Audio Branding: Philips Explores the Sound of Creation

The stewards of the Philips brand are "obsessed" with sound, and are hoping to answer the question, "Does creativity have a sound? And if so, what would it be?"

Cue "The Sound of Creation," an interactive musical story and digital experience that's playing out on the Philips Sound Facebook page and on a microsite. The project follows on from the brand's 2011 "Hear every detail" interactive music project, and showcases the acoustic design and craftsmanship of the Philips Fidelio product range with a nine-part story.

Once again created by Tribal DDB Amsterdam and Philips (in collaboration with songwriter and producer Washed Out, Stinkdigital London and Swedish film director Gustav Johansson), ‘The Sound of Creation’ is a journey to audio perfection in nine steps: nine layers of music, nine videos, and nine stories behind nine products.

“Each step carries a unique soundtrack and an intriguing behind-the-scenes story. Some of these stories are funny, ridiculous, surprising or even unbelievable,” said Chris Baylis, ECD at Tribal DDB Amsterdam. “We have spent a significant amount of time with engineers and designers from the Philips Fidelio range. This campaign wouldn’t be that special if it wasn’t for all the conversations we had. The anecdotes were fascinating and inspired us immensely.”

The steps range from step one, ‘Inspiration,’ focused on the designers and engineers at Philips Sound and the intricacies of air movement through a trumpet, to step five, ‘Improve,’ that shows moulds made from 400 different ear shapes for the M1 headphones.

“While visiting the Philips engineers we found one of the first SoundSphere prototypes,” said Pol Hoenderboom, copywriter at Tribal DDB Amsterdam. “The floating tweeter was a bent spoon from the canteen, glued onto an adjusted speaker with pieces of bubblegum. Now that’s what I call improvisation. You won’t find stories like these in a brochure.”

Nine frames on the home page open the doors to the journey which Washed Out’s Ernest Greene called “an audio-visual metaphor for creativity. I go through similar stages of the creative process when producing a song as Philips’ engineers and designers do when they’re creating a new Fidelio product.”

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is a world leader in healthcare, lifestyle and lighting, and integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions. Their brand promise, “sense and simplicity” is eloquently delivered in ‘The Sound of Creation,’ a fresh take on product advertising well worth taking the steps.