Case Study: Sony Music and D&AD Masterclasses
The background
Home to the most loved and commercially successful artists in the world, Sony is a global music company representing a huge range of talent – from household names to newly emerging artists.
So it comes as no surprise that A&R - finding and signing those artists is an essential part of the business. With the ambition to support and stimulate their team in the best way possible and continue to build a world class A&R department, Sony enlisted D&AD to create a bespoke Training programme that would cover a number of aspects.
The brief
Firstly, they wanted to equip creatives with the skills and inspiration to support and represent the SME Artist community, whilst also uniting a network across the organisation. Additionally, they wanted to encourage the team to share and enjoy each other’s success, ultimately building a culture where creative freedom and innovation run rife.
Being a network united by its passion for and belief in design and advertising excellence “D&AD felt like a natural fit”, said a representative from Sony Music. “We loved the fact that D&AD is not for profit, and is made up of different people so passionate about what the organisation stands for, that they’re doing this on top of their day job – as a community, it always felt very high calibre”.
“In the past, we’d done a lot of work within the team around innovation and creativity. Everyone wanted to find out how we could be more creative as a team, but when we dug deeper it was clear we weren’t ever short on creative ideas. Instead, what we were lacking was the skills required to execute those ideas. So that became our North Star”- a combination of Sony described as “both the beauty and the rigour of creativity”
Planning the solution
“After one conversation with D&AD, it became very clear what course of action we would take. The areas they wanted to look at fell into place very naturally, with words, visual aesthetic and PR being the main objectives.
After selecting the workshops that sounded interesting, Sony then had a design day with D&AD where each of the workshop owners and skill-builders came in and talked through how their workshop would be run and what kind of content the course would contain.
Taking onboard what was on offer, Sony then fed back on areas that they’d wanted to adapt and change to be more engaging for their delegates based on their experience. This was mainly tweaking the vocab that was used so it reflected how they spoke within the company, and making sure the case studies used were related to the music industry or the kind of work that Sony are involved in.
“They were very receptive to the feedback, bringing their best ideas to the table but also more than happy to customise the course content to our needs. It felt like the best of both worlds.”
The Workshops
Across the three days, D&AD and Sony explored different elements of the creative process. The first was spent on honing copywriting skills and learning to express the tone of voice of the artists that Sony Music Entertainment represents. For this, they enlisted the help of Vikki Ross, who showed the delegates how to translate and protect artists’ unique tone of voice across multiple creative outcomes.
Next, D&AD’s digital specialist took delegates through the six core steps to create digital platforms, including how to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and ways to communicate more effectively with digital specialists and technologists.
Finally, PR experts finished off the program with a session aimed at ensuring all creative output has inherent ‘talkability’ by building the perfect ‘hook’ into the creative process, and that everyone understood the cultural, commercial, social and political impact of the creative they produce.
Outcomes
Rather than just working three days back to back, part of the program involved Sony working on live artist’s briefs so they could put into practice what they’d learned that day. By the end of the week, they’d compiled full pitches to go back to the artist’s marketing teams and could see an immediate effect of what had been learned over the week.
“We really appreciated D&AD giving us the room and space and understanding what needed to be changed about the content so we could have that deliverable. That appreciation and empathy was key to making us real collaborators on it.”
Ultimately, all the course elements built on Sony’s business needs and objectives, while enhancing the skills and talents of the creatives in the room. Combining D&AD’s Learning Consultants with the knowledge and expertise of Sony Music Entertainment’s team ensured a connected and consistent learning programme. Not only this, the experience united creatives across their European offices- delivering both “beauty and rigour” in the most collaborative way possible.
D&AD Masterclasses power up careers and future-proof businesses by focusing on the creative skills of tomorrow, taught by the stars of today. Online and offline, our creative learning programmes connect you and your business directly to the people making the most outstanding work today and enable you to learn skills to generate brilliant outcomes tomorrow.