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Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed on the following program are those of the persons appearing on the program and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of any of the program's producers or partners. For me, the creative part is associating yourself with people who really have mission, purpose and a rudder. Bob Dylan, he's a counterculture figure, but he's also done more for brands than many people even know about. Welcome to Tagline or a cocktail and join us for inspired conversations with the best storytellers, culture makers, and creators from our friends at Bullock Frontier Whiskey. I'm still waiting for Windex to call about come to my window. Tagline is produced by I Heart Radio and partnership with Advertising Age. Welcome to Tagline. I'm Adam Schlacher, President of Global Innovation at Policies Media, and we're coming to you live from south By, Southwest. I'm very excited to be here in the I Heart Radio studios in Austin, Texas with some true creative legends as we dig into the topic of unleashing constellations and creativity through collaboration. Sitting with me I Singer songwriter and activist Melissa Ethridge, an iconic American musician who sold over thirteen million albums, won two Grammys and an Oscar, and is considered to be one of rock's most enduring and inspiring artists. And we're so excited to have you with us today. Thank you so much. Also with us is Chris Curtin, the Chief Brand and Innovation Marketing Officer for Visa, who oversees the company's strategy to drive the commercialization of digital payment products and platforms, and he also sits on several advisory boards for digital marketing. Welcome Chris, thank you for having me. And last but not least, Jared goostat a k A. Jingle Jared, as President and Chief creative Officer of Jingle Punks, has created audio creative for brand such as Mao, Mix Outback, Steakhouse, Snapple, and countless others. He's well known for his countless TV soundtrack contributions and over the last year loans written and produced for acts as Diverses, Low, Wayne Timberland, Geasy, and Brad Paisley. So welcome Jared. Hello, So this is a great moment to talk about collaboration at South By Southwest. It's just a giant mash up of music, technology, film, and digital and what's now, what's next? And as we break out of our silos and universes and look beyond two new people in places for inspiration, we want to talk about what that means for each of you in your creative processes, and how you find new modes of inspiration, how you partner and collaborate with others, whether in your own field or your own background or genre, or seek out other people with different perspective altogether to help you through your process. Cool, Cool, let's do it. You've been hacking away at jingles. You did eight yesterday? Oh my god, eighty out right? Yeah. I felt like my brain was falling out of my head halfway through the day. We have this amazing partnership with iHeart Media where we met Gael a few years ago and she thought we're wacky creative people and she was telling me all about the ad business that we're building here. And strangely, in the eight years that Jingle Punks had been in business, we had technically never really written jingles. We were more of like a production music library. Like me, I called myself a rock star for a long time. I eventually morphed into Jingle Jar and through this partnership, and she said, they sell this airtime to their clients and they need audio to pair it with, and we became this internal audio creative agency for them. So yesterday it was really kind of a stunt in a way to get clients in the room see what we do, pull back the curtain of how music has made and bring them into the process. It was pretty cool. What qualities do you guys feel make for good collaborators and good partners, Melissa, You guys just cut a new record and collaborate with a whole bunch of new artists and producers that I think, yeah, think most of us are looking for that. It's actually a real personal connection, Like I think Jared Jingle Jared guy. I talked to him last night, and you just instantly connect with this guy. And you want, I imagine visa over here once to connect with people, because that's what you're all about. So wouldn't you want initially when you meet this person, Wow, that connects. So you trust that the art is going to be such or the song or whatever it is that you are giving to your public. When they see it, they feel good. They think of Visa. That's sort of the aman Melissa, Right, Melissa and Visa come out. What's the Visa jingle? Right now? Record? It'll be done right here? Okay, Chris? How do you guys connect with creators? To Melissa's point, I think that human connection is incredibly important. But as a brand with lots of people touching the business and lots of different agency partners and outside collaborators, how do you guys make that kind of a connection for the work that you're doing, You know, with a lot of creative people. We have Morgan Freeman's the voice of Visa, does all of our ads. We have something called Team Visa, which is olympians from all over the world, not based on their athleticis um that's given, but in staid on their character. So we sponsored the refugee Olympic team for the first time in this past Rio Games. There was a young lady from Syria named Usa Martini who was on our raft across the g and c no one could swim in the raft. She jumps out of the raft because it was capsizing, swam it to shore. A German swim coach found out about this recruited her to Germany, put her in Adolf Hitler's personal swimming pool. She trained for the Olympics, qualified for the Olympics, got to the Olympics, we got her on team Visa for the refugee team, and the purpose for her was to be able to tell the people in Syria that she had actually made it alive. So we're like, in this a great moment for you because you're becoming like a professional in so many respects, and she goes, I'm doing this so that people in Syria know that I actually made it. So for us, part of creativity is what Melissa was. Sandwich is like a connection, was also an inspiration, and we're trying to like make Visa ageless. And I think for brands today you have to have mission. You have to have purpose, particularly with millennials, and if you don't, you just look like blanking and selling blank widget. For me, the creative part is associating yourself with people who really have mission, purpose and a rudder. Their boat is going in a certain direction in life. You can disagree with it, but at least there's purpose. My god, will you run for office? Oh? My god? Especially now nowadays, I love that brands like Visa are not being pulled by political tide or winds right now to take on some sort of thought that we know we don't have. We had four people from Visa last night and Melissa said this at the end of her Q and A before the performance, and all of them you could just feel them coming out of the chair because they were so like, yeah, we were who we were two years ago, and we want to stand for something, and we want to stand for a business concept of acceptance. When you leave, we want you to think about, hey, if I have my music card, it's going to be accepted all over the world and all over the world, and we want to be accept all over works. We want to have a borderless world. And then when you get to a borderless world, then you get into deeper topics and some people are afraid of that, and it's great the artists that art can make them not so afraid of. And also these brands become like a platform for everything, for positive stuff, also for creativity and music. At a time when it's harder and harder for people in the music business to actually make money and get stuff out to people. Brands ultimately became the platform for my music. I got into music. I'm gonna age myself. I don't know up or down. But in the early two thousands, when I was trying to get a record deal, labels just were kind of scared. They were looking for something that's popular. Now the second sign it, so there was no incubation or development period. Coming down to south By Southwest and seeing the transformation of how brands have played into the development of artists over the last few years, it's a totally different festival from when I was going down in the early two thousands too. Now and everyone could say, maybe, oh, it's like a negative thing because brands are involved, but it's a good thing because they actually are without strings attached, cutting the check to put artists on stage and put artists in spots and have creative integrations beyond just having them do a standard jingle or something like that. Like a few years ago, was so controversial. When Lady Gaga came out here and did the Dorito stage, They're like, oh my god, she sold out, but the label didn't want to pay for her to come out here, and she put on the show that she wanted. It was a pretty edgy, crazy show, and I don't think that Dorrito's had any strings attached with that. But you have to be willing to let go of convention, right and adapt to what's new and what's current and how you can sort of progress. But it used to be if you were tied to a brand, it was selling out because what artists represented was diversity and this sort of crazy thought that we're all on and how about that? And the brand was no, no, no no. They were prisoner to this old way of thought. And it's switched now. Now the brand is like, no, we are of diversity. So it's kind of cool. It's kind of we're all in this together now. And it's also kind of reverted back to what music's utility used to be in the radio days, where people created music to drive people to buy products. In tin Panaley was music as utility. People just creating sheet music for vaudeville, people coming up with little jingles, and that's where like some of the greatest writers of all time came out of the Barry Manilow's Carol King came out of tin Panalty. Even like in a weird way, Bob Dylan, he's a counterculture figure, but he's also done more for brands in the past throughout his career than many people even know about. It's an important thing to consider that music plays such a critical part in the creative process, whether it's producing commercial old material like for the super Bowl or for the Olympics, or whether it's thinking about that theme song or that tagline, if you will, for a brand. But how do you, guys find inspiration through that, like when you're looking to collaborat with people like have you heard my Pips Potato chip jingle? I love? This is the first little podcast I've ever done that as a bartender and commercial break Frontier Whiskey right here now time to take a break with our friends from Bullet Frontier Whiskey. Please drink responsibly. So what do we have here? Foot? This is the one to milk Punch One to milk Punch, And this is an inspired collaboration that was created using Bullet and Guinness extras out which interestingly enough, I was drinking independent of one another last night. So I'm glad that this is a collaboration that I wasn't sort of planning on joining, but thank you, it's my pleasure. It's a riff on an old milk punch Back in the day, you might have milk or cream with a little bit of a sweetener and either cornac or bourbon. And so I always like having a milk punch. Were the shot of us US, So I'm gonna get before the show, and so the bitterness of the guinness really plays well with the bourbon and I like it. This is absolutely phenomenal. And you're down here at south By this week, and I imagine it's pretty busy. Have you met Jared He's speed Jingles. That's absolutely fantastic. I imagine you're meeting with tons of creative people down here, absolutely interacting with them, helping them with finance, some inspiration. The biggest and most fun thing that we're doing is we do all of the cocktails, all of the alcohol for Willie Nelson's Luck reunion, and so he brings in a lot of the old school great while he Hubbard, Billy, Joe Shaver and they have theirs, and they also bring in the New school Langhorne, Slim, Margot Price, Lily May, a lot of really fantastic artists. So you get these really interesting collaborations with the old School, the New School, the up and comers. It's a lot of fun. That's awesome. Can you tell us a bit about the Barman's Fund? Sure? The Barman's Fund is a nonprofit my friends and I founded years ago in New York City. Before I had my company sourced, I was just a bartender and it could be a very self centered life, partying and its booze. It's late nights, it's money and the money out. And we decided six of us that we would do one shift, pull all the money and do a project with a local soup kitchen. We kept doing it one night a month, everybody would work as shift. We'd pull all the money, Women's Shelter, DV Shelter, Soup Kitchen, the Brooklyn Free Clinic. At one point we had twenty six bartenders and three burrows, so we had five six grand and liquid o a month that we could go to a shelter, nine bed maternity shelter in Brooklyn. What do you need? We need cribs. Cribs are expensive. I didn't know that, but we could go in and buy brand new cribs for this entire shelter. We probably raised and donated over three underground. That's that's amazing, awesome, congratulations, that's fantastic, and so many people in those cities can draw inspiration from everything you guys are doing. Hopefully, hopefully pass that on and continue to trend. Absolutely. Our guests come in and they want to know what we did last month, what we do because the money they put on the bar is going directly to a charity, and they know that, and it's a way if they don't know how to be involved, it's a way they can get involved, and they learn a lot about the charities we donate to. Floyd. Thank you, cheers, my pleasure, Thank you so much. Thank your brands on the front him, grab the spirits. Here, wrap the story, all the bars disappear. There we go, Bullet Frontier whiskey, Please drink responsibly. I'd love to ask you guys, how you found that sort of inspiration to collaborate with other brands or causes they're important to you, and what that process has been like the last time we did something with my Heart, I saw on the sheet that they wanted a c l U to be part of our last jingle day anything that we were doing, and I was like, hell yeah, And I was more excited about that one. And that was a cree by for the brand than anything else. And it actually started as we're gonna do a quick jingle for them to hopefully something that maybe we could maybe talking. Yes, man, I am so glad to be here. I'm meeting Visa. I mean jingle Jared A c l U. That's exciting. And I get what you mean because we write and Okay, we know this is gonna be fun. We hope it gets stuck in people's minds just for a minute and you become a part of their world. But if I can become a part of their world through something that touches their heart and maybe it has them stop and think and helps them be a positive force in the world, if I can be a little part of that, Wow, that's that's beyond money. That's yeah, that's beyond everything. You know. I've certainly done very well in music business. I'm very happy about that. I've been blessed. Still to this day, if someone comes up and says, oh, I didn't kill myself when I was a teenager because I knew you were out or I saw you on the Grammy's bald and did help me with cancer, that means more than anything. That's the stuff that goes in and stays