Ramesh Sathiah’s LIA report from Las Vegas

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Ramesh Photo.jpgSong Zu creative director/partner Ramesh Sathiah (left) sat on the prestigious TV/Cinema/Online Film – Music & Sound jury this week in Las Vegas. Here’s his report exclusive to Campaign Brief.

I was lucky enough to get a call back to judge the LIA awards this year – once again in Las Vegas. Besides the fact it’s a pretty awesome wicket – two years in a row – I can honestly say I love judging music and this jury took the task really seriously. What really interested us was trying to build a framework and understanding of what makes a piece of music for advertising ‘Good’, and what makes it ‘Great’. Music is so subjective, but that’s what we love about it.

Judging Session.jpgMusic Adaptation – Song, was a surprising category. Essentially this is for covers of existing tracks. In some cases the adaptation was subtle but the overall use was extremely effective, but in general we felt it more deserving of a higher award if the new version showed some significantly new thinking to bind it to the story.

Music Original – Song, was very well represented by Australia, and there were quite a few examples that had us judge’s Old Town.jpgusing Shazam to find out if the songs were actually existing licensed pieces as they were so convincing. Was happy to see a couple of kick arse electronica tracks in there. It gave me hope that the “great folk scare of the 2000s”, may soon come to and end.

Use of Licensed Music was a very competitive category and challenging to judge. Some very impressive high-budget commercials were in this category. How integral is the music to the concept? Could there be several other tracks that would do an equally good or better job? Or was this track ‘it’? Some spots were essentially new music videos to a song, that stole the songs equity and put a brand logo at the end, is that worthy of an award?

Trump Tower.jpgMusic Original – Underscore was a bit disappointing. There seems to be a handful of emotional shorthands that keep getting used and abused. There were however, a few great examples were everything, the message, the film making, and craft on all levels were stunning.

We also discussed how Sound Design is a category that people define differently. In Australia we tend to call audio editing sound design, where the American’s see it a bit differently. They see it as being in the area between sound editing and music, where the line is blurred. In our judgement the spots that were more literal but showed excellent craft and Poolside.jpgskill may be worthy of an award, but there were one or two examples of completely re-imagined soundscapes that were really inspiring.

A few random thoughts:

1. We were judging Advertising music awards – not The Grammys – so the entire communication is important not just the music in isolation

2. We appreciate the telling of the story with Crab Legs.jpgsound when it’s done deftly, nuanced and with a high level of craft

3. We appreciate it more if you do the above but get away from the well worn path of cliched musical scoring styles

4. Solo arpeggiated piano, and Hans Zimmer “Inception” rips-offs get boring real fast

6. Melody – is not a dirty word!

5. Longer is not always better. If it’s over three minutes long, it had better be incredible (and it rarely was)

6. Doing an Ad version of ‘Stomp’ or other musical SFX concepts seems to an idea that will never die

7. Doing a great cover of an existing song can be even cooler than just using the original recording

8. It IS possible to eat too many crab legs in the all you can eat buffet

I would like to thank Barbara and all the LIA team who are fantastic hosts, and the fellow jury members who were a wonderful bunch to spend a few days locked away with.