibe of a party through AI - we’ve partnered with Dazed Magazine on this previously and there’s so much more to come that we’re excited to share. We love cultural programming and it’s one of our key strengths so this is a project that’s really close to our hearts.

Coors Light - ‘Obstructed Brews’ with Coors Light was an application we developed to allow anyone with a blocked seat at a baseball stadium to scan the pillar, pole or wall in front of them in exchange for a discount on Coors Light. It reflected the easy-going, chill nature of the brand and this was a simple, fun thing to build, which we did in partnership with Droga5.

Eon Ark - ‘The Eon Ark’ is an experiment in time travel we created with the Future Humans team at the Berggruen Institute. Participants engage in a series of questions about themselves and their identity and then we take those question and answer pairs and use them as little mini-training sets for agents. Those agents are then encoded into glass slides created by our partner Sphotonix - because glass doesn’t biodegrade and can last for thousands, possibly even millions of years. This creates the unique possibility that a version of you, your representative agent, could speak to a human in the far, far distant future. We love this as it represents the kind of civilization-scale thinking we try to bring to things.

LBB> Give us a fun fact about your company!

Iain> We’re fully remote, always have been and always will be, and between us we’ve won several hundred awards, published 14 books, gone viral on TikTok a bunch of times and made about seven children.

LBB> What are your strongest opinions about your industry?

Isabel> Henry Ford famously responded to a question about innovation, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” The entire industry is using AI to build a faster horse. There’s agencies popping up everywhere who seem really, really proud of how few people they employ and how much they’re leaning on AI to do the creative work, which just seems backwards to us. AI’s great for a whole bunch of things and we’re particularly interested in using it for new ways to tell stories and drive experiences, but if you and I and some accountant somewhere all have access to the same tools and the same models, what differentiates us?

LBB> What are you proudest of as a company?

Iain> We all do things outside of work that make us better at our jobs. That and we’re trusted to work on problems that have no brief and often no precedent. Clients come to us when they don’t just need ‘creative’, they need a new lens on what’s possible. And we’re proud to keep that trust by being deeply collaborative with fewer layers, wildly imaginative, and relentlessly committed to making things that no one else can make.

LBB> What are some upcoming projects our readers should keep an eye on?

Isabel> We’re launching the next phase of ‘Make Space’, our cultural programming platform with Lenovo Yoga focused on bringing young people into the conversation around creativity and AI - and that’s going to be incredible. We have one or two massive things planned that we of course absolutely cannot talk about yet.

LBB> Where can we check out Sounds Fun online?

Iain> Follow us on LinkedIn or our website.