and I'm very grateful for that. This thing with a c l U. And we just did the jingle. I said that's not enough. And then two weeks later, after the dust settled on us making the radio creative, I said, we have to do something bigger. We should create like a full single, bring a bunch of artists into this thing, make a great song first and foremost, so that people actually care tell that story. Maybe a c l use not everybody's thing. I mean, you know, some of people like aren't into civil liberties, you know, but I mean for me, that's kind of an important thing at this moment in time. And uh, you know, having an organization like that that's really putting their Chris, how how do you push yourself inside Visa and the work that you've done to go beyond the Olympics story was one great example. What else? Right now, we're sponsoring a group called Girls Sorter Younger Women, and we're talking ages like fourteen to one. They have a business idea or an idea to start something. They want a TV show, which is a little bit Shark Tank meets Apprentice meets American Idol. So it's like something in that mix, and they're like, we need help get this off the ground, but we don't have a network that will take it. So what we really need is an advertiser or a brand out there that would say if that show were on the air, we would support it. So we told him go. We went with them to Discovery into TLC and it's gonna air now. This spring just really remarkable younger people who have a sense of self and a vision and uh stick to itness that appealed to us. There's also stuff and that why didn't I think of this earlier camp in Africa where we do exactly what Visa does every single day. And mobile payments Everyone knows mobile phones in Africa leap frog laptops and PCs and everything. And so we went to Africa and we said we effectively found any number of use cases where mobile payments could occur. And we found one mother who worked two jobs and then should get on a bus for two hours to go pay someone. We were like, wait a minute, you work two jobs, then you leave your house to get on a bus to go pay the person. They're like, well, if we don't go pay the person, then we get charged extra. There's interest and we're like, we can come up with a mobile payment solution so you never have to leave your house. Yeah, I mean, it's completely what we do, and we should have done it earlier and we should have been there before that. And you know, we're not gonna have an earnings correction with Visa on this, but just to look at her face and realize she shouldn't have to get on that bus for two hours after two jobs, that's worth it. That's unreal. Yeah. So people say a mobile payments and Apple paying all the rest, Like, honestly, go to places like Africa or go to the developing world and see the difference that will make in someone's life and imagine yourself having to work two shifts and then get on a bus to pay someone, not even to get something to pay them. That's incredibly inspirational because making that difference, on the one hand, it's a risk, right, will you be successful in trying to make that difference for that person and improve their life for inspire them or make them feel more comfortable in their own skin, or give them that push they need to sort of be great. I wish this was on television because the old idea of who's the guy's running visa, those old days of all about money and that's it. You don't want to live like that. You mean, you're very nice guy. You look like you look like you have a wife and maybe a few kids, and criticize my apparel too much stuff. I'm aware that you're the visa guy. Yes, yes, you're Chris. I'm not fashioned forward. You're a real guy. And I imagine you don't want to go to bed thinking, wow, I made a lot of money tonight. Period. You love that story about your love. I want to get back to the Hitler's swimming pool, but we shot, Yeah, it does, and we shot the spot in that pool, and we've heard her about it and the significance about her competing and then ultimately getting into the Olympics in his swimming pool at one that he built for his Yeah, yeah, now I get it. I thought, were yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know whether it was the group or whatever, but it was the pool that he utilized. You know, I was driving over here and I was thinking about creativity and I was think what ultimately helps people become creative? And I actually do think it is about mortality. At the end of the day. The sooner any of us realize that the clock ticks down, not up, And the sooner that you realize that you have to make an impact in your own way, modest, personal, with your family, whatever, at your level, just in any way, that's when creativity kicks in, because that's when you question status quo. That's when you question, well, it's always been done that way, it doesn't always have to be done that way. You don't have to be radical, but you just independent thinking. Sometimes that's radical. Disruptive the word literally that was used most to describe me when I was in school, getting into the office every day thing and they tell you it's bad. My mom would come to Lee Back Hebrew Day School every morning and like and draw me off, And in the afternoon I'd be sitting in the Principle's officers like, why you damn here again? But in your career and in your life later on, that disruptive, childlike idea of that the world doesn't have to fit into all these suppering categories is ultimately what was used to describe my company the most when we started, because we were basically trying to put music in TV shows and everyone said you can't do it like that. I had one view on it because my day job, I was a TV editor during the day and I was trying to make it in bands at night. And I realized that the person who had the most control over what music ended up in content was the last person on the assembly line, the editor. So I was like, I'll just put my music in there. No one will notice. MTV was really pissed when I put all my music in a wonderful show called Engaged and Underage, But I quickly figured out about contracts and are buying com and they're like, you can't just do that, but like, but they were really nice to be there, like if you want to do this, here's how you properly go about it. And that was the beginning of how jingle Punks really started. It was disruption, and along the way, all these music supervisors like, you can't do that, you can't bypass this this, and I was like, I don't know the other way. I made a career on my brand of doing things that people do. Weren't you know, you shouldn't do that, you shouldn't come out, you should end ask for forgiveness, you don't ask for permission, right, Yeah, just being truthful became, you know, an act of defiance and just being myself. I remember one of the first things when I was diagnosed with cancer, my business people around me were like, do you want people to know you have cancer? It might seem weak, and I was like, you know, yes, of course, I want people to know. This is real, this is true. Actually, recently, in the Grammys, I was there and they always show clips of performances passed during the commercial break, but your bad performance of the Janis Joplin song my wife and she was like, oh my gosh. She's like I have chills the whole thing watching it because they played back the greatest moments. It was unreal. That was a crazy time. And I got asked to pay tribute to Janis and I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna be bald well to be bald, okay, yeah, might as well just go out there and yes. And that was twelve years ago, and to this day, people still come up to me, Oh my mom, she flew off her wig after that, just the things that happened. I had a nurse come up and say, oh