It’s happened to all of us…you’re going about your day and suddenly you realize you’ve been humming the same tune for an hour and you can’t get it out of your head. Then you wonder…”where did I hear that song?” and it hits you, it’s from that commercial!
Sound is an important part of advertising. The powerful crescendo of instruments or a catchy lyric can have an emotional and resonating impact. Sometimes it’s mainly the music in an advertisement that catches our attention or moves us. This is the job of music production and publishing houses like Mophonics that create original music for film and TV advertising. Adam Harriman is Managing Director and Partner at Mophonics and uses Daylite to establish clear communication between the LA and NY offices.
Marketcircle: How did you get involved in this business?
Adam Harriman: I was an aspiring tennis player when I was younger and unfortunately suffered an injury. I was on crutches for a while and that’s around when I picked up the guitar and started playing. As it turns out, I was a natural and taught myself. Eventually I became an apprentice to a composer where I learned many of the skills required to compose and record music scores. I started collecting recording equipment, made as many professional relationships as I could and eventually gained enough experience to pursue it professionally.
Marketcircle: Who are your typical clients?
Adam: Our typical clients are ad agencies, television networks and film production companies. We work globally, most of our clients being in the US, but also including Asia, Europe and South America.
Marketcircle: What do you enjoy most about working at Mophonics?
Adam: I like the opportunity to be creative and to work with a lot of extremely talented people. Our team is second to none. I also love the challenge of growing a business.
Marketcircle: What was most difficult about your job before Daylite?
Adam: The ability to quickly see what our people were working on and to transfer tasks and projects between staff. Before Daylite, it took a lot of hand holding and individual contact to get a clear picture of how our projects were progressing and what resources were being utilized. All of the details that come along with any project. With Daylite we don’t have to ask those questions, all the information is there. We can open a project and instantly see all the client information, resources and the progress.
Marketcircle: How does Daylite help you with your workflow?
Adam: Daylite is an indispensable part of our business. When first starting out, we were mostly creative minded people so organization and work flow was not our primary focus. As we evolved as a company it became clear we needed our communication and project management workflow to be top notch as well. We’re bicoastal and we needed a way for both offices to communicate and access client information, projects, etc. After doing research, I found Daylite to be a flexible solution for a small company like ours. We were all native Mac users so it was an ideal fit. We found that we were able to customize Daylite to work seamlessly with our production needs and made it very easy. Daylite is intuitive enough that we didn’t need any formal training or a dedicated IT person to support it. It’s been a huge asset for us. We use pipelines to monitor the progress of our productions so we can see what phase of production we’re in. We use activity sets to break down reoccurring tasks that happen on our typical projects and delegate those tasks accordingly to our team members.
Marketcircle: What are your favourite time savers in Daylite?
Adam: Smart lists are something we use quite a bit. We work with a lot of different composers so we break down the composers by strengths. We tag a composer as being good for electronic or orchestral, etc. Within that list I can see what other projects they’ve been on even if I wasn’t involved in the project personally. It gives me a better context for their skill sets and whether or not they’d be a good fit for a current or upcoming project . Geographic and role tagging for our clients is another time saver. We divide our clients by region (West Coast, Mid West, Europe, etc.) and tag them accordingly. This enables us to have a real time snapshot of our client base in any given region and to quickly drill down to more specific detail to help navigate strategic decisions.
Marketcircle: What’s been your favourite project to work on?
Adam: We’ve had the good fortune to be able to work on some amazing projects over the years but if I had to pick a favorite it would probably be the work we’ve done with Apple. They always seem to bring out the best in us. Here’s one we’ve done with them:
See who Mophonics is working with on Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud.