Six weeks. That is how long one client spent choosing between two sans serifs that differed, as far as I could tell from the room, in the terminal of the lowercase a. Six weeks of PDFs. Six weeks of opinions about warmth. An entire workshop about whether one of them felt too Swiss.
In those same six weeks the social team published eleven videos, and every one of them opened with a stock music bed somebody picked in ninety seconds from a subscription library because it was the third result and it was under two minutes.
Nobody in the room chose that. It chose itself.
Your brand has a sound whether you designed one or not, and at the moment the person deciding it is whoever had the tab open on a deadline.
This used to be a defensible oversight. Feed video autoplayed muted, so a decade of brand systems got built on the assumption that audio was decoration and the real work was making the first frame legible without it. That world is gone. Vertical video plays with the sound on because somebody opened it on purpose. Podcast host reads arrive in a listener's ears on a walk, at conversational volume, with no visual at all. For a growing share of your audience, audio is not the last consideration. It is the entire impression.
The brands that took this seriously did it early and cheap. Netflix owns two syllables. HBO owns a sound that is technically static. Intel bought four notes in the nineties and has never once let go of them. None of that required a composer on retainer. It required somebody deciding once and then refusing to redecide every quarter.
Three things worth doing before your next system goes to print. One, own three seconds: a short, slightly ugly, unmistakable mark you put at the front or the end of everything, chosen deliberately and defended the way you defend the logo lockup. Two, decide the voice literally, not metaphorically. Who reads your scripts. Tempo, warmth, whether it is one narrator forever or a different person every time, whether anybody is allowed to sound like an announcer. Three, write it into the guidelines next to the type scale, with rules and actual files, because anything not written down gets decided by whoever is closest to the deadline.
Nobody in the room chose that. It chose itself.
Barnaby comes running at the sound of the drawer, not the sight of the food. Three seconds of a specific rattle in a specific kitchen and he has crossed the whole apartment, ears first. I have never gotten that response out of a typeface, and I have been arguing about typefaces for a living for nine years.