🔊 DJ Khaled teaches you the 🔑 to Sonic Branding.
Last month marketers descended on the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity (you can think of it as the Oscars of Marketing & Advertising).
Through talks and events hosted by the VaynerMedia, Sixème Son and Audiobrain, it was the first time I was exposed to the term “Sonic Branding”.
Sonic Branding, also referred to as Audio Branding, is creating a brand identity through sound. Adweek has a good summary of this concept here.
With the growth of audio-based consumption mediums like Podcasts and Voice (e.g. Alexa, Siri, Google Home), Sonic Branding continues to take on ever growing importance in brand building.
What you might not realize is that the idea of Sonic Branding has been around forever.
Examples of Sonic Branding
From the jingle the ice cream truck would make on your street corner, to the iconic “Ba da ba ba ba, I’m loving it” from McDonalds, every time you can instantly recognize something based on the sound it makes, that’s effective Sonic Branding.
These are all examples of what the Sonic Brand world refers to as audio tags, a 3 to 5 second audio clip that is attached to everything your brand does with audio.
One of the experts in developing iconic audio tags is DJ Khaled.
DJ Khaled embraced the concept of Sonic Branding from the start
DJ Khaled is one of the most famous record executives, producers and DJ’s in the world, having done collaborations with artists from Jennifer Lopez to Jay-Z, with 11 albums to his name.
Starting from his first album in 2006, DJ Khaled has developed an arsenal of audio tags. The three primary ones you’ll hear are:
- “DJ Khaled”
- “We the Best” (sometimes modified to “We The Best Music”)
- “Anotha One”
This song from his 2017 album gives you an example of all three tags being used in succession.
The song “All I Do is Win” features the iconic “DJ Khaled” (with a very subtle inclusion of “We the Best”).
Even when paired with other artists like Lil’ Wayne, or producers Tay Keith, who have their own audio tags (e.g. Lil’ Wayne’s tag “Young Money” which you can hear in his song “A Milli”, or Tay Keith’s tag “Tay Keith, F*** these N***** up” which you can here in this playlist), DJ Khaled’s always ensures his audio tags are always heard.
Here’s an example of a Tay Keith produced song with DJ Khaled where both Khaled’s and Keith’s tags are heard.
In Lil’ Wayne’s collaborations with DJ Khaled, “Young Money” is never heard in the song “Jealous” or “I’m on One”.
DJ Khaled’s diversity of audio tags lets him also pair up with big stars like Jennifer Lopez in the song “Dinero”, by using more subtle tags like “Anotha One” to preserve his audio brand without needing his name spoken in every song.
However, when he gets to the song for the End Credits for Disney’s Aladdin, the iconic DJ Khaled audio tag come in very handy, having heard in the theatre in the first few seconds of when the credits are rolling.
There are two major keys (coincidentally, this is another less used DJ Khaled Audio tag goes “Major Key Alert”) I took away from DJ Khaled’s approach.
1. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Use your tag everywhere.
Similar to DJ Khaled, Gary Vaynerchuck (multiple New York Times Best Seller, investor in Uber, Snapchat, Facebook… etc.) now includes his own self developed Audio tag on every video.
2. Build in flexibility.
While some brands like McDonald’s stuck with a single jingle, DJ Khaled has managed to create multiple tags that allow him to extend his audio brand into other non-audio mediums.
DJ Khaled has since extended the “Major Key” audio tag to his book “The Keys” an “We the Best Music” tag to his furniture line “We the Best Home”.
That is a pretty nice home.
Daniel Rodic is an entrepreneur; the Co-Founder and CEO of Exact Media and a representative of Canada at the G20 Entrepreneurship Summit in Moscow and Beijing. Daniel’s been named a Top 30 Under 30 by Forbes Magazine.
