MassiveMusic's Net Just Keeps Getting Bigger
The Amsterdam-based music agency, famous for Nike's "Write the Future," among other tracks, just keeps racking up the hits.
MassiveMusic's Net Just Keeps Getting Bigger
The Amsterdam-based music agency, famous for Nike's
"Write the Future," just keeps racking up the hits.
By Anthony Vagnoni
If ever there was a company that's appropriately named, it's MassiveMusic. Because massive they are.
Now first, let's define massive. It's not massive in the lumbering, ungainly sense, although the company clearly has more tentacles than a dish of fried calamari served up at New York's Oyster Bar. No, the massive we're alluding to here refers to breadth and depth, like a massive wave of troops overrunning your base camp. or a massive cold front that's bound to deliver a shock to the system when it hits you as you walk out the door.
MassiveMusic is kind of like that. They're wide, if you consider offices scattered around the globe (one is not all that far from the Oyster Bar, come to think of it) as an expression of width. And they're deep, if you consider that they do just about everything from original scoring and sound design for commercials, broadcast promos and network IDs to creative creative song searching and licensing, talent development, music strategy, sonic branding and brand activation through music. Those are the tentacles I was referring to.
And on top of that, they're just massively cool. They exude cool the way only very hip Dutch guys can, and they express it in lots of ways, from their legendary parties in Cannes to things like DJ'ing for the Velocity Films party at the Loerie Awards in South Africa earlier this month to scoring groundbreaking work like Nike's "Write the Future" 2010 World Cup spot, which has won just about every award under the sun over the past year or so.
So what's the secret here? How do they do it? We checked in with Massive's Hans Brouwer, who founded the studio back in 2000 in Amsterdam. Today they have offices in five cities - L.A., New York, Shanghai and the recently opened London office round out Massive's massive network.
This summer the London office opened up shop in the Shoreditch creative community. Paul Reynolds and Nico Steiger contacted Brouwer, and the fifth studio came into being. This move brings Massive closer to London's abundant talent and further strengthens their reach and capabilities worldwide.
Massive's approach is built around a core team of experienced and knowledgeable staff producers (they go by the title Creative Director in the US offices) who can tap into the composer pool to mix and match the right talent for each project, Brouwer explains. The process is marked by frequent collaboration and gives them the ability to not only create new sounds and musical styles for clients, but also to work in familiar idioms, when needed. For example, he notes, "The US office tends to work with a lot of American composers."
The studio has been on something of a global tear for the past year or so, with the "Write the Future" spot being just one of many notable projects. They've worked on everything from Gatorade's G-series spots out of TBWA\Chiat\Day in L.A. (check out "Second Wind" and "Rejuvenate") to BMW's "Mini vs. Monster" for BSUR in Amsterdam to Mercedes work for China to EA's FIFA 2011 game launch to Carlsberg's recent "Everest" spot to that Land Rover "Out There" TVC that's running across Europe and the States even as I write this.
But wait, there's more! Massive's worked for L.A. hot shop David & Goliath on music-driven spots for the California Lottery and Universal Studios, and with San Francisco's Venables, Bell & Partners on the Audi spot running in the US now where a guy jumps onto a moving car carrier trying to grab himself an Audi. The list of spots Massive's had a hand in, from composition to sound design to music licensing (how about Adidas' smash hit "House Party" spot from 2008?) is, well, kind of massive.
The studio also scores broadcast promos, working for such global programmers as MTV (check out this otherworldly global promo called "MTV Rocks"), as well as the BBC, Al Jazeera, Germany's ZDF, the Dutch public broadcaster Z@pp and the Sci Fi Channel in the States, now called Syfy.
Brouwer was originally a partner in another Amsterdam music house, Soundscape, and it was there that the annual Cannes blow-outs first got their start. "Cannes used to be quite dull," he says. "There was not a lot happening. I remember we were standing around at a boring party and we felt, 'what the festival needs is a really good party.'"
And so the origins of the MassiveMusic bash were born. Brouwer and his partners initially teamed with the Dutch post production house Condor, and then, when he left to start Massive in 2000, he used the party to launch the company. By then, expectations were growing.
"Every year it just grew," Brouwer says of the event, "with more clients and more friends." For three years in the middle of the last decade, Massive teamed with Getty Images on the bash, then with The Lift, a European and Latin American production house. Finally, when it came to their tenth anniversary in 2010, they flew solo.
