B~Log — our build log
The Machines

I Make My Own Commercials

Every spot for every product here is made in-house — the pictures, the voice, and the music. The beats come out of software I wrote. Here are three of them, and three walkthroughs with my own beats underneath.
Anthony EspositoAugust 21, 20264 min read

Twenty-one years in media means I have bought a lot of advertising for other people and paid a lot of production houses to make the thing being advertised. I know the invoice. So when it came time to put commercials behind our own products, the question wasn't which agency. It was: what would it take to do this here?

Three things have to come from somewhere — the picture, the voice, and the music. We make all three.

Three commercials

AE Wire — meeting notes that put every action item one tap from the moment it was said. On your device, nothing uploaded. This is the sixty.

AE Wire — 60 seconds.

AE Comply — compliance readiness and IT system health, coming to the store.

AE Comply — coming soon.

ESPO Fret — the guitar app that listens to you play. That's me playing.

ESPO Fret — "It Hears You."

The beats are mine, and the software is mine too

The music under our spots isn't licensed from a stock library. It isn't licensed from anywhere. I write it — and I write it in FunkMaster, which is software I built for exactly that.

That's the part I'd want to know if I were reading this. It isn't just that the beats are original. The instrument is original. Every track under every commercial on this page came out of a program that didn't exist until I needed it to.

There are three volumes of them now. They're not locked up either — if you want to put one under your own video, take it.

The voice

Some of these are read by me. The two above are read by Brian, one of the voices that runs on our own voice machine. Not a subscription service, not a per-character bill, not a vendor who owns the read. It runs here, and the voice belongs to the company.

That matters more than it sounds like it does. When a voice is rented, every revision is a transaction and every product launch has a meter running on it. When it's yours, a commercial costs an afternoon.

And a machine to assemble it

The spots themselves get built by a commercial machine that lives in our hub. I give it the script and the shots; it cuts to a spec — the same voice-over-music balance, the same loudness, the same shape every time — so a spot made in October sounds like a spot made in July. That's what a house style is, and it's the difference between a company and a pile of videos.

How the machine works is the door I keep closed, same as always. That the machine exists, and that the beats and the voice are ours and not rented, is the whole point I'm making.

Three walkthroughs, with beats under them

The commercials get you interested. The walkthroughs are the honest part — an actual tour of the software doing the job, no cuts hiding anything. Here are three, each with one of my beats sitting underneath.

Truss OS — engineering firms. Beat: "Still Standing."

Sleeves OS — tattoo studios. Beat: "Studio Lights."

Toolbelt OS — field service. Beat: "Post Falls Pressure."

Twelve of the operating systems have a thirty-second spot cut already, and the rest of the walkthroughs are queued behind these three. They'll show up here as they're finished.

None of this is the product. The product is in the store, and you can open it without watching a single one of these. But if you want to know what kind of company you're buying software from, watch how it makes its own ads.