Brand Campaign Suite

About the campaign

A national campaign needs one sound that survives being chopped into a dozen lengths. The challenge here wasn't writing a nice piece of music — it was designing a musical identity flexible enough to feel complete at sixty seconds and still land as a six-second bumper. I built a single theme with clear, modular sections, then produced cut-downs that each open on a recognisable hook so no format felt like an afterthought.

Alongside the music, I designed a small kit of branded sonic elements — a logo sting, UI sounds, and transitions — so the brand stays audible even where full music can't play.

The brief

The agency needed one piece of music that could carry a national campaign across television, pre-roll, social, and radio — and still be recognisable when cut down to a six-second bumper. Their previous campaign had used a licensed track that worked beautifully at sixty seconds and fell apart at every shorter length, leaving the brand with no audible identity in the formats that ran most often.

The challenge

A six-second edit gives you roughly two musical events. Most music, chopped that short, becomes a meaningless fragment — you hear the tail of something without ever hearing the thing itself. The real design problem was structural, not melodic: the theme had to be built so that every cut-down opens on a recognisable hook rather than whatever happened to fall at the start of the trim.

Approach

• Design the shortest version first. I wrote the six-second bumper before anything else, then built the longer versions outward from it. That inverts the usual process and guarantees the hook survives every edit.
• Modular sections, fixed harmony. The theme is written in interchangeable four-bar blocks over a single harmonic bed, so sections can be reordered or dropped without creating awkward transitions.
• A separate sonic identity kit. Beyond the music, I built a short audio logo plus a set of UI sounds and transitions, so the brand stays audible in formats where full music can't play.
• Mixed per format, not once. Broadcast, social (often heard on phone speakers), and radio each got their own mix pass with different loudness and low-end treatment.

Scope of work

• One master theme with modular 60 / 30 / 15 / 6-second edits
• Branded audio logo and sonic identity kit
• Sound design and mix for broadcast, social, and radio specs
• Fully licensed, delivered with stems and alternate mixes

Credits

• Composer & sound designAlex Rivera
• ClientNational brand (name withheld — NDA)
• AgencyLumen Records Creative
• MixAlex Rivera
• Broadcast QCBright Coast Studio
• LicenceBuyout, 2-year national, all media

Technical notes

Outcome

• Campaign ran nationally across broadcast, social, and radio
• Zero re-scores needed for the short-form cuts — the modular structure held
• The audio logo was retained for the following year's campaign
• Now the template I use for all multi-format commercial work