Sprinkling Musical Stardust on WACL’s 100th Birthday
The idea of a bespoke WACL music was first raised in 2019 by Jane Carter of Universal. A long-time supporter of WACL, Jane came to a WACL dinner and started chatting to Carol Reay about her ideas for the 100th birthday celebrations. Excited by Carol’s ambition of using the 100th to celebrate the past as well as look to the future, and by her determination to do ‘extraordinary things’, Jane asked whether Universal could help by composing some music for the celebrations. The answer was a resounding yes and that’s how WACL’s first ever music came to be commissioned.
At the beginning of 2023, a team comprising Carol, Jane Callingham and Jayne Barr was formed to bring the idea to reality. We were to work with a pioneering musical mnemonic division of Universal, Elias Audio Branding. Elias would create a sound that would accompany the WACL 100 ident and represent WACL’s emotional DNA. (Musical idents are Elias’s speciality and they are responsible for many of the industry’s best known, including Columbia Pictures, Honda and FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.) We were pretty excited!
Our brief to them was to reflect a list of selected WACL words – strong, purposeful, inspiring, supportive and leadership – in a way that would be immediately identifiable and memorable.
Their 3-stage creative development process was rigorous. Starting with a deep-dive into WACL’s history, they followed with an exploration of the objectives and emotional equities associated with the club, before moving ultimately into defining a new sound.
We were presented with a wide selection of different musical compositions, all by female composers. Each met the brief in a different way and as music tends to be subjective in its appeal, it was a pretty difficult task to make choices. After two rounds of this we did reach a consensus and most of you now will be familiar with the final result. We love it for its inspirational feel, its blend of new and traditional, its vocal texture and its overall celebratory vibe – and so many other reasons. We hope that you share our enthusiasm and would encourage you all to use it on as many WACL occasions as possible.
And that’s not the end of it!
We are also lucky enough to be producing a WACL album, courtesy of Universal Music. Jane Carter and her team have briefed a selection of young, up-and-coming female composers to write songs that will appeal to the next generation of WACL-ers. The album is called She, Her, Us and has a distinctly ‘poppy’ feel, with lyrics that reflect these composers’ personal takes on the essence of the club. It will have eleven individual tracks, including a thematic version of the WACL ident. The vinyl pressing will be produced in time for Christmas, but so you can all enjoy the music before then, a QR code will be available at the WACL 100 Birthday Party from which you can download the tracks.
We are so excited about having our first WACL music and delighted that we’ve been able to make this happen as part of the WACL 100 Celebrations. It’s a wonderfully memorable and distinctive set of assets and will undoubtedly help raise the club’s profile. Thank you SO much to Jane Carter and the teams at Universal and Elias for enabling it.
You can hear the WACL musical mnemonic on the short promo film we made to help promote the Channel 4 documentary Mad Women, that was inspired by 100 years of Women in Advertising & Communications Leadership.
And if you haven’t yet got your tickets to the WACL Summer Festival where we’ll celebrate our 100th birthday, WACL members can buy them here.
Special thanks to Jayne Barr for sharing the story of this initiative.
About the author
The Others & Me; Author of No More Menemies