my god, everybody was walking around bald after that. It's crazy. Were you inspired through that process to create differently everything things as a creative person, especially as a songwriter. I'm not sitting around in my bedroom writing broken hearted songs anymore because I'm happily married with children. Life is very different. Life changes you, children change you. Children and cancer are probably two things that changed my writing the most. And I find I can still write passionately inside from what moves me, the desires I have, the pains, the hopes, the fears, and that's what we write from thinking about where we are in the backdrop of the collaboration that goes on the south by And if you spend any time in Austin, just the collaboration that happens in this town between craters and technologists, musicians, chefs, just everyday people that are absorbed it. What have you guys seen and heard spending some time down here this week that you're inspired by, Like, what's the most innovative thing you've seen or heard? And it could be bullshit, it could be something that you think is real and gonna make a difference today, or something that just opens up your mind to the possibilities. And Chris, you mentioned all the ways that you guys are trying to find moments to improve people's lives right, or for your products actually make an impact, not just make money, but to make a difference. What sort of things have you seen down here that you're drawing some inspiration from. We had someone on our team do analysis of the Jetsons, or werenlar with this show the Jetsons? There another classic? Okay, it's about eight of what was in the Jetson's actually exists today. And one clearing exception is the car that you can fly to a briefcase and folding the briefcase. Now I'm waiting for that, a smart home, the car that can fly. Elon Musk has actually put it in the pattern of course to be able to look at early designs and prototypes for doing that. With Tessa, you would watch an like Dude, that's not gonna ever happen. As much progress has been made that you know, you can pick apart that show and show actual things in society today that can do that. I think it's remarkable. The one thing I'll say about Elon Musk is he is a disruptor to large companies. Aren't going to be the people who do this is not gonna be Ford or Chevy. It's going to be someone who has a the great idea and be the ability to do this stuff. And he said, there's no incentive for some of these big companies to really want to get rid of cars that use s. It's all possible when you actually want to solve the problem. Didn't Amazon just deliver its first drone? That's futuristic. Really, that's a huge topic of today's conversation and Washington, be honest, is robotics. Amazon is not just doing robots and delivery. They're doing robots and manufacturer and an assembly line and distribution, which is interesting. I went to presentation that Ellen gave and someone said to him, Ellen, you know, why are you building all these expensive recharging stations across the United States? And so he said, well, actually, if I don't do that, I'll never know how to build the recharging stations. I'm gonna need to get to Mars. We'll have to write a jingle. Yeah's tagline. Yeah, come on when you think about all that. But we're not there yet. But the opportunity to collaborate with technology today is so vast. Right when you guys think about collaboration, what's a good example of it. What's a bad example of it? The best and worst example is the splitting of the atom. You know, things get solved and invented when there's a time and pressure. That film Fat Man and Little Boy. In that one moment, the evolution of like our thinking went from like we were around for hundreds of thousands, millions of years and just like invented electricity and then all of a sudden, we get to nuclear and then nothing's really evolve all that much since then you open up Pandora's box there. But that is a great example of some of the smartest people in the world coming together to solve a problem. And you'll probably in our lifetime never solve a problem like that collectively with great thinkers ever. Again, like in that moment, artist collaboration, like you mentioned before, like it used to be like the artist is selling out collaborating with the brand, and there's probably tons of examples of that. How do you avoid that? How do you avoid bad collaboration? It's on both parts. I'm still waiting for Windex to call about come to my window. But it's perfect or Microsoft, so you know, I mean it's right there. I actually haven't been branded if that's what you call it. I don't know. I've never been connected to a brand, and I always thought I'm pretty much outside the brand scope because of the gay. I don't fit into every household. Yet as time goes by, I've become more and more normal. Really, I'm looking like the next door. So I imagine there will come a brand. This is a great brand, No, I just well, once we saw your reaction to the guitar, I was like, we've I got a guitar for free yesterday. But that's a whole other podcast was so genuine and incredible. I mean, it was so sweet though the way you seriously, I mean, the stereotype would be you don't need another guitar, but you look like a little kid opening up a box at Christmas. It was like, oh my god, well it's it's sweet because if I were to do a wind Next commercial, come to my window, I would get a couple of boxes of wind next. You know, it's great, that's fine. This had nothing to do with Gibson. I was doing it in the place that it wasn't required that they give I was truly moved. That's not a cheap one. Oh my god. I know the White understood last night. I had it in never mind. So one last question, who is your dream collaborator? Oh my god, well I actually got to work with my dream collaborator. I got to collaborate with him. I sang with him, which is in a way of collaboration on my unplugged and it was Bruce Springsteen. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those moments you're like, let's let life just I would love to write with him sometime. I haven't collaborated with many folks on the writing. Jared and I were going to collaborate. Sometimes you meet someone you knows for a reason. It was great first hang and this is these things happen for me, my dream collaborator. I named almost all of my kids after Beatles or Wilberry, so it's a Beatle if I could, you know, obviously Paul would be unreal. But hey, maybe he'll work with me on my song Poop on the Potty for Poop, the musical that I'm putting together for Huggies. I want to put it on the first ever branded Broadway play. A Little Jealous of Your Life. As dumb as it sounds, it's a It's fantastic. What's your tagline, my tagline jingle all the way. It's brilliant that just wrote itself perfect. Mine has been, always will be Speak true, Speak true. I love it to be strong, Speak true. Melissa Jared. Thank you guys so much. Thank you I heard, Thank you, Bullet, Thank you, south By Southwest. Uh this is this has been a blast. And uh we hope you guys all enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed creating. And we'll see soon you've been listening to Tagline presented by our friends at Bullet Frontier Whiskey at the Bullet Distilling Company, Louisville, Kentucky. Please drink responsibly. We want to hear what you thought. Joined the discussion on Twitter now by using the hashtag tagline. On the next episode of Tagline, I Heart Media CMO Gayle Troberman hosts the discussion about what inspires creativity, featuring film producer Dan Lynn, Deutsche, North America lead Mike Sheldon, and designer Michael Bennetville. Catch all our episodes and I Heart Radio slash tagline in the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Yea audiation
Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed on the following program are those of the persons appearing on the program and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of any of the program's producers or partners. For me, the creative part is associating yourself with people who really have mission, purpose and a rudder. Bob Dylan, he's a counterculture figure, but he's also done more for brands than many people even know about. Welcome to Tagline or a cocktail and join us for inspired conversations with the best storytellers, culture makers, and creators from our friends at Bullock Frontier Whiskey. I'm still waiting for Windex to call about come to my window. Tagline is produced by I Heart Radio and partnership with Advertising Age. Welcome to Tagline. I'm Adam Schlacher, President of Global Innovation at Policies Media, and we're coming to you live from south By, Southwest. I'm very excited to be here in the I Heart Radio studios in Austin, Texas with some true creative legends as we dig into the topic of unleashing constellations and creativity through collaboration. Sitting with me I Singer songwriter and activist Melissa Ethridge, an iconic American musician who sold over thirteen million albums, won two Grammys and an Oscar, and is considered to be one of rock's most enduring and inspiring artists. And we're so excited to have you with us today. Thank you so much. Also with us is Chris Curtin, the Chief Brand and Innovation Marketing Officer for Visa, who oversees the company's strategy to drive the commercialization of digital payment products and platforms, and he also sits on several advisory boards for digital marketing. Welcome Chris, thank you for having me. And last but not least, Jared goostat a k A. Jingle Jared, as President and Chief creative Officer of Jingle Punks, has created audio creative for brand such as Mao, Mix Outback, Steakhouse, Snapple, and countless others. He's well known for his countless TV soundtrack contributions and over the last year loans written and produced for acts as Diverses, Low, Wayne Timberland, Geasy, and Brad Paisley. So welcome Jared. Hello, So this is a great moment to talk about collaboration at South By Southwest. It's just a giant mash up of music, technology, film, and digital and what's now, what's next? And as we break out of our silos and universes and look beyond two new people in places for inspiration, we want to talk about what that means for each of you in your creative processes, and how you find new modes of inspiration, how you partner and collaborate with others, whether in your own field or your own background or genre, or seek out other people with different perspective altogether to help you through your process. Cool, Cool, let's do it. You've been hacking away at jingles. You did eight yesterday? Oh my god, eighty out right? Yeah. I felt like my brain was falling out of my head halfway through the day. We have this amazing partnership with iHeart Media where we met Gael a few years ago and she thought we're wacky creative people and she was telling me all about the ad business that we're building here. And strangely, in the eight years that Jingle Punks had been in business, we had technically never really written jingles. We were more of like a production music library. Like me, I called myself a rock star for a long time. I eventually morphed into Jingle Jar and through this partnership, and she said, they sell this airtime to their clients and they need audio to pair it with, and we became this internal audio creative agency for them. So yesterday it was really kind of a stunt in a way to get clients in the room see what we do, pull back the curtain of how music has made and bring them into the process. It was pretty cool. What qualities do you guys feel make for good collaborators and good partners, Melissa, You guys just cut a new record and collaborate with a whole bunch of new artists and producers that I think, yeah, think most of us are looking for that. It's actually a real personal connection, Like I think Jared Jingle Jared guy. I talked to him last night, and you just instantly connect with this guy. And you want, I imagine visa over here once to connect with people, because that's what you're all about. So wouldn't you want initially when you meet this person, Wow, that connects. So you trust that the art is going to be such or the song or whatever it is that you are giving to your public. When they see it, they feel good. They think of Visa. That's sort of the aman Melissa, Right, Melissa and Visa come out. What's the Visa jingle? Right now? Record? It'll be done right here? Okay, Chris? How do you guys connect with creators? To Melissa's point, I think that human connection is incredibly important. But as a brand with lots of people touching the business and lots of different agency partners and outside collaborators, how do you guys make that kind of a connection for the work that you're doing, You know, with a lot of creative people. We have Morgan Freeman's the voice of Visa, does all of our ads. We have something called Team Visa, which is olympians from all over the world, not based on their athleticis um that's given, but in staid on their character. So we sponsored the refugee Olympic team for the first time in this past Rio Games. There was a young lady from Syria named Usa Martini who was on our raft across the g and c no one could swim in the raft. She jumps out of the raft because it was capsizing, swam it to shore. A German swim coach found out about this recruited her to Germany, put her in Adolf Hitler's personal swimming pool. She trained for the Olympics, qualified for the Olympics, got to the Olympics, we got her on team Visa for the refugee team, and the purpose for her was to be able to tell the people in Syria that she had actually made it alive. So we're like, in this a great moment for you because you're becoming like a professional in so many respects, and she goes, I'm doing this so that people in Syria know that I actually made it. So for us, part of creativity is what Melissa was. Sandwich is like a connection, was also an inspiration, and we're trying to like make Visa ageless. And I think for brands today you have to have mission. You have to have purpose, particularly with millennials, and if you don't, you just look like blanking and selling blank widget. For me, the creative part is associating yourself with people who really have mission, purpose and a rudder. Their boat is going in a certain direction in life. You can disagree with it, but at least there's purpose. My god, will you run for office? Oh? My god? Especially now nowadays, I love that brands like Visa are not being pulled by political tide or winds right now to take on some sort of thought that we know we don't have. We had four people from Visa last night and Melissa said this at the end of her Q and A before the performance, and all of them you could just feel them coming out of the chair because they were so like, yeah, we were who we were two years ago, and we want to stand for something, and we want to stand for a business concept of acceptance. When you leave, we want you to think about, hey, if I have my music card, it's going to be accepted all over the world and all over the world, and we want to be accept all over works. We want to have a borderless world. And then when you get to a borderless world, then you get into deeper topics and some people are afraid of that, and it's great the artists that art can make them not so afraid of. And also these brands become like a platform for everything, for positive stuff, also for creativity and music. At a time when it's harder and harder for people in the music business to actually make