Here’s an agency hack I’ve never talked about.

When we define a client’s universe at my agency, we ask questions about how their brand should look, sound, feel, and talk. Some brands are more aggressive, some more gentle. Some more quaint, some more futuristic…

One of the first things I do when working with a new brand is find a song that represents their tone of voice.

While we never share this song publicly, we have the song playing internally while making critical design and copy decisions.

If a brand’s song is death metal, you’ll make very different choices listening to that vs. say, relaxing ambient nature music or soulful 70s funk.

While I can’t prove it, I believe that this strategy makes a brand’s expression more unique and cohesive than creating work in the void.

Synesthesia is the ability to see music in anything; everything.

Alt title: The problem with folk music

Any singer or songwriter, no matter how talented, tends to write in only one language.

Sure, Taylor Swift’s timeless lyrics are heartfelt and poignant—and don’t you dare say otherwise!—, but is the person in rural China really getting the full message? The full intention?

So much of our art and our humor and our music is cultural. It’s impossible for it to transcend boundaries and politics.

This is one of the reasons that I fell in love with electronic music at the age of 11. No singers means no lyrics. No lyrics means that no matter who you are, you are able to interpret the music in exactly the same way. No references, no inside jokes, just frequencies hitting human ear drums.

The allure of a truly universal language has been a consistent theme in human history. The Tower of Babel parable tells us that the only reason we fight is that we don’t understand each other. And worse still? There was a magical, utopian time when we all did. How many of our disagreements today are based on simple misunderstanding?

Douglas Adams’ Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a wonderful idea: what if we could universally translate any language to any other in real time?

And now, we’re at a point where an upcoming AirPods version (or whatever Sam Altman and Jony Ive are creating) will have instantaneous, AI-powered universal translation. This isn’t distant sci-fi, this is imminent.

We'll take our headphones into Mongolia and instantly understand everything that’s being said.

How much will this increase our sense of shared global humanity? How many disagreements will be mitigated? How many Russian анекдоты will we suddenly get?

Or maybe, we’ll just find out how bad Vogon poetry truly is.

1. Gullfoss (Audio) - In the world of audio Equalizers (or EQ) has been a static way to change the tonality of a sound. Dynamic EQ reacts to a sound dynamically (in real time) but in a “dumb” way. Now? There’s a new generation of AI powered smart tools that are changing the game for audio engineering. Gullfoss listens to the signal coming in dynamically and reacts in real-time, boosting frequencies that are under-represented and taming frequencies that are over-represented. The result is audio that instantly sounds more pleasing.

2. ACES (Video) - It’s not uncommon for shows to use multiple cameras. Even indie creators will be mixing iPhone footage with drone footage with a main camera. Getting this footage to coalesce has been a major pain. With the introduction of ACES, all cameras and sources can be brought into the same color space, automatically. This makes editing between sources (and color matching) easier and more powerful than ever before. This feature comes standard in DaVinci Resolve now.

3. Make (Automation) - Connecting the many (paid) services of our lives is a challenge. With a connection library of thousands of common apps and services (including ChatGPT), is a very affordable way to start automating business and creative tasks. It will allow you to be more efficient and to use that thing between your ears more, and to type/click less.

The most exciting thing happening right now? The combination of (API) automation and AI.

Tools like Zapier and make.com have made it easier to access the API layer of the internet for years.

In case you don’t know, APIs are the behind-the-scenes access points that allow digital platforms to connect with each other. For example, if you wanted a list of all your YouTube videos, it’s far easier to use the YouTube API than to manually scrape them one by one.

Power users have been using APIs forever, but for the average person? Automating mundane tasks has had its limits in practical utility.

But now? Many of the processes that waste your time can be automated with these tools plus the added layer of AI to make them even more powerful and robust.

What if you want to automatically download all invoices from a gmail account, sort them, rename them based on the content, and organize them into a single folder?

What if you want to automatically log every sales call, determine the sentiment, update the prospect’s database dynamically with the information of that call (including their attitude), so you never need to take sales notes again?

These things are here right now with the combination of make.com and ChatGPT.

If there’s one exciting thing about today’s moment in AI evolution, this is it.

My chat bot looks forward to talking with your chat bot.

It’s been long cited that people fear public speaking more than death, but in an era where everyone seems to have no problem pointing a camera at themselves and blasting their opinions to milions, I wonder if that’s still true?

Even still, the most savvy content creator can be paralyzed by actually speaking in front of a live audience. That feeling rises up inside… Fight or flight kicks in. Is this anxiety? Or is this a panic attack? I think I’m going to throw up… What if they all hate me? What if I pee my pants on stage and I destroy my career and then I die poor and alone, all because the very fate of my existence hinged on this one speech or presentation or interview!?

Well that’s anxiety talking.

But here’s where people with a theater background have a major advantage in business. I was a theater kid. And I did improv comedy for hundreds of people at a time for over 6 years. I can tell you, that what separates a “performer” from someone who’s terrified of performative situations, isn’t that one experiences anxiety and the other doesn’t.

The reason performers can’t be happy unless there’s an audience is the same reason that adrenaline junkies keep jumping out of planes. Wasn’t once enough??

Some people fear adrenaline, some embrace it. Some people fear performance anxiety, others see it as excitement. For me, I love that tingly feeling coming into a show or sales call or big meeting. That tingly feeling tells me “you’re alive”. And you guessed it, without it for too long, I feel “unalive”.

That’s why performers constantly seek the limelight. If you don’t consider yourself a performer, one of the best things you can do is simply not identify that feeling with “anxiety, fear, or stress”, but rather connect it to “alertness, aliveness, and awakeness.”

Maybe it’s not terror, but excitement. Because on the other side of that emotion is connection, fun, and community. If you could learn to embrace that one feeling, your fear of public speaking would disappear.