The Loudest Sonic Brand in Sport Is Two Jets
Ask anyone last Saturday morning to name the most famous airline in the world and the answer would have been Emirates. Ask again on Sunday and the answer was Airlink, a South African regional carrier, after its two passenger jets swept low over Cape Town Stadium ahead of the Springboks test and set off a media storm that reached well beyond rugby.
Our own John Smeddle has written about it for LBB’s Thought Leaders, and his argument is one we make for a living: the reason that moment landed had less to do with what eighty thousand people saw, and everything to do with what they heard.
It was never about the sight
South African rugby has opened its home tests with a flyover since 1995. Three hundred tons of aircraft passing low enough to crick your neck is quite a picture, but the picture is not the payload. The payload is turbofan engines at up to 30,000 pounds of thrust, screaming past 100 decibels inside the sound trap of a packed stadium. As John puts it, no one can ever sit unflinchingly through the sound of these flyovers, however many times they have seen them.
Our sonic branding work for a club and a city that sings.
View case study ↗Why it works as sonic branding
Strip away the aviation and what remains is textbook sonic branding mechanics. The same sound, in the same place, carrying the same emotional charge, repeated for thirty years. That is exactly how a sonic identity is built: consistency, context and feeling, compounding over time until the sound alone stands for the occasion. Most brands invest years of deliberate work to earn that response. South African rugby got there by accident, with jet engines.
Our original music for the airline everyone named first last Saturday.
View case study ↗The punchline
John’s conclusion is the kind an agency rarely writes about its own market: if you sell sonic branding, do not bother pitching the Springboks. What they have right now is working just fine. For every other brand, the lesson still applies, because the mechanics that make a flyover unforgettable are the same ones that make a sonic logo pay for itself.
Read John’s full piece on LBB.
Our original music for the biggest day in Dubai sport.
View case study ↗ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE… AND OUR NEWSLETTER.