money and get stuff out to people. Brands ultimately became the platform for my music. I got into music. I'm gonna age myself. I don't know up or down. But in the early two thousands, when I was trying to get a record deal, labels just were kind of scared. They were looking for something that's popular. Now the second sign it, so there was no incubation or development period. Coming down to south By Southwest and seeing the transformation of how brands have played into the development of artists over the last few years, it's a totally different festival from when I was going down in the early two thousands too. Now and everyone could say, maybe, oh, it's like a negative thing because brands are involved, but it's a good thing because they actually are without strings attached, cutting the check to put artists on stage and put artists in spots and have creative integrations beyond just having them do a standard jingle or something like that. Like a few years ago, was so controversial. When Lady Gaga came out here and did the Dorito stage, They're like, oh my god, she sold out, but the label didn't want to pay for her to come out here, and she put on the show that she wanted. It was a pretty edgy, crazy show, and I don't think that Dorrito's had any strings attached with that. But you have to be willing to let go of convention, right and adapt to what's new and what's current and how you can sort of progress. But it used to be if you were tied to a brand, it was selling out because what artists represented was diversity and this sort of crazy thought that we're all on and how about that? And the brand was no, no, no no. They were prisoner to this old way of thought. And it's switched now. Now the brand is like, no, we are of diversity. So it's kind of cool. It's kind of we're all in this together now. And it's also kind of reverted back to what music's utility used to be in the radio days, where people created music to drive people to buy products. In tin Panaley was music as utility. People just creating sheet music for vaudeville, people coming up with little jingles, and that's where like some of the greatest writers of all time came out of the Barry Manilow's Carol King came out of tin Panalty. Even like in a weird way, Bob Dylan, he's a counterculture figure, but he's also done more for brands in the past throughout his career than many people even know about. It's an important thing to consider that music plays such a critical part in the creative process, whether it's producing commercial old material like for the super Bowl or for the Olympics, or whether it's thinking about that theme song or that tagline, if you will, for a brand. But how do you, guys find inspiration through that, like when you're looking to collaborat with people like have you heard my Pips Potato chip jingle? I love? This is the first little podcast I've ever done that as a bartender and commercial break Frontier Whiskey right here now time to take a break with our friends from Bullet Frontier Whiskey. Please drink responsibly. So what do we have here? Foot? This is the one to milk Punch One to milk Punch, And this is an inspired collaboration that was created using Bullet and Guinness extras out which interestingly enough, I was drinking independent of one another last night. So I'm glad that this is a collaboration that I wasn't sort of planning on joining, but thank you, it's my pleasure. It's a riff on an old milk punch Back in the day, you might have milk or cream with a little bit of a sweetener and either cornac or bourbon. And so I always like having a milk punch. Were the shot of us US, So I'm gonna get before the show, and so the bitterness of the guinness really plays well with the bourbon and I like it. This is absolutely phenomenal. And you're down here at south By this week, and I imagine it's pretty busy. Have you met Jared He's speed Jingles. That's absolutely fantastic. I imagine you're meeting with tons of creative people down here, absolutely interacting with them, helping them with finance, some inspiration. The biggest and most fun thing that we're doing is we do all of the cocktails, all of the alcohol for Willie Nelson's Luck reunion, and so he brings in a lot of the old school great while he Hubbard, Billy, Joe Shaver and they have theirs, and they also bring in the New school Langhorne, Slim, Margot Price, Lily May, a lot of really fantastic artists. So you get these really interesting collaborations with the old School, the New School, the up and comers. It's a lot of fun. That's awesome. Can you tell us a bit about the Barman's Fund? Sure? The Barman's Fund is a nonprofit my friends and I founded years ago in New York City. Before I had my company sourced, I was just a bartender and it could be a very self centered life, partying and its booze. It's late nights, it's money and the money out. And we decided six of us that we would do one shift, pull all the money and do a project with a local soup kitchen. We kept doing it one night a month, everybody would work as shift. We'd pull all the money, Women's Shelter, DV Shelter, Soup Kitchen, the Brooklyn Free Clinic. At one point we had twenty six bartenders and three burrows, so we had five six grand and liquid o a month that we could go to a shelter, nine bed maternity shelter in Brooklyn. What do you need? We need cribs. Cribs are expensive. I didn't know that, but we could go in and buy brand new cribs for this entire shelter. We probably raised and donated over three underground. That's that's amazing, awesome, congratulations, that's fantastic, and so many people in those cities can draw inspiration from everything you guys are doing. Hopefully, hopefully pass that on and continue to trend. Absolutely. Our guests come in and they want to know what we did last month, what we do because the money they put on the bar is going directly to a charity, and they know that, and it's a way if they don't know how to be involved, it's a way they can get involved, and they learn a lot about the charities we donate to. Floyd. Thank you, cheers, my pleasure, Thank you so much. Thank your brands on the front him, grab the spirits. Here, wrap the story, all the bars disappear. There we go, Bullet Frontier whiskey, Please drink responsibly. I'd love to ask you guys, how you found that sort of inspiration to collaborate with other brands or causes they're important to you, and what that process has been like the last time we did something with my Heart, I saw on the sheet that they wanted a c l U to be part of our last jingle day anything that we were doing, and I was like, hell yeah, And I was more excited about that one. And that was a cree by for the brand than anything else. And it actually started as we're gonna do a quick jingle for them to hopefully something that maybe we could maybe talking. Yes, man, I am so glad to be here. I'm meeting Visa. I mean jingle Jared A c l U. That's exciting. And I get what you mean because we write and Okay, we know this is gonna be fun. We hope it gets stuck in people's minds just for a minute and you become a part of their world. But if I can become a part of their world through something that touches their heart and maybe it has them stop and think and helps them be a positive force in the world, if I can be a little part of that, Wow, that's that's beyond money. That's yeah, that's beyond everything. You know. I've certainly done very well in music business. I'm very happy about that. I've been blessed. Still to this day, if someone comes up and says, oh, I didn't kill myself when I was a teenager because I knew you were out or I saw you on the Grammy's bald and did help me with cancer, that means more than anything. That's the stuff that goes in and stays and I'm very grateful for