Banding Together: The Marriage Of Music and Marketing

Sudeep Gohil is the CEO of Droga5 in Australia, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies. Over the years, the company has worked on campaigns combining the might of Microsoft and Jay-Z, publishing house Hachette and Qantas, and even tapped Sarah Silverman for an innovative Obama 2008 campaign. Last year, the world’s largest talent agency, William Morris Endeavor, bought a 49% stake in the company, furthering their scope. We talked to Gohil about the increasingly-important marriage between music and marketing – and how selling out is no longer a dirty word.

Before you worked in this field you worked both as a DJ and a promoter. How has this informed the way you pair brands and music?

It was the underpinning of everything I’ve done, really. After I left university, I started in the mailroom at an advertising agency, and at the same time I was DJing, putting on gigs and stuff like that. Over the years, when we were doing events, I was being approached by brands to sponsor our events, and they were being advised by agencies in terms of what they should do, and it was always ’put a crappy poster here’ and do all these other lame things, and whilst we took the money at first, we thought it didn’t really have anything to do with the events we were doing. So my business partner and I started to give our advice on what to do.

After ten years of doing events, we had a lot of brands coming to us – whether or not we had an event or not – paying us to give them advice in that space. There is a big difference in the worlds of brand and music: brand people are very analytical, plan things well in advance, and are fairly used to getting their own way. Music people on the other hand, are quite organic, fairly creative, don’t plan particularly well, and they seem to believe that brands have buckets of money, and all they need to do is find the right person and they’ll unload this treasure trove of finances.

Understanding the dichotomy between those two realities, and that neither one is the actual reality, has served me very well: being a point of translation between those conversations is really important.

What common mistakes do you see in music/ brand team-ups?

The biggest mistake is that people think someone will care. Just because you gave away a song or whatever, why would anyone care about that? I think it’s more important from the brand side – all we need to do is hang around this piece of music or this artist and we’ll become cool or relevant, and I think just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t work – which makes perfect sense when you articulate it.

Another mistake is just one-off conversations. The best bits of work, the best partnerships that have been built, have been long-term, they leverage a common truth for both the artist and the brand, and it’s a genuine one plus one equals three. The mistakes that are made are when they think it’s kinda easy and ‘we’ll just get in there and do it’, and it doesn’t do anything for either party.

The idea of musicians ‘selling-out’ has far less of a stigma these days. What do you attribute this shift in thinking to?

I think the most interesting thing is now there are very few acts that won’t want to get involved with a brand, for the right relationship – not always for the most amount of money. They understand that if you want to get involved in interesting things then you need to do interesting things yourself. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that the record labels have not been – the evidence suggests – very good at marketing stuff themselves, and the artists ask, ‘Well, who are the best people at marketing?’ I was at a conference the other week, and Pharrell [Williams] said, ‘the average budget for a music video from the label is $15,000 now – that’s ridiculous. Proctor and Gamble would never try to do anything for $15,000. Why does a label believe that’s enough money to make a great film, and a brand knows it’s not?’ What’s changed now is the artists see the labels as the financiers, and the smart ones have people around them that help them make better marketing decisions. Working with brands makes those activities happen more organically, and in a smarter way.

This article (and numerous others) feature in the Australian Music Industry Quarterly – out now. To get a copy delivered to you for $9.95, click here.