A good sonic signature is a crucial element in any brand’s media strategy. But you can’t just create any old sound and call it a day. I’ve often criticized the Netflix sonic logo for this.

It’s a cool sound, but it doesn’t have any melody. It’s so bland that for cinematic presentation, they enlisted Hans Zimmer to spice it up.

It’s certainly more interesting, and I’m a big fan of Zimmer’s work, but someone like him should have been brought in from the start. What we have here doesn’t amount to much more than lipstick on a pig. The presentation is very colourful and exciting, but it still doesn’t have a signature melody.

Then every so often you get a brand whose sonic logo does have a distinctive melody, but it just doesn’t fit the rest of the commercial. Kia’s logo sounds good in isolation.

The problem is it rarely fits their commercials. Most commercials tend to be bright and upbeat. Kia’s logo has a slightly darker tone. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you can tell they weren’t thinking long term when they developed it. It rarely matches the rest of the ad. It’s such a poor fit that they often have to create space between the music and the logo. It almost feels like a separate commercial.

Once you have a good melody, you can adapt it to pretty much any timbre or genre. Kia has a good melody, but it always has the same sound. If you’re not leading into the logo with custom theme music, you have to adapt the logo to the music. In order to avoid the problems of Kia, there needs to be cohesion between your audio elements. They can’t sound like different commercials. They have to flow into each other.

So who’s been doing it right? A great example is certainly McDonald’s. Their melody has been done in pretty much every genre and timbre you could imagine over the last twenty years. But how about we look at a relative newcomer?

Most of the big Canadian banks now have a sonic signature, but CIBC has been absolutely killing it.

They’ve got a great melody that you can sing (try it), and they nearly always adapt it to the music of the piece. One element flows seamlessly into the next.

Spot on!