Capturing Eardrums

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Specifically, it was a stunt to promote the opening of new branches (um, stores) in northern California that started Umpqua thinking about music identity. The bank's advertising agency, Portland's Leopold Ketel & Partners, hired three ice cream trucks to drive around the relevant neighborhoods pumping out music, handing out free ice cream, and in the process spreading buzz about a different kind of bank. But what music, exactly? Up-tempo numbers like Outkast's "Hey Ya" and James Brown's "I Feel Good" made the 20-song playlist, and Rumblefish was brought in to help with the sonic logistics and to make sure any licensing issues were handled correctly. That was the opening: Anthony has since convinced the bank that its "handshake marketing" style is a perfect fit with music identity, and he has a couple of fresh projects in the works.

Rumblefish is not an advertising agency or a marketing or branding firm per se, he says, "but I've met a lot of brand managers who invest heavily in new ways to speak to their consumers." In a world where every consumer is assaulted with marketing messages, music can be a way for a brand to make a connection through all the clutter. "That connection," Anthony says, "is what they're buying from us."

Improvisation is part of music and part of business. Anthony's improvisation skills got a test in college that set him on the path to starting a business rather than a band. He had a double major in composition and recording technology; what he didn't have was enough money to get by. He hit on an idea: licensing.

Of course, he didn't really know anything about how to, say, license his music to a filmmaker or an advertiser. So he cold-called every production company listed in an off-the-shelf filmmaker directory, and showed up at a local television station and asked, "Who makes your commercials?" In other words, he didn't really know what he was doing. But the cold-calling hooked him up with small-budget filmmakers who were thrilled at the idea of obtaining a full orchestral score for a few thousand dollars. Films like Dawn of the Dwellers and The Killing Club didn't become box-office smashes, but the money was pretty good for an impoverished college student. Meanwhile, Anthony's persistence with the local TV station led him to a gig writing a jingle for the local power company.

The bad news: The music department kicked him out -- "for licensing my homework," as Anthony puts it. Improvising, he changed his major to business and took a few law classes. There was something to this whole idea of licensing, he figured, that could benefit musicians and generate good money, too. As he was working out his theory, corporate advertisers were becoming more and more interested in the power of music. Mitsubishi and Volkswagen, for example, each released ads that boosted little-known acts such as Dirty Vegas and Nick Drake onto the radio and the record charts -- and got serious buzz as a result.

But as anyone who brushes up against the recorded music business knows, there's a dense legal thicket between any piece of music and anyone who wants to license it: performance rights, composition rights, different rules for different countries. And if it's a hip-hop tune with three samples, the complexity level triples. There are scores of small companies that help pick songs for commercials or negotiate clearance deals and the like. Because this market has so many players, it's fairly disorganized, and pricing can be all over the map.

Rumblefish has placed songs on The Sopranos and on a forthcoming video game.

This is the realm Rumblefish entered, but with a twist: Anthony, a relentless networker, started to put together a stable of upstart independent artists from every genre he could think of; they agreed to let him represent their music to licensees in exchange for favorable terms. That way, Rumblefish could offer clients something different. The company would be happy to do a search for the perfect tune, but if getting rights to a hit single by a well-known band proved too expensive or complicated, it could offer something similar from its own network and do so quickly and nimbly because all the clearance issues were worked out in advance. (Now Rumblefish has more than 400 artists in its stable, including George Clinton, of Parliament fame.) The company has placed songs for use in JCPenney commercials, for The Sopranos and other TV shows, and for a forthcoming video game.

"It generated a lot of buzz," says a Pabst brand manager of Rumblefish's campaign. "They did it in such an authentic way."

Then Anthony hooked up with Neal Stewart, brand manager for Pabst Brewing's resurgent Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, for what became the first test of Anthony's bigger idea of music identity. Because PBR wanted to maintain a kind of grass-roots image -- and also because its marketing budget was lean -- the brand wanted to be associated not with hit songs but with up-and-coming local bands that connected with its product. Rumblefish researched the music scenes in two markets, Kansas City and Cleveland, identified a handful of appropriate bands, and executed a quasi-underground program that involved helping those artists cut singles (in PBR-branded packaging) that they could sell or give away as promotions. That way PBR was positioned as a supporter of local indie music -- a part of the scene rather than just some outsider trying to exploit it. Stewart used Rumblefish again for a similar project for another Pabst brand, Ranier, and is figuring the firm into plans for future online marketing because he liked the way this initial foray into music identity played out. "It generated a lot of buzz," he says. "They did it in such an authentic way." In other words, it made a connection for the brand -- music to Anthony's ears.

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