Why Audio Matters More Than You Think
When people think about marketing, public appearances, political campaigns, or building a personal brand, they naturally tend to focus on the visuals. Cameras, lighting, graphics, staging, and presentation all get plenty of attention.
But there is another part of the equation that can make or break how you are perceived: audio.
In this video, I take a technical—and decidedly non-political—look at a recent video of Amy Acton that circulated online and became the subject of criticism from her opponents. My point isn’t about politics or about taking sides. It’s about what happened to the sound, and what could have been done differently.
Oddly enough, many Acton supporters who are defending this clip don’t fully understand what went wrong.
Live events create a complicated audio environment. The sound that works for an audience sitting in an auditorium isn’t necessarily the sound that should be sent to television, social media, or other media outlets. A live audience has its own acoustics, crowd noise, applause, cheering, and the natural sound coming from the stage. The media feed needs to be mixed separately so that the person speaking—and the reaction of the audience—sound natural and balanced.
In the example discussed in the video, the speaker’s microphone is isolated and sounds noticeably different from what you would expect when someone is addressing a crowd. A properly designed media mix could have combined the speaker’s microphone with strategically placed ambient microphones, creating a much more natural representation of the event.
And that’s the larger lesson.
Poor audio can make a good presentation look bad.
Whether you’re a business owner, CEO, political candidate, public speaker, nonprofit leader, or someone building a personal brand, everything you say is part of your brand. If the audio sounds harsh, thin, distorted, overly isolated, or disconnected from the environment, the audience may not consciously understand what’s wrong—but they will notice that something doesn’t sound right.
I’ve spent a good portion of my career working with audio, and I realize that people like me are sometimes dismissed as “audio geeks.”
That’s okay.
But when you’re putting yourself, your company, your campaign, or your organization in front of an audience, it might be worth listening to the audio geeks before the bad recording becomes the thing everyone remembers.
Because audio isn’t an afterthought.
