Do Brands Give a @%$£ About Quality Anymore?

Do brands give a @%$£ about quality anymore? I’ve heard so many instances lately where it’s evident that they don’t appear to that I’ve started seriously asking the question. So allow me a moment to vent.  

VOs recorded in what sounds like a cupboard. Ads mixed by the picture editor (who by their own admission don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing – and why would they?) because the brand doesn’t want to spend money doing it properly. Radio ads which consist entirely of audio lifted wholesale from the TV ad... without the context provided by the pictures, the radio version becomes nothing but a noisy, meaningless 30” lump of wasted airtime. One of the worst offenders is a bank FFS.  Can’t they even find an extra £12,000 to make a proper radio version to sit alongside the TV? Well, of course they can. They’re a bank. Ergo, it appears they really don’t care.  

An agency producer asked us, with some embarrassment, if they could spend three days in our large, professionally equipped sound studio, staffed by experts in the middle of Soho for the princely sum of £5000, which was all their client could afford. Turned out the brand in question was a multinational oil company who I can only assume had somehow fallen on hard times. Or perhaps they just didn’t think it was worth shelling out on... we declined BTW.  

There are countless examples I could quote – and I’ve no doubt I’m not alone. We spend thousands of pounds and many hours of our time to ensure everything we do - from the quality of our studios to the training of our staff - is of the highest possible standard. We’ve even developed audio workshops to help clients get the best from their studio sessions...

I’m currently sitting next to our tech team who are at this very moment assessing a very expensive mic pre-amp (the thing that allows our very expensive mics to still sound very expensive when they are mixed via our very expensive desk). And I’ve just heard yet another commercial where the VO is sat under their stairs – brands could actually demand the VO gets on a bus and comes into Soho – as pretty much everyone did pre 2020 – to ensure the quality of the recording. Some do.  

I don’t know why this is – do certain marketing departments understand what a decent commercial should actually sound like? On that subject, can we point out that it’s really not possible to judge the quality of a final mix by sitting on a Zoom call in a café? I know it’s so 2019, but how about actually attending the sessions? Are they all working from home so there’s no one around to monitor their output as carefully as we monitor ours? 

More probably, anyone who has ever had to fill in a procurement tender document will know that once you’ve got past the lines asking for the percentage discounts you won’t find anywhere on those documents that even attempts to quantify quality. Cheap is all that counts. If the number on the bottom of the invoice keeps the finance dept happy, don’t worry about the fact that the ad everyone is hearing is, quite frankly, crap. And, ultimately, they have the money as the £100 lunches our runners collect for them demonstrate. They evidently value quality takeaways more than quality audio...

So, at the moment, it does very much feel like there’s some brands out there that really don’t care about quality. Even though we, and pretty much everyone we work with, from the agencies to the editors, very much do. Rant over – that was actually quite therapeutic...

To end on a positive note, let’s remind ourselves of what caring can actually achieve:

One of my favourite ads we’ve done this year... Swatch:

And probably my favourite ad ever (although we can’t take credit for the sound...) Honda Cog.