Culminating Experience Reflection
Danel Illarramendi
Reflection of the Culminating Experience Project that was done as a consulting
Project for Warner Chappel Spain

Global Entertainment and Music Business
Berklee College of Music
Valencia, Spain
July 2015
W a r n e r
  C h a p p e l
  S p a i n
 
 
 
 
 
 

Danel
 Illarramendi
 

Reflective paper CE

Index
Introduction
 ........................................................................................................................
 3
 
Summary of the project
 .................................................................................................
 3
 
Results
 ..................................................................................................................................
 4
 
Process
 .................................................................................................................................
 6
 
Next Steps
 ...........................................................................................................................
 9
 
Contribute
 to
 the
 discipline
 and
 profession
 ..........................................................
 10
 
Impact
 on
 the
 student
 completing
 the
 work
 .........................................................
 10
 
Bibliography
 ....................................................................................................................
 11
 


 

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Introduction
When I first came to Berklee, my future career in the music industry
was blurry, probably as blurry as my knowledge of the industry. Even though I
might have wanted to create a business plan for my Culminating Experience
(from now on called CE), I did not have any idea and, since I wanted to be
employed by a multinational company by the end of the year, I decided to go
for a Consulting Project.
Taking Marjorie Scheker’s publishing class and taking into account that
she works for Warner Chappell Spain, I saw a good opportunity to ask her for
a consulting project. I understood the importance that synchronization is
gaining in publisher’s revenue streams and I thought that doing a study on
how Warner Chappell could better market their music to brands would be a
great project to work on and something that could actually be worth for the
company. Marjorie Scheker thought the same way and after signing the
agreements, I started with my project, “How to better market Warner’s
catalogue to agencies and brands”.

Summary of the project
As mentioned above, this project consisted on a consulting project for
the publisher Warner Chappell Spain. To complete their question, “How to
better market our music to brand”, I needed to conduct a research that


 

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consisted in both, secondary information research and primary information
research. Whereas the secondary information research consisted on articles
and books about music advertising, the impact in music in advertising and
even how psychological theories like neuroscience impacted in music
advertising, the primary information research was, in the end, what brought
most value to the project. It consisted in firstly, analyzing the music of
successful Spanish advertisements of all time, trying to find similarities
between them and seeing whether the music was key for them or not. Later
on, I conducted a series of interviews with different profiles of industry
specialists, not only music industry experts but, in fact, I also reached
marketing specialists of IT companies and consumer goods companies. This
led to interesting answers where sometimes all the interviewees clearly
agreed on, and where sometimes, the variety of answers led to an interesting
approach depending on the specialization area and hence, industry.

Results
The results of the conducted investigation were interesting. It resulted
clear that advertising agencies and brands needed data to take decisions, that
Branded Content was going to take more and more market share in the
advertising industry, that advertising agencies like to ease their job in song
selection and that there was not enough knowledge of music in advertising
when selecting the songs. Therefore, I concluded in some recommendations
that I presented to Warner in my paper.
My overall recommendations, summarized, are the following:


 

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1. Market Research on Catalogue: Brands and advertising agencies
would like to have data to make decisions on which songs to use in
their advertisements. Up until now, there has been no objective and
data driven decision options for brands. All decisions are made
because “feels like a song it would fit the ad and the brand”. That is
why making a market research could be valuable for Warner Chappell.
The market research could be done with both, direct to consumer
surveys, asking the consumers how do they feel by a particular song in
their catalogue; and big data provided by digital streaming platforms on
consumer’s behavior on music consumption, where Warner Chappell
could see when and how do consumers consume their catalogue.
2. Interactive song selection application: An application that would
ease the life of advertising agencies could be key to differentiate
between other competitors. An interactive application that could be use
from the advertiser’s computer, where they could filter all the song that
they are looking for through its characteristics (that could range from
genre to prize of synchronization), would be easier for both, the
advertiser and the publisher.
3. Playlists for Branded Content: If a client is looking into creating a
branded

content

campaign,

Warner

Chappell

could

offer

a

standardized prized playlist (that fits the needs of the client) so that the
brand can implement it into their campaign. This is especially
interesting for the brand because it can help them to have a more


 

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integrated, multi-device campaign since they could create a sponsored
playlist in digital streaming platforms.
4. Become

music

branding

consultants:

The

synchronization

department has to step up and become experts on the advertising
world, the music advertising world, the psychology of advertising and
music and, of course, the best fit of music in advertisements. This
could expand their business interaction with their clients, offering a
bigger, more reliable revenue stream than just selling songs to
advertisers.

