ABOUT

ATB is a regional bank in a crowded Canadian market – where all banks use mnemonics, but none employ sonic branding strategy.
ATB is looking to grow market share and is leaning on their new “differentiated experience” model in an industry characterized by a sea of sameness. As music is a powerful way to define experience, ATB wanted a holistic sonic strategy with lots of research and big thinking.
Our plans for sound incorporated every part of ATB, so research, insights and analysis were paramount to guide diverse stakeholders along our musical journey. We found the sonic footprint of our sector does a poor job evoking ATB strengths with listeners. This presented an opportunity to plant our flag and have our brand resonate our strengths with distinction.
As all Canadian financial brands are “caregiver” or “ruler” archetypes, ATB embraced “sage” as our new persona. ATB’s history is ultra-caregiver, helping local farmers and businesses. Their authenticity and empathy are undeniable, but their genuine passion to share expertise to create better possibilities for their customers is authentically “sage”. We could confidently embrace sage and never lose the positive attributes of caregiver embedded in public conscience. The best of both words.
Sage is a wide-open space in our sector – and music can do some heavy lifting towards shifting brand perception. Our task was to interpret the exact sound that would convey all our unique strengths, overlap these with sonic ingredients we found to resonate with other sage brands, and find our own way to create music that hits the mark with our target verticals : everyday, business, and wealth – where our growth demo is leaning younger and appreciates fresh air in a stuffy corporate industry.
Our process makes us consultants before we get into creative work and is very research, analysis and insight driven. We used “music intelligence” and workshopped various teams within ATB and focus groups in Alberta to discover our sonic positioning in the market and define our sonic DNA.
This eventually led us to “Bedroom Pop” a genre that reflects ATB in many ways and is thriving in Canada – led by highly passionate and motivated DIY artists who are “powering their own possibilities” by making hit songs in their bedrooms – not backed by big labels. Kind of like ATB’s not being part of the “big 6” but “powering possibilities” for our clients through our passion for sharing our expertise and discovery, we share common attributes with these artists – like resourcefulness, teamwork, curiosity, innovation, and community. Working with these artists as creators and for activations also provides ATB an opportunity to support Canadian culture with meaning rather than just hosting huge names in a big stadium.
To anchor our sound and strategy, we created a dream pop single with Canadian artist Munya, a rising star who embodies our sonic DNA – dreamy vocals, ethereal soundscapes, and a visceral optimistic attitude.
Guided by our ‘music intelligence’, we developed several songs with her and performed qualitative testing. Fortunately, all tracks outperformed across all audiences, but the incredibly specific feedback we received from different consumer groups on what musical elements elicited the strongest responses and why was creative direction gold. We applied all these learnings to the strongest candidate “Cloud Dance”, which evolved into a “best of” hybrid and subsequently tested off the charts with all audiences across all core strengths and with high cultural relevance.
We did not want a one size fits all song, which is where most strategies end, but this song was a keystone to our larger strategy - a “center” around which we could build a truly flexible “Sonic Identity System”. We created 20 derivative tracks that evoke different emotions organized into libraries specific to ATB wealth, business or everyday customers – all of which was informed by earlier testing feedback. These libraries can be expanded upon over time by other bedroom pop artists via clear audio brand guidelines.
This wide variety of related tracks were then developed into assets of all lengths and styles to meet any opportunity or need. Like a “VIS”, our “SIS” provides a clear set of rules that allow ATB to create new music with any artist or vendor as well as pull from curated production music libraries. We are not tying the brand to a single song– we’re giving them a soundworld with recognizable characteristics and lots of room to stretch, no handcuffs. This is future-proofing the brand with a guided, but limitless identity system.
As ATB’s proactive sharing of “expertise” is their main differentiator, we created a way to express this with sound – taking a cue from Hollywood and the way films often convey brain activity and intelligence – high staccato sounds moving with precision in patterns or arpeggios.
Using examples from film score to dream pop and other contemporary music, we audio mood boarded this idea in both customer and client focus groups to uncover the ingredients that resonate, helping create a very precise “molecular” language for ATB. The result is a detailed approach or ’feel’ rather than any specific melodies or instruments – behaving almost like sound design, and subtle enough to weave throughout our eco-system, in our songs, your ATM deposit, scanning a check, hearing our mnemonic, etc.All Canadian banks use sonic logos – simple standalone memory devices that don’t really say anything about the brand itself. They’re ”earworms”

We wanted our mnemonic to be different – to tell our brand story using (A) molecular sound for “expertise”, (B) 3 notes for “ATB”, and (C) a group vocal to convey our human approach to sharing expertise, an optimistic call-to-action that conveys ATB’s promise of “powering possibility”.
These 3 parts can work in any combination or as standalone “earcons”, and the “molecular” intro is swappable, resulting in 40+ versions of this mnemonic – all unique yet all recognizably ATB. Sentient, a veteran implicit focus-testing lab, proclaimed ATB’s mnemonic to be “one of the strongest performing sounds that we’ve ever had the good fortune to test!”