Choosing Music for Ads: Does a Premium Source Matter?

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Summary

Does music in advertising need to come from an expensive source, like a popular performance artist, to make an impact? A European academic-practitioner research team, including a Pandora executive, studied the evaluation process for choosing music in ads, by comparing how professionals and consumers judged the sourcing of music. The differential can potentially prove costly for brands.

Manuel Anglada-Tort (m.angladatort@campus.tu-berlin.de) is a doctoral candidate in the department of Audio Communication at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. He is also a visiting researcher in the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany. Anglada-Tort’s research interests include music psychology and aesthetics, auditory perception and cognition, and the use of music in advertising.

Steve Keller (skeller1@pandora.com)is the sonic strategy director for Studio Resonate at Pandora. His work explores the ways music and sound inﬂuence consumer perception and behavior and can be found in the Journal of Advertising Research, Music and Medicine, Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, and Journal of Food Quality and Preference.

Jochen Steffens (jochen.steffens@hs-duesseldorf.de) is a music and sound researcher and recently appointed professor of musical acoustics at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. His research areas include the perception of music and sound and their inﬂuence on emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes.

Daniel Müllensiefen (d.mullensiefen@gold.ac.uk) is a professor in psychology and codirector of the master of science program in music, mind, and brain at Goldsmith’s University of London. His main ﬁeld of research is music psychology, with a focus on individual differences in musical abilities and music in advertising.