“We were not expecting that amount of hatred”: Neural DSP founders break silence over Nano Cortex teaser videos, “we thought they were quite fun”
Doug Castro and Francisco Cresp, co-founders of Neural DSP, have addressed those bizarre Nano Cortex teaser videos for the first time since their launch.
The videos landed back in September in three parts titled Soon, Sooner and Tomorrow. Each consisted of a mini film created by the Neural team, with all three running for over 20 minutes respectively. The tone and length of the films did not go down well with Neural fans on the internet who made their displeasure pretty clear in the comments section.
READ MORE: Neural DSP Nano Cortex review – the last pedalboard amp you’ll ever need?
The teaser trilogy began with the story of a producer who’d been tasked to make some new music for a marketing campaign. He was then delivered a brief case containing a Quad Cortex, which he used to make the track. Shortly after however, he realised the unit he was delivered was the wrong one, as the Quad Cortex that was meant to be used was of a much smaller size. The next two videos continued to follow the producer as he tried to track down the elusive mini unit.
In a new interview with Guitar.com, Castro and Cresp explain why they decided to make the campaign, and share their thoughts on the backlash it received. “Companies – even big companies – reflect the traits of the people that make them,” Castro begins.
“We take our work very seriously in terms of how good the products have to be. Our quality standards are very high. But at the same time, us as individuals, we love to have fun, and do goofy, silly things sometimes. Why would you work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re not having fun?
“I think that we’re a pretty quirky company – if you look at our marketing before this video campaign we’re already doing some tongue-in-cheek things,” he adds. “When the comments get a bit edgy we can be edgy back, have some good banter with the user. I think this is one of the things that make us interesting and cool. We’re not a dry, boring, boring corporation in many ways.”
Castro continues, “We wanted to take a chance and see what happened. It was a very intense project – we saw the videos a few days in advance, and we thought they were quite fun and funny. We weren’t thinking, ‘oh, people are gonna hate this.’”
Despite this, the pair do say that the “postmortem” of the campaign was important to move forward. Cresp explains, “We were not expecting that amount of hatred and negative comments, but it taught us a lot of lessons about when to take the risk, how to take the risk, and to discuss it further before, maybe plan it differently.
“We were trying to push the boundaries of what we had already been doing. The ‘Soon, Soon, Tomorrow’ campaign has been going for a long time, and even though it’s effective, we’ve grown a little bit tired of it as well, and I think our users have too. We wanted to give our users a little bit more content in order to participate more in the process, just have more fun and take a little bit of risk as we tried to evolve that concept.”
One thing that can be said of the teasers is that they did their job of getting everyone talking. As Castro reflects, “It was probably the most talked about release this year, right?… The worst thing you can hear when you release something you’ve invested all your time and money in is silence. If there are people who love it, there are also people who hate it – but as long as people give it a chance. In the end, the campaign was definitely intense and controversial, but I think it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t successful.”
You can check out the Nano Cortex over at Neural DSP.
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