“Sports,” said Bill Bergofin, SVP of marketing for NBC Sports, “is an all-senses experience whether on TV or in person, and a lot of what we try to get to in our promotional content is that same sort of passion and excitement that sports brings. It’s a reasonable facsimile for the experience itself and the emotions that the fan or the player may be experiencing.”

It seems pretty straightforward when he puts it that way, but of course the art of crafting sports promo is anything but. Distilling the powerful feelings that are part of being a fan into a clean and effective :60, :30 or less is as hard as throwing a complete game shutout—every player on the team has to be playing at the top of their game for it to happen.

One of the players on the NBC Sports roster, which tends to throw a lot of shutouts, is a company that doesn’t get mentioned too much, because what it does works at an invisible level. Hobo Audio Company has, in recent years, been engaged in an incredibly fruitful collaboration with NBC Sports, time and again adding evocative sound designs and mixes that raise the emotional bar of high-profile projects.

The man who has handled the brunt of Hobo’s sound work for NBC Sports is a former punk rocker named Max Holland, who has a knack for mixing sonic textures that convey a seemingly limitless tapestry of emotions. As a kid, he told Brief, he already expressed a keen understanding of the power of audio, noticing that when the volume was turned down on horror films, they lost their ability to frighten him. In that sense, scary movies and sports are kindred spirits in terms of the importance sound plays in each medium’s ability to raise the hackles on a viewer’s neck. And Holland is more acutely aware than ever of the visceral impact his work can have.

“My goal when working on any sports piece is getting it to sound great but then sitting with it and making the little changes and tweaks that gives you goose bumps,” he said. “The goal is to serve each piece and work it until the hair on your arm stands up when you take a step back and play it down. If it’s not doing that then it’s not finished.”

The spot “Coliseum,” for instance, which was recently released for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, is “a simple piece of just voice and music” said Holland, “paying homage to the Islanders and their fans as they play their last season at Nassau Coliseum before moving to Brooklyn… They are a storied team with an intense and loyal following and moving to Brooklyn is truly a new era for the team and their fans.”

Which means that those who already follow the Islanders are also already experiencing heightened feelings over this pending transition. But it was important for Holland to express that nostalgia in a way that anyone could grasp, not just Islanders fans. So he carefully calibrated the spot’s music and vocal tracks to subtly underscore the gravity of the situation.

“The key,” he said, “is in the delivery of the voiceover and the emotional swells of the music and getting the pacing right” to let “this moment in time shine through to an audience who might not know that story.”

Diehard sports fans don’t need to be told to watch their favorite teams. The goal for a sports promo is to make what’s being marketed a universal experience that anyone can appreciate whether they follow the opponents involved or not. In this regard, sound might be an almost more effective sensory input than sight. It’s the sense that can most effectively immerse the viewer in the mindset of an athlete, and when we understand another human’s mindset, we find ourselves compelled by them whether we root for them as a sports fan or not.

Holland and his colleague at Hobo, sound designer, Diego Jimenez, proved this in the below promo for NBC Sports’ coverage of the 2014 Spanish Grand Prix, concocting a sound design that literally brings the viewer inside the head of British Formula One racing star Lewis Hamilton. Or at least inside his helmet.

For that award-winning spot, Holland and Jimenez built tension without any music at all. There is the lock-down click of the helmet and we are in Hamilton’s world. The visuals are vague but the sounds are crisp and clear: the swishing of race flags, the murmur of reporters, the buzz of high-octane engines speeding around a track, and the driver’s own interior monologue—all swirling around him/us without ever turning into chaos. It’s hard to think of a more effective way of connecting a viewer to an athlete, and while it’s just a beautifully conceived and executed piece of work all around, “the dynamics of the sound in that spot are what really make it work,” said Holland.

But while the precision of the sound effects inside the helmet are impressive, for this writer the spot’s most powerful moment comes at the :22 mark, when the tension of the buildup to the race finally, mercifully breaks with a perfectly executed, pulsating drum line that takes us toward the finish line. The relief it provides is palpable, almost as though you’ve just finished a race yourself.

Hobo president and CEO Howard Bowler said that moments like that are made possible by taking a minimalist approach to the sound mix.

“It’s really not what you put in, it’s what you don’t put in,” he said. “That allows you to pump the mix where you need to. It allows the ear to enjoy the experience.”

That technique of moderation is also on display in the Hobo/NBC Sports collaboration “Bedtime,” a :60 for NBC Sunday Night Football that finds a father sneaking into his son’s bedroom so the two of them can watch football on a tablet under the covers. Its sweet poignancy belies a courageous choice that Holland had to grapple with while mixing the sound: You never actually hear what any of the characters are saying, only vague hints of their speech.

Holland said that he and NBC Sports wanted the viewer “to be able to project their own conversation into the story, because it has a sweet sentiment of a family sharing a love of football that rings true for many people watching.”

That takes us back to the emotional universality that lets us all relate to what’s being offered—maybe some of us don’t care about football, but anyone can see the unspoken bond sports can forge between a father and his son, and be moved by it. Though achieving that intentionally vague dialogue effect, according to Holland, was trickier than it would seem.

“You don’t want it to sound odd, as if there was a mistake in the soundtrack,” he said. “That’s where working the level and treatment of the voice became really important. The approach was to take great care and really pay attention to the story instead of the technical aspects of the mix.”

From the creativity on display in Hobo’s NBC Sports work, it’s clear there is a trusted relationship between the two parties, and that Hobo has earned the freedom to not only experiment with and add to a spot with its audio elements, but sometimes help shape or reshape its entire direction.

“The best part of working with a client like NBC Sports is the respect they have for my craft,” said Holland. “They always bring me pieces that have fantastic creative, video and graphics work and my job is to elevate all those elements through the medium of sound, and they know that sound can make or break a spot.”

Added Bergofin: “NBC Sports is seen as being incredibly high-quality in everything we do, whether it’s the actual game presentation or the events themselves. We want to match that in promotion and we have a very exacting sense of how we want to deliver a level of elegance or poignancy whether it be an aggressive or quiet sort of intensity… The partnership with Hobo has been able to really deliver that to us.”

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