Process
The first step of the project was to meet Marjorie and frame the
problem and the project. That way, we decided to work on the CE in the
following way. I would first gather secondary information, 8 articles or books
related to the topic I was researching and write a secondary information
conclusions paper. Once having that done, I would prepare Focus Groups,
that would be conducted in 4 different regions of Spain (Madrid, Barcelona,
Basque Country and Valencia), about the perception of the music in
advertising and how people felt with some music or other. Once the interview
where conducted, I would prepare an abstract, write down the methodology,
the profile of the interviewees and the results of the “Focus Groups Primary
Information Research”. Once having that settled down, I was going to
interview some advertising agencies and trying to gather as much information
as possible from them for the topic that I wanted to research on, to finally write


 

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the methodology of the interviews, the results and the final paper. I avoided
conducting an online survey from the begging because of the complications
that it would bring. People would’ve need to watch different advertisements
and then express their opinion about them in the following questions. This, not
taking place in a control environment, was unlikely to provide results worth
taking into account in the research since probably, no one would watch all the
advertisements or watch them full length.
After having my first meeting with Ferrán, my supervisor for this project,
this plan changed though. We thought that I did not have enough resources to
do a relevant research based on focus groups, since I would need to conduct
much more Focus Groups than what I had planned so that the data was
reliable. This way, after the meeting, the planned changed.
The main differences between the first plan and the actual process that
I followed during the work on the CE was that in this last one, I did not conduct
Focus Groups, I broaden my secondary information research and I
interviewed to more profiles rather than just advertising agencies. I ended up
having interviews with different profiles of marketing specialists. An
advertising agency professional, an IT company marketing professional, a
consumer goods marketing professional, a digital streaming professional and
a branded content and music industry specialist.
I started gathering primary information on successful advertising
campaigns in Spain and analyze how the music impacted on them in
February. While doing this, I also conducted my secondary information
research. These two researches took place from February up until May.


 

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Focusing one different topics, the secondary information research was the
hardest. I found out that this was a very exploded topic and most articles did
not provide nothing especially new or interesting for my research. That is why
in the final paper, I only implemented the ones that I thought were more
relevant for the specific case Warner Chappel wanted me to research on.
By the end of March I also started conducting my first interview with
Kiko Fuentes Nuñez, branded content manager of Newcast Multimedia. This
first interview was possible because of Ferrán Coto, my project supervisor,
since Kiko Fuentes was his friend and contact. Ever since, I approached
numerous companies to try to get interviews with a very little rate of success. I
ended up reaching 57 professionals to try to get interviews and in the end, I
could only interview people with whom I had a closer relationship with since
the rest did not answer my emails. This though, ended up positively because,
as mentioned above, I could reach people of 5 different specialization areas.
From April to June, there was not a time where I conducted most my
interviews. In fact, I tried to adapt the interview to the time that would most fit
the interviewee and the rest four interviews came from April to June having an
interview pretty consistently every two weeks. The order was the following:
Kiko Fuentes Nuñez, Alex Gibelalde, Leo Nascimento, Pedro Esnaola and
finally Pedro Oyarzabal, who’s interview took place the 1st of June.
After conducting all interviews and having my research done, I started
writing the final paper of the CE. Even if I had not finished the whole writing
part for my trial presentation on June 17th, I had analyzed the whole research


 

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and was able to present the most important thing of the project, the
recommendations.
The last week before turning in the project (June 17th to June 25th), and
after the trial presentation feedback, I have finished writing my final paper and
I have been getting ready for my trial presentation on July 3rd.
If the project is successful, later during the summer, I will go to Warner
Chappell Spain’s offices in Madrid to present the consulting project there.

Next Steps
As mentioned before, the next step will be to present the Project in
Warner Chappel’s offices in Madrid. After doing so, the company should
evaluate my recommendations and discuss whether they will try to implement
them or not. I know that most of my recommendations are pretty ambitious.
That is why in the paper I have tried to propose a more economical solution to
try to get a similar (yet, probably less effective) answer to the market.
I would be open to discuss anything the company would like me to, and
will be happy to help them. Being a consulting project though, my official work
would be done once I present the consulting project in their offices in Madrid.
From them on, the responsibility of implementing or not the strategies, as well
as tracking the results, would be of the company since they did not offer me a
continuity of the project after I graduate.


 

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Contribute to the discipline and profession
This paper will hopefully help Warner Chappell to gain market share in
Spanish synchronization industry and be preferred by most brands and
advertisement agencies when they are looking for a publisher to synchronize
their advertisements. It feels like major publishers still need to innovate in this
business area that, even though is increasingly growing its revenue, they are
still working as they did a decade ago. Given the dynamism of current the
current market, especially in those industries where IT is impacting (like
music), major publishers should step up their game and try to be more
competitive having a more young and dynamic culture. It is my hope that this
paper shows them new possibilities to innovate and new things they can do
to, not only improve their own revenue, but also be the first ones to change
the major publisher’s paradigm in advertisements.

Impact on the student completing the work
Completing the work has showed me different perspectives of the
music industry and how music can be useful for this way beyond listener’s
experience. It has helped me to get a little bit more connected with some
Spanish marketing specialists and, even if it was not a direct consequence,
having an interview with Leo Nascimento and closing up our relationship
helped me to get an internship in Deezer in Barcelona.


 

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Before completing this project, I had never worked in a project that had
such a big timeline on my own. I really had to work on my planning and, even
if I got stressed a lot of times for not doing the work I needed to do some
days, I ended up finishing the project on time.

Bibliography

Interview:
Scheker, Marjorie: “Consulting Project for Warner Chappell”, 07 November
2014
Coto, Ferrán: “Consulting Project for Warner Chappell”, 22 January 2015


 

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