that. This thing with a c l U. And we just did the jingle. I said that's not enough. And then two weeks later, after the dust settled on us making the radio creative, I said, we have to do something bigger. We should create like a full single, bring a bunch of artists into this thing, make a great song first and foremost, so that people actually care tell that story. Maybe a c l use not everybody's thing. I mean, you know, some of people like aren't into civil liberties, you know, but I mean for me, that's kind of an important thing at this moment in time. And uh, you know, having an organization like that that's really putting their Chris, how how do you push yourself inside Visa and the work that you've done to go beyond the Olympics story was one great example. What else? Right now, we're sponsoring a group called Girls Sorter Younger Women, and we're talking ages like fourteen to one. They have a business idea or an idea to start something. They want a TV show, which is a little bit Shark Tank meets Apprentice meets American Idol. So it's like something in that mix, and they're like, we need help get this off the ground, but we don't have a network that will take it. So what we really need is an advertiser or a brand out there that would say if that show were on the air, we would support it. So we told him go. We went with them to Discovery into TLC and it's gonna air now. This spring just really remarkable younger people who have a sense of self and a vision and uh stick to itness that appealed to us. There's also stuff and that why didn't I think of this earlier camp in Africa where we do exactly what Visa does every single day. And mobile payments Everyone knows mobile phones in Africa leap frog laptops and PCs and everything. And so we went to Africa and we said we effectively found any number of use cases where mobile payments could occur. And we found one mother who worked two jobs and then should get on a bus for two hours to go pay someone. We were like, wait a minute, you work two jobs, then you leave your house to get on a bus to go pay the person. They're like, well, if we don't go pay the person, then we get charged extra. There's interest and we're like, we can come up with a mobile payment solution so you never have to leave your house. Yeah, I mean, it's completely what we do, and we should have done it earlier and we should have been there before that. And you know, we're not gonna have an earnings correction with Visa on this, but just to look at her face and realize she shouldn't have to get on that bus for two hours after two jobs, that's worth it. That's unreal. Yeah. So people say a mobile payments and Apple paying all the rest, Like, honestly, go to places like Africa or go to the developing world and see the difference that will make in someone's life and imagine yourself having to work two shifts and then get on a bus to pay someone, not even to get something to pay them. That's incredibly inspirational because making that difference, on the one hand, it's a risk, right, will you be successful in trying to make that difference for that person and improve their life for inspire them or make them feel more comfortable in their own skin, or give them that push they need to sort of be great. I wish this was on television because the old idea of who's the guy's running visa, those old days of all about money and that's it. You don't want to live like that. You mean, you're very nice guy. You look like you look like you have a wife and maybe a few kids, and criticize my apparel too much stuff. I'm aware that you're the visa guy. Yes, yes, you're Chris. I'm not fashioned forward. You're a real guy. And I imagine you don't want to go to bed thinking, wow, I made a lot of money tonight. Period. You love that story about your love. I want to get back to the Hitler's swimming pool, but we shot, Yeah, it does, and we shot the spot in that pool, and we've heard her about it and the significance about her competing and then ultimately getting into the Olympics in his swimming pool at one that he built for his Yeah, yeah, now I get it. I thought, were yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know whether it was the group or whatever, but it was the pool that he utilized. You know, I was driving over here and I was thinking about creativity and I was think what ultimately helps people become creative? And I actually do think it is about mortality. At the end of the day. The sooner any of us realize that the clock ticks down, not up, And the sooner that you realize that you have to make an impact in your own way, modest, personal, with your family, whatever, at your level, just in any way, that's when creativity kicks in, because that's when you question status quo. That's when you question, well, it's always been done that way, it doesn't always have to be done that way. You don't have to be radical, but you just independent thinking. Sometimes that's radical. Disruptive the word literally that was used most to describe me when I was in school, getting into the office every day thing and they tell you it's bad. My mom would come to Lee Back Hebrew Day School every morning and like and draw me off, And in the afternoon I'd be sitting in the Principle's officers like, why you damn here again? But in your career and in your life later on, that disruptive, childlike idea of that the world doesn't have to fit into all these suppering categories is ultimately what was used to describe my company the most when we started, because we were basically trying to put music in TV shows and everyone said you can't do it like that. I had one view on it because my day job, I was a TV editor during the day and I was trying to make it in bands at night. And I realized that the person who had the most control over what music ended up in content was the last person on the assembly line, the editor. So I was like, I'll just put my music in there. No one will notice. MTV was really pissed when I put all my music in a wonderful show called Engaged and Underage, But I quickly figured out about contracts and are buying com and they're like, you can't just do that, but like, but they were really nice to be there, like if you want to do this, here's how you properly go about it. And that was the beginning of how jingle Punks really started. It was disruption, and along the way, all these music supervisors like, you can't do that, you can't bypass this this, and I was like, I don't know the other way. I made a career on my brand of doing things that people do. Weren't you know, you shouldn't do that, you shouldn't come out, you should end ask for forgiveness, you don't ask for permission, right, Yeah, just being truthful became, you know, an act of defiance and just being myself. I remember one of the first things when I was diagnosed with cancer, my business people around me were like, do you want people to know you have cancer? It might seem weak, and I was like, you know, yes, of course, I want people to know. This is real, this is true. Actually, recently, in the Grammys, I was there and they always show clips of performances passed during the commercial break, but your bad performance of the Janis Joplin song my wife and she was like, oh my gosh. She's like I have chills the whole thing watching it because they played back the greatest moments. It was unreal. That was a crazy time. And I got asked to pay tribute to Janis and I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna be bald well to be bald, okay, yeah, might as well just go out there and yes. And that was twelve years ago, and to this day, people still come up to me, Oh my mom, she flew off her wig after that, just the things that happened. I had a nurse come up and say, oh my god, everybody was