With a new episode every couple weeks, The Sonic Truth Podcast Series co-produced with Veritonic explores the monumental shift to audio from a unique angle. Episodes will not only feature the stories and perspectives of media leaders, they’ll reveal new data generated from research that many of those leaders have conducted on how and why audio truly moves people.
Hitting on everything from voices in ads to gender politics to audio branding, the series will entertain, educate, and help businesses think about a sonic path forward.
Episode 1: The Sound of Influence
Before Lonesome Rhodes, the antihero of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in The Crowd, capitalizes on the power of a new innovation called TV to fuel his political ascension, he capitalizes on radio, and is soon turned into a star of the airwaves by his handler. More than just his words themselves — his down-home charisma — the way he sounds — moves people.
On more occasions than one can count, the right delivery in ads, campaign videos and other channels has literally turned the tide of a vote and helped candidates win elections.
And whether on TV, radio or digital, sound has always played a critical role in helping create that influence.
In this first episode, “The sound of influence: how audio moves the electorate,” we talk with Katz Media CMO Stacey Schulman about the research they did on how radio ads by candidates in the hotly contested US Senate race in Florida are influencing voters there — particularly that highly-valuable subset of swing voters.
We also hear from some legends of advertising — Lenny Stern and Tom Messner — about how sound influenced some of their decisions when they worked on the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.