The Audio Ad You Can See

Global audio company Squeak E. Clean Studios teamed up with VMLY&R Australia and New Zealand to hide a secret image in sound to attract Navy intelligence recruits for highly skilled positions. ‘The Audio Ad You Can See’ is designed to connect a tech audience to Navy intelligence roles and targets the narrow field of intelligence professionals suited to work in the Navy. The ad reaches these intelligence professionals on the “invisible battlefield” where they operate, and can be streamed here. Squeak E. Clean Studios Head of Sound Paul Le Couteur worked carefully to reverse engineer the “world’s first recruitment message hidden in sound,” by producing audio from an image to be analyzed through a spectogram, a tool that analyzes frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum.

To reveal the hidden message, the audio discovered by only the most clever must be processed in a spectrogram, which is used in sound production to repair background noise, crackle, hums and glitches. It’s also used by the Australian Navy to intercept, analyze and identify threats at sea.