While known for its opulence and theatrics, the party has had some real benefits. It was there that they made some key connections with people from the US, which led in turn to the studio starting to partner on projects with US-based music companies. "These were music companies that were looking for a Euro sound," says Brouwer. They did a couple of jobs with Elias Arts, which is where they connected with Keith Haluska, a producer there. "We talked about doing something in New York, and now he's running our office there," Brouwer explains.
That location opened in 2005, housed down on Union Square, followed by Los Angeles three years later, which is run by another Elias alum, Scott Cymbala. Shanghai followed in 2009, on the heels of Massive's work on a big Coke campaign for the 2008 Olympics. "It was one of the biggest ad campaigns ever in China, and it gave us a lot of exposure," says Brouwer. The studio's Diederik van Middelkoop went to China to produce a job there, and fell in love with the culture and the people. "We're the first international music company to open in China," says Brouwer, " and so far I believe we're still the only one."
The studio has worked on a range of longer-form and new media projects, including a 90-second spot for the Belgian beer Grimbergen, created by Sid Lee (like Wieden + Kennedy, another regular collaborator with Massive) and a fascinating web site for Philips that's part of its "Obsessed with Sound" campaign, produced for the Amsterdam office of Tribal DDB, that lets users deconstruct a performance by the Metropole Orkest, the Dutch jazz and pop ensemble. They also scored a two-and-a-half-minute piece titled "Get Ready" for Fiat's reintroduction into the US market, a dazzling visual spot created by the agency called Impatto and produced by Motion Theory.
Massive's eclectic mix of projects seems to suit its free-form culture, one in which exploration and experimentation are encouraged. "Advertising is pushing the edge of music styles, which means we have to stay current on the latest trends and the freshest talent," Brouwer continues. "You're always looking for the newest stuff out there, which means, in a sense, that you need to rediscover yourself all the time."
Massive has responded to this via its talent division, Massive Talent (check out their blog here, it's updated just about every day), which is designed to help relatively unknown artists get a leg up in their careers by connecting them with projects associated with brands, games, films, TV series "or any other great work that might get their music out there in a positive light," Brouwer says. Given Massive's contacts with agencies and broadcasters around the world, he explains that "it puts us in a great position to promote the music of these young artists that have yet to make their way into this big world."
Brouwer points out that the music industry itself no longer invests in new talent, leaving that to other entities, such as marketers or music houses such as his that have a vested interest in keeping new talent in the pipeline. Their efforts are paying off, he adds. "We've already done a few campaigns with new artists that have been backed with huge media pushes, so that gives them a lot of exposure."
Massive also works in the growing field of sonic or audio branding, which is essentially the use of sound in all its forms to help define and identify a brand. The studio has put together a short 'how to' video that helps explain the concept to those still somewhat unfamiliar (you can check it out here). It's a discipline that's farther along in its acceptance in Europe than in the States, and Brouwer says it taps all of a music company's capabilities, from original composition to sound design to strategy and creative problem-solving.
With the global scope of what Massive does, the need to have this full palette of services is something of a requirement, Brouwer suggests, pointing out that most of the agencies they work with around the world don't have music producers on staff, like are commonly found at bigger shops in the US. Beyond that, the overall goal of how the company is structured elevates what they do beyond just being a music production company, he says.
"We really don't refer to ourselves as that, but rather as a music agency," he says. "It's a big difference. We're not just composing tracks to picture, but we think along with the brands and their agencies about things like strategy and perception. This developed to the extent that MassiveMusic, having created the music strategy for Heineken, is now the global music agency for Heineken International. In this case, our emphasis is on providing the brand with music intelligence, music activation ideas and even legal advice."
Now that Massive has reached the grand old age of 11, what's the next decade hold for the company? "Good question," says Brouwer, "especially when you're trying to avoid clichés. But if we can keep working at the level that we're working at now, I'll be very, very proud. I'm really excited about the quality of the work we're doing, and it's great to be able to practice your hobby every day. We're all musicians here-the only one who can't play an instrument is our office manager, but she can dance really well-and we're all music freaks, so every day for us is a blessing."
Brouwer is also tickled not just by the work his studio is doing around the world, but the kinds of scripts and projects they get asked to work on, things like the "Write the Future" assignment. "We've had the opportunity to collaborate on some really great creative," he notes, but is quick to point out that going great work is never easy. "Finding the right music or sound for a product or a brand and its target audience is always a demanding task," he says. "Even if the spot in question is not brilliant, the challenge is the same. It makes our jobs never dull."
Published 29 September, 2011
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