walking around bald after that. It's crazy. Were you inspired through that process to create differently everything things as a creative person, especially as a songwriter. I'm not sitting around in my bedroom writing broken hearted songs anymore because I'm happily married with children. Life is very different. Life changes you, children change you. Children and cancer are probably two things that changed my writing the most. And I find I can still write passionately inside from what moves me, the desires I have, the pains, the hopes, the fears, and that's what we write from thinking about where we are in the backdrop of the collaboration that goes on the south by And if you spend any time in Austin, just the collaboration that happens in this town between craters and technologists, musicians, chefs, just everyday people that are absorbed it. What have you guys seen and heard spending some time down here this week that you're inspired by, Like, what's the most innovative thing you've seen or heard? And it could be bullshit, it could be something that you think is real and gonna make a difference today, or something that just opens up your mind to the possibilities. And Chris, you mentioned all the ways that you guys are trying to find moments to improve people's lives right, or for your products actually make an impact, not just make money, but to make a difference. What sort of things have you seen down here that you're drawing some inspiration from. We had someone on our team do analysis of the Jetsons, or werenlar with this show the Jetsons? There another classic? Okay, it's about eight of what was in the Jetson's actually exists today. And one clearing exception is the car that you can fly to a briefcase and folding the briefcase. Now I'm waiting for that, a smart home, the car that can fly. Elon Musk has actually put it in the pattern of course to be able to look at early designs and prototypes for doing that. With Tessa, you would watch an like Dude, that's not gonna ever happen. As much progress has been made that you know, you can pick apart that show and show actual things in society today that can do that. I think it's remarkable. The one thing I'll say about Elon Musk is he is a disruptor to large companies. Aren't going to be the people who do this is not gonna be Ford or Chevy. It's going to be someone who has a the great idea and be the ability to do this stuff. And he said, there's no incentive for some of these big companies to really want to get rid of cars that use s. It's all possible when you actually want to solve the problem. Didn't Amazon just deliver its first drone? That's futuristic. Really, that's a huge topic of today's conversation and Washington, be honest, is robotics. Amazon is not just doing robots and delivery. They're doing robots and manufacturer and an assembly line and distribution, which is interesting. I went to presentation that Ellen gave and someone said to him, Ellen, you know, why are you building all these expensive recharging stations across the United States? And so he said, well, actually, if I don't do that, I'll never know how to build the recharging stations. I'm gonna need to get to Mars. We'll have to write a jingle. Yeah's tagline. Yeah, come on when you think about all that. But we're not there yet. But the opportunity to collaborate with technology today is so vast. Right when you guys think about collaboration, what's a good example of it. What's a bad example of it? The best and worst example is the splitting of the atom. You know, things get solved and invented when there's a time and pressure. That film Fat Man and Little Boy. In that one moment, the evolution of like our thinking went from like we were around for hundreds of thousands, millions of years and just like invented electricity and then all of a sudden, we get to nuclear and then nothing's really evolve all that much since then you open up Pandora's box there. But that is a great example of some of the smartest people in the world coming together to solve a problem. And you'll probably in our lifetime never solve a problem like that collectively with great thinkers ever. Again, like in that moment, artist collaboration, like you mentioned before, like it used to be like the artist is selling out collaborating with the brand, and there's probably tons of examples of that. How do you avoid that? How do you avoid bad collaboration? It's on both parts. I'm still waiting for Windex to call about come to my window. But it's perfect or Microsoft, so you know, I mean it's right there. I actually haven't been branded if that's what you call it. I don't know. I've never been connected to a brand, and I always thought I'm pretty much outside the brand scope because of the gay. I don't fit into every household. Yet as time goes by, I've become more and more normal. Really, I'm looking like the next door. So I imagine there will come a brand. This is a great brand, No, I just well, once we saw your reaction to the guitar, I was like, we've I got a guitar for free yesterday. But that's a whole other podcast was so genuine and incredible. I mean, it was so sweet though the way you seriously, I mean, the stereotype would be you don't need another guitar, but you look like a little kid opening up a box at Christmas. It was like, oh my god, well it's it's sweet because if I were to do a wind Next commercial, come to my window, I would get a couple of boxes of wind next. You know, it's great, that's fine. This had nothing to do with Gibson. I was doing it in the place that it wasn't required that they give I was truly moved. That's not a cheap one. Oh my god. I know the White understood last night. I had it in never mind. So one last question, who is your dream collaborator? Oh my god, well I actually got to work with my dream collaborator. I got to collaborate with him. I sang with him, which is in a way of collaboration on my unplugged and it was Bruce Springsteen. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those moments you're like, let's let life just I would love to write with him sometime. I haven't collaborated with many folks on the writing. Jared and I were going to collaborate. Sometimes you meet someone you knows for a reason. It was great first hang and this is these things happen for me, my dream collaborator. I named almost all of my kids after Beatles or Wilberry, so it's a Beatle if I could, you know, obviously Paul would be unreal. But hey, maybe he'll work with me on my song Poop on the Potty for Poop, the musical that I'm putting together for Huggies. I want to put it on the first ever branded Broadway play. A Little Jealous of Your Life. As dumb as it sounds, it's a It's fantastic. What's your tagline, my tagline jingle all the way. It's brilliant that just wrote itself perfect. Mine has been, always will be Speak true, Speak true. I love it to be strong, Speak true. Melissa Jared. Thank you guys so much. Thank you I heard, Thank you, Bullet, Thank you, south By Southwest. Uh this is this has been a blast. And uh we hope you guys all enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed creating. And we'll see soon you've been listening to Tagline presented by our friends at Bullet Frontier Whiskey at the Bullet Distilling Company, Louisville, Kentucky. Please drink responsibly. We want to hear what you thought. Joined the discussion on Twitter now by using the hashtag tagline. On the next episode of Tagline, I Heart Media CMO Gayle Troberman hosts the discussion about what inspires creativity, featuring film producer Dan Lynn, Deutsche, North America lead Mike Sheldon, and designer Michael Bennetville. Catch all our episodes and I Heart Radio slash tagline in the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Yea audiation
