September 2013
The day has finally come, you have been so excited for today for months. The new EA Sports FIFA 13 is out and you have got your hands on a copy.
Rushing home, you turn on your Xbox and the excitement builds. The game downloads, the loading screen pops up and you know once you hear that sound (you know the one) the game is ready.
Here it comes, the EA Sports animation. As you mimic the sound ‘EA Sports, it’s in the game’ there is an eerie silence. Something feels off.
You load it up again, thinking it must be a glitch. But it is not. Now, no matter how good the game is, all you can think about is why on earth EA have removed this iconic sound from the loading screen. Their most recognisable brand asset. Why?
October 2017
The Chinese is ordered. All week you have thought about the release of Stranger Things Season 2 and now you start Netflix and see what is in store.
You grab the remote, open Netflix and think, hey, is the volume broken? But it is up to full blast. Why on earth did I not hear the TUDUM? Is Netflix broken? You try again. Same thing. Again. Still no TUDUM.
Your group chat blows up. “Did you see Netflix removed the TUDUM?” Nothing to do with the excitement or how eager everyone was for Stranger Things. All anyone can talk about is Netflix taking away that bass drum sound. Weekend ruined.
May 2026
I arrive with my popcorn. This has been all anyone in has talked about for months. The release of Devil Wears Prada 2, two hours of laughter and maybe a few tears. But what else would you expect from Meryl Streep?
“Turn it up!” screeches another excited cinema goer in the front row. “I can’t hear the intro music.” No 20th Century Fox theme. What is going on?
Let us get our strategic hats on. Imagine we are any of the brands above. What if we aligned a marketing initiative with these big releases? We are going to see increased traffic across all our brands during high impact moments, so it makes sense to align.
But instead of more of the same, we disrupt. Change the norm. For the first week of each launch, let’s remove something, let’s remove our sonic branding.
Everyone should have been talking about the releases. But no. They talked about what was missing. Our sonic assets. We shifted the strategy. Now they are talking about us.
Disclaimer: None of these campaigns ever took place. Should we have said that earlier? Maybe. But in a study by System1, brand awareness, recognition and perception improved by 191% when a sonic asset was developed and rolled out. We technically re-launched ours back to the market after a week.
Would it work? Who knows. But at Marketing Network Group we are always looking to cut through the noise, to innovate and deliver results. And just look at the examples above, people are talking about us. That in itself is a result, is it not? The irony is our strategy worked not by adding, but by taking something away.
Marketing Network Group. We lead the way.
