Keith and Epilepsy Ireland have released a song which makes the Time, Safe, Stay (TSS) message memorable after research showed that most of the general public would not know what to do if they witnessed someone having a seizure
Keith Lawler
Over 45,000 people in Ireland have epilepsy, making it a hidden condition rather than a rare one.
With numbers like these, it is important to highlight experiences to help people learn more – and to let those living with the condition know they are not alone.
To help the cause, Keith Lawler, the founder and creative director of LAUDHAUS, Ireland’s first dedicated sonic branding studio, and the face behind the music in many iconic ads, has thrown his support behind the latest campaign for Epilepsy Ireland.
Together they have released a song which makes the Time, Safe, Stay (TSS) message memorable after research showed that most of the general public would not know what to do if they witnessed someone having a seizure.
As the man behind the music of many well-known ads, including a famous ad for Spar, and the creative director behind some of Ireland’s most iconic commercial work, including An Post’s Tin Man Christmas campaign, Vodafone’s Team of Us commercials, and the Cannes Lion–winning Address Point campaign for An Post, Keith was the perfect choice for creating a song that would stick in people’s minds – and he says he enjoys using the power of music to make important messages memorable.
Of his career, Limerick man Keith told Chic , “I started off as a musician, 20, 25 years ago, that’s always been my main passion. And then I got into advertising, started working through the ranks as an art director to a creative director, through Dubai. I had my own agency then which was a music-related agency, a music technology business called Firstage, then in 2018 we ended up putting on the first ever augmented reality live streamed gig.
“All the while I was working in advertising at the same time, then my career kind of grew when I moved home to Ireland and I was working in agencies here in An Post, Lidl, Vodafone, the Irish Rugby team.
“But what I really noticed was that all of my clients were looking for something similar and that was in the music space which offers a distinct asset that can connect with an audience every single time.
“So I noticed that creating music that could connect with people across every touchpoint and have a branded moment everywhere and interact with the brand through sound, is what clients were looking for all these years.
“And as somebody who is a professional musician, it means I can speak the music language. Because another thing I noticed when working in creative agencies, you would go to a composer and say, ‘I kind of want something like this’ and play a piece of music, or play something completely different and say ‘I like this too’, but you wouldn’t understand why those two pieces are completely different, or really understand what emotional thing this piece of music is really doing. But because of my background of being in bands for 25 years, writing music and creating music, I understood how to create the right brief and how to have that coversation with musicians and composers.
“So what I do now is sit between brands and artists because I understand what the brand is actually looking for and I am able to translate that to artists so they can answer that particular brief.
“You’re working within a scientific background – we’ve chosen to use this rhythm or this BPM or this melody or instrument because it’s going to achieve for your brand what you want it to achieve.”
Taking a piece of music for an ad from start to finish is a lot more technical than some of us might have imagined.
Keith talked us through the process of making the music for the new Epilepsy Ireland campaign, explaining, “We would analyse the brief, take the target audience, figure out how we want to appeal to them, then we’d start to build the piece of music around the speed of the music.
“So this particular piece of music, we’ve set the speed at the resting heart rate BPM. Research says the average adult’s resting heart rate is 72 so that was the beat per minute we set the song to because you’re more likely to absorb a piece of music when you’re relaxed so it’s going to come in and sync with your relaxed state and will reach your ear because of that.
“Then we started to choose the instruments that we would use. So we used all natural instruments so there’s no digital instruments in there because you’re more likely to be relaxed when you hear natural instruments because it’s a vibration that our body is used to hearing.
“Then we crafted the lyrics. So we worked with the team in Connolly Partners and Epilepsy Ireland to put together a rough messaging lyrics sheet which was a collection of things they wanted to say. Then we worked with that to create short, bitesized lines that work in the flow in the piece of music.
“It’s very important that they’ll be short and easy to absorb because anything that’s a long piece of information, that’s too much of a long sentence, our minds aren’t going to capture that. As soon as you get past three or four words, the brain kind of meanders and goes somewhere else. So short and snappy is the goal so it goes in and stays in.
“There’s another small one we do, it’s something I call ‘the broken nose’ so if you look at a face and it’s absolutely perfectly symmetrical, almost like AI has made it up, you’re unlikely to retain that face, that face won’t stick in your mind, there’s no character to it.
“But if someone has a broken nose or has a bend in their nose or something like that, you’re most likely to remember that face. And we used the same thinking with creating the melody for this. So if you create something that is too perfect, it’s forgettable. It just goes in and comes out because there’s nothing there to catch your ear, there’s no hook in it.
“So what we do is we start with a perfect melody and then we just break it a little bit. That might be through the instruments we use, it might be through going slightly of time or off-key, or the voice might do it, but we’ll design something in there to make sure there’s hooks that when that piece of music comes in one ear, it doesn’t go out the other, it gets hooked.”
When it comes to making music that is delivering an important message, Keith says he feels a huge amount of responsibility.
He told Chic , “There is definitely an added responsibility to this one to make it work. And we also had the added responsibility here to design something that wouldn’t be triggering to anyone who suffers from seizures so any instrumentation that went in there would be gentle on the ear so that it’s actually for people who are adjacent to people who are suffering from seizures.
“That was a key differentiator at the start when we started talking about creating a piece of music that would just sit and seep into people ears, how we would go about doing that.
“There’s a huge responsibility in that because you don’t want to annoy the lay person. Baby Shark, for example, was something that came up when designing this. Not in how it sounds, just in how the repetition is used.
“And one major part that I inputted in the strategy in this particular campaign was this idea of a campfire. So this is set up in this campfire way where you’re sitting around this campfire and there’s like a chorus line and everyone goes, sing it together now, and you naturally will want to do that so instead of you playing music, the music plays you.
“You’ve given the listener enough information, you’ve played the music, say, three times and then you place a little space, a little gap, and automatically then the person wants to say it because you’ve been given the information now, you’ve been given the line and you know how it sounds and then you have the space to sing it.
“So that campfire approach was really important to me to get people to say it and remember it. Like when you study for a test, just say it out loud and the more you say it out loud the more it comes back into your mind.”
We can’t chat with the man behind so many iconic pieces of music without asking him what his favourite musical adverts are – and there is one in particular that Keith has huge admiration for.
“Some of the ones I think are brilliant at the moment are Mastercard, they designed a full sonic system,” he says.
“So one of the biggest things for banks and financial institutions is trust and knowing that your payment is going to the right place and that you haven’t made a mistake and there’s no one in the background stealing your information so Mastercard created the full system sound so when you tap your Mastercard it gives you a specific Mastercard tone that if you had a Visa it would make a different tone so your Mastercard is a feedback tone that let’s you know you’ve done it right.
“Then they took that feedback tone and created a full orchestral piece that goes across all advertising, they have a sonic logo that they place across all their social media and any communications and TV ads that is the same feedback tone that is played, just in a slightly different way.
“And when it goes to different countries, they have different cultural versions of that song. You know, in the Middle East they might have one that’s got more culturally relevant instrumentation in it than you might have elsewhere. They have a K-pop version, they have a Latin American version, they have more of a Western version. They all have the same DNA but they’re all treated in slightly different ways to culturally appeal to the people who hear them.
“I just find it so interesting that this goes all the way back to tapping your card to that entire, huge breadth of design sound. It’s the one thing that has the same core DNA the whole way through, that tiny little signature.”
If you see someone having a seizure remember: TIME the seizure, make sure they are SAFE and STAY with them until the seizure has stopped and while they recover.
See www.epilepsy.ie to watch the video and for more information.
See www.laudhaus.net and www.keithlawlercreative.net.
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