An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Be authentic. It’s really hard to be someone you’re not. Similarly, if a brand tries to be something it’s not, consumers can smell right through that.
As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Salo Sterental.
Salo Sterental is cofounder of SoStereo, the music for advertising company aiming to unlock access to the world’s best music for brands & creators. Salo is a start-up founder, musician, and creative partner who has worked in the music industry for more than 15 years.
Salo has been partnering with Grammy-winning music engineers and production artists since he was 17. He has held roles as a producer for Zumba Fitness, as an engineer for The Flipstones (Jason Derulo, Jake Miller), and in marketing for Sony Music Entertainment. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music production and engineering from Berklee College of Music.
As a student at Berklee, Salo partnered with Beto Azout to launch SoStereo to share the power of real music and artists with creative professionals to make it affordable and available on demand. They developed a revolutionary platform that helps artists monetize their work and breaks down the walls of access to music, and the technology they developed was the perfect solution for advertisers to easily find the compelling tracks they need to connect with audiences through unique sounds in advertisements.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I always knew I wanted to go into the music industry and that’s what lead me to Berklee College of Music. I met Beto Azout there — my then roommate and now business partner — and we both immediately connected over our passion for both the creative and business sides of the industry.
After graduating, we both worked in various roles in the music industry and recognized the same issue — having worked with Zumba and other major brands, we saw their need for a better and more cost effective way to leverage music across their content (ads, social, etc). From our experience working for the major labels and their artists, we saw how many artists were struggling to monetize their work beyond sales/streaming. And finally, how there was just no way to access that music for commercial licensing use — meaning artists’ music were literally sitting on a shelf while demand for music licensing was exploding. We knew that something needed to change to break down the walls of access to music and that technology was the perfect solution.
We launched SoStereo to unlock access to the world’s music for brands & creators — to share the power of real music by real artists with creative professionals and make it affordable and available on demand. We developed a platform that helps artists monetize their work and gives brands/advertisers a solution to easily find the compelling music they need to connect with audiences through music.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I think early on, when you’re first building a company with no proper marketing education background, you make some very rookie marketing mistakes. One of the first mistakes we made was channel-audience fit. We thought, “we’re an online startup, we should be doing SEM & Display ads” and quickly proceeded to run experiments with both. We paid little to no mind thinking about whether this was the way our audience wants/expects to see us. We tried different copy, designs and ultimately stopped running them a couple of months later when we didn’t see results. It was still early and while our audience wasn’t as clear as it is today, the bottom line at the time was, we were pursuing ad agency producers and creatives. And it took years after we had stopped running those ads that we had built the proper relationships in the space to figure out WHY they didn’t work — we were targeting our audience through a B2B channel that they didn’t use for work-related things/products. A complete misalignment on channel-audience fit.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We’re music people first and foremost, so I’ll start with that. But as we’ve built SoStereo, we built it as a tech company at our core. Our investment and development in AI music discovery, data-crawlers & data enrichment, platform architecture and scalability — all of these things that have never been done or tried before in this space make us an extremely unique solution for brands to unlock the power of music for their content and artists to unlock more value for their art. It’s why we know we can finally unlock access of music for use on content in a scalable manner where both brands and ARTISTS win. And that’s important to us — making sure artists win and not bastardizing the value of music like other stock libraries- because like I said, we’re music people first.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We recently launched Season 2 of our ‘What About the Music’ Podcast. The weekly show is hosted by our co-founder Beto Azout and features intimate conversations with the top tastemakers in advertising, music and the creative arts. We are really excited to share the unique perspectives, trends and insights from industry leaders with anyone who is interested in the power of music and the ability it has to build strong brands. Music is important — but it’s kind of like one of those things everyone knows to be true but is afraid to say out loud. So, by getting the top industry execs to yell it from the rooftops (podcast), we believe it will create an organic groundswell to place the proper importance on music in advertising/branding it deserves.
Ok let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?
To me, brand marketing is what makes someone pay attention. It’s what gets someone in the door — the credibility and trust factor to push the person into the next step — consideration. Product marketing helps answer the what/why/how — what is it, why do I need this, and how do I use it. That’s critical for to push the consumer through consideration and ultimately to purchase. It needs to be a balanced build — you can get people in the door, but if you don’t have anything advertising what/why/how, chances they transact are lower. The opposite is true as well — you can have great product marketing but without a brand, chances are you won’t even get them to look your way.
Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?
A brand is an extension of you. It’s an extension of your company’s philosophy and ethos. Ultimately, it is your why. And research shows more often than not, people don’t ‘buy’ the ‘what’, rather they buy the ‘why’. People buy purpose more than they buy products. And to me, building a brand is basically the communication of that purpose — they’re synonymous. Building purpose should be everyone’s first step — not just for your audience & clients, but for your employees as well — a proper brand helps align everyone and make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
In addition, and whether you like it or not, you’re always building your brand — either in the positive or the negative. What I mean by that is even the actions you DON’T take, the places you’re NOT in — those build your brand as well. Say you’re a vegan brand but don’t focus on building your brand, i.e. communicating your purpose in the places and ways your audience expects. That absence will now be part of your brand — at best, your audience won’t think of you, but at worst they will think about you negatively — as disingenuous or phony.
Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.
- Live your purpose & values. Some of the most distrusted brands are ones who have wonderful purposes but their actions (and those of their employees) speak differently. It creates inconsistency, confusion and ultimately distrust. There are brands out there that advertise as if they’re saving the world, being inclusive and caring, but a quick google search will show just how detrimental they are to the environment in the pursuit of profits. Not quite aligned.
- On the flip side, the most beloved brands live their values. Think of Patagonia donating revenues to sustainability causes. Perfectly aligned.
- Consistency is key. That’s not just about visual brand or copy — it’s about everything. Yes, visuals and copy — but also values, sound, actions, etc. Everything a brand says, does, looks like, partners with, supports, condones — everything needs to be consistently LIVING the brand and its purpose.
- People are important. From the leaders down to the employees, everyone is an extension of your brand (to bigger or lesser degrees). You need to make sure that you hire people that will be strong representatives & stewards of your brand & purpose.
- Be authentic. It’s really hard to be someone you’re not. Similarly, if a brand tries to be something it’s not, consumers can smell right through that.
A brand is only as good as its product. If you do all of this work to create brand and purpose and get people in the door, but your product doesn’t meet expectations or creates some of the inconsistencies mentioned above, that’s a surefire way to have your brand lose all trust & credibility you built.
In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job building a believable and beloved brand. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?
I mentioned Patagonia in a previous post because of how they lived their values of sustainability, but also actions during the pandemic could be used as another example of them living their brand value. Obviously, no conversation about brand would be complete without mentioning Apple. Look at how their brand aligns to their purpose and aligns to their advertising/marketing initiatives and then how the product delivers on that. “The Best User Experience via Innovative hardware, software…” etc. And its brand perfectly aligns to that — all they do is show you how they execute on that, whether it be via advertising, via new product (Apple CarPlay or AirPods), how they do product marketing of those products, etc. And Apple literally has fans as a brand. That’s the power of complete alignment.
In advertising, one generally measures success by the number of sales. How does one measure the success of a brand building campaign? Is it similar, is it different?
I think sales is always the primary measure no matter what. Even if you’re converting 1 percent of leads, a stronger brand should, in theory, drive more traffic — if you go from 10 leads to 100, you will still 10x your bottom line too. With that said, I think there’s other ways to measure brand building campaigns. Leads/traffic is a simple one — a stronger brand gets people to pay attention more, then ideally, you’ll be driving more people to become leads (however you measure that). We’ve seen that firsthand as we focused on cultivating the SoStereo brand, all of a sudden, we had more sign-ups, more downloads, etc.
Another way to measure success that’s a little more complicated is brand affinity. From having casual conversations with your clients to algorithms that can measure affinity via what people say (and how often they say it) about your brand in the digital domain. This can be an important insight into “word-of-mouth” growth or organic growth. It’s great to hop on a call with a client and hear “I see you guys have been killing it lately, congrats.” Depending on your strategy, it can boost credibility, fomo, etc.
What role does social media play in your branding efforts?
It plays a huge role in continuously communicating our why — we’re here to unlock the power of music for brands & artist alike. It’s huge because it helps artists see that we’re on their side and that we can help them unlock revenue and make a living with their music. It helps brands see the level of credibility we have when working with the Apple’s and the Nike’s of the world. You build that trust from both sides; you get people to pay attention and to want to learn more and understand how we’re being as successful as we’re being. And then next thing you know, they’re in consideration — a brand sending us a brief or going on the platform and searching; an artist sending us their music to try to be a part of our movement.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think if we could zap “understanding of other people” into everyone’s minds, we’d be at least 80 percent of the way to a more inclusive and supportive world. Too often we get caught in our own personal life/worldview without understanding another person’s culture/history/story/etc. To loosely quote Cornell West; it’s not about ignoring our differences and pretending they don’t exist, but to learn about them and celebrate them together.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I think that’s like saying choose your favorite song — an impossible task. But some quotes I live by: Michael Jordan’s “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” or Thomas Edison’s “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Those are some of my favorites because in business and in life, the worst thing that can happen is someone tells you know. In Spanish we say “el que no llora, no mama” — the baby that doesn’t cry, doesn’t eat. Sometimes you have to ask, try, do, because it’ll never be worse than not trying.
We are blessed that very prominent leaders in business and entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I’m going to get greedy and include two because they’ve been a duo of late: Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. From music moguls to partners in Beats to now other music ventures, I think they’re the examples of what I aspired my career to be. Like them, I started my career behind the scenes as a producer and songwriter, albeit at a much much smaller scale LOL. And taking those lessons into the entrepreneurial world of building a company — again at a much much smaller scale for now than what Beats became. To innovate in the music industry, it’s just my dream. And to be able to have dinner with them, the stories and lessons they must have must be priceless. If there was a Dr. Dre/Jimmy school, sign me up.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Instagram: @sostereomusic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sostereo/
Twitter: @SoStereo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sostereomusic/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Salo Sterental Of SoStereo: Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
