Ross Penney, our CEO, has written a lot recently about our culture and values at AVC Immedia. He’s a passionate believer that all our interactions, whether internal or external, should be unpinned by these behaviours.
I thought it would be worth writing about how that culture shapes the content we provide in all of AVC Immedia’s services, such as audio, for our clients and how our values help us deliver services that stand out from the others.
We never ever forget that it’s people who consume our content. What we do is heard by millions of humans every single day. That might seem obvious but it’s also easy to forget. We could spend our days ticking boxes on to-do lists so that we can generate an invoice at the end of every month but that would be awfully process driven. Instead, we put the audience at the heart of every decision we make. Will this delight them? Will it be noticed? How will this make someone feel?
We’ve been doing this a long time. It would be easy to say, “we know what we’re doing here, leave us alone”. However, we believe in listening to what the audience want. Whether that is doing vast studies to understand the music tastes around the world or observing the likes and dislikes of our friends and families, we listen to the audience.
Yes, we’re experts in our field and only too happy to offer advice and ideas but that is always informed by keeping a keen ear on the audience. In truth, it’s them who tell us everything we know.
This is key to us. We work in a field that is full of smoke and mirrors with manufactured stories and made-up claims, all in the name of entertainment. That’s not for us. Firstly, the audience can smell rubbish from 3 feet away. Secondly, we won’t put any of our people in the position of having to say something they don’t believe in, why would we?
We have privileged jobs. We spend most of the day listening to music and producing creative audio. We strive to never lose sight of how lucky we are. It’s easy to say we have jobs we’re passionate about. It’s harder to put that passion into everything we do.
We’re passionate about every single one of our audio channels, we’re constantly monitoring what we play, thinking of fresh ideas and generally caring about them as if they were our children. When you hear one of our channels, I don’t know if you can hear the passion behind it. I do know that if our audio was produced without passion, you’d spot it straight away.
Yeah, this is a tough one in the audio world! But if visibility means being noticed then that’s what we aim for. Good audio can brighten someone’s day, create an awesome atmosphere, or make you feel like you’re with your best friends. We can’t do bland; we can’t do unnoticeable; we can do a bit to improve the day of the millions of people who hear what we do. And we love that.
These words are easy(ish!) to write and they could be forgotten about tomorrow but trust me, having a strong culture and set of values at AVC Immedia is what sets our content apart.
Written by Euan McMorrow, Content Director for AVC Immedia.