Sounding Effective – How SFX can help you.

clocktower — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 09:30:52 +0000

What are Sound Effects?

Whether it’s a radio commercial or an animated video, sound effects can really help to set the scene. They can be very subtle, like an outdoor atmosphere or very direct and in your face, like a dinosaur roaring. Sound Effects really can make all the difference between a flat, lifeless scene or one that sounds real and authentic.

Why do I need Sound Effects?

Say you have an advert with two people talking about your product.

If you set it in a coffee shop, it immediately makes the conversation more believeable. Just two friends having coffee and discussing a great new product they’ve come accrss. To sell the idea that they’re in a coffee shop, we add an atmosphere sound effect of a coffee shop, drawn from our extensive sound effects library and mix the audio to place the characters in our scene in a realistic and believeable way. It makes it much more authentic than two people talking over silence or music.

What if we don’t have the effect?

For most things, we have an appropriate effect somewhere in our library, but there are exceptions. Take the animation recently posted on our facebook page. It required some very specific effects, namely a telephone being thrown into the pot in a poker game. The video above gives a peek into what is known as foley recording, where we immitate the scene to record the sounds, which we can then add to the soundtrack we’re putting together. Sometimes foley is done with the real objects, or a close approximation, as in our scenario, and sometimes it’s via clever methods that produce a similar sound, such as making thunder sounds with a large sheet of thin metal.

Another example of sound effect use is this recent ad we made for Rochdale Shopping Centre.

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What Radio Can Do For You

clocktower — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:00:58 +0000

You want to get your name out there or push your latest product or service, but you don’t want to spend the earth to do it. You also don’t want to waste your money.

Radio is a great alternative to other advertising options for a number of reasons. It’s cost effective, it has a wide audience reach, and can be easily targeted both demographically and geographically.

Let’s look at some other advertising options:

Newspaper and print – Many people don’t read newspapers these days and flyers tend to end up in the recycling.
Television – TV is very expensive, both for airtime and production.
Email – Email is spotty at best and it’s hard to get a good mailing list and still stay ahead of data protection laws, which seem to change by the day.
Internet marketing – Internet marketing can be a very effective medium, if you know how to use it. If you don’t, it can be good money after bad with no real result.

Radio has a huge reach.

People from all walks of life listen to the radio all the time. You listen in your car, at home, in shops, on your computer. It’s everywhere. In most cases, people can’t just fast-forward through a radio ad break, either.

Radio advertising takes a lot of the guess work out of targeting.

Certain demographics listen to certain stations and, in these increasingly regionally focused times, there are many stations that serve quite specific areas of the country. There are also a variety of radio station sizes, which can help with budgetary concerns. They range from your local community station, which will be very cheap to advertise with, all the way up to a national station or stations, which will be very expensive.

How you want to advertise depends on your budget and product.

For instance, if you own a shop in Manchester that sells sandwiches, there’s not much point advertising on a station that covers anywhere but Manchester. However, if you sell products online or something available nationwide, it’s much more practical to advertise over a wide area.

I mentioned demographics earlier, so let’s look at that some more.

Let’s say, for example, that you are selling the latest must have gadget for young people, then you would want to advertise on Kiss or Heart, something that is already targeting that demographic for you and doing it well. However, if you’re trying to sell high end cars to an older, more affluent market, Smooth is probably a better bet. Heart and Smooth both have a variety of regional stations, so you can easily and quickly target the demographic you’re after fairly accurately.

At Clocktower, we can help you by creating engaging and interesting radio ads, tailored to your demographic and station choice. Have a look at our Radio Commercial page for more information or get in touch today.

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