Enterprise Advertising — Macy's & Schick

In 2015, two of America’s largest consumer brands ran national campaigns built entirely on the human voice — no instruments, no programming. Both hired the same engineer.

For Macy’s, the project was the All-School A Cappella Challenge, a national contest launched with Grammy-winning group Pentatonix. Deyder was brought in by the agency, CarlByrd&Co, as principal engineer, and selected the room himself: EastWest Studios in Hollywood.

For Schick, the spot was “Ready, Shave, Shine” — the flagship music asset of the Rock Your Legs campaign with Skintimate, run in partnership with the film Pitch Perfect 2. The agency, J. Walter Thompson, brought in the Wojahn Brothers music production house; the Wojahn Brothers hired Deyder for a specific reason — his years engineering vocals on Glee. The track was a custom-lyric adaptation of a Charli XCX record, and the campaign’s video was directed by Adam Shankman — the same director whose Rock of Ages soundtrack sessions Deyder had engineered three years earlier. Same director, different decade of pop, same engineer at the console.

What the room looked like

A cappella at broadcast scale is engineering with nowhere to hide. There are no guitars to mask a loose edit, no drum bus to carry the low end. Every rhythm element is a human sound — claps, stomps, vocal thuds — and every one of them has to hit like a produced record on a living-room television.

The Macy’s session

The Macy’s session tracked more than thirty people in the building on the music side alone — two youth cohorts, one under ten and one of teenagers, recorded individually and as a combined ensemble: cohesive harmonies, tight timing and pitch, specific phrasings delivered to spec. The campaign shipped the work as two distinct national spots — a Kids version and a Teen version — both embedded below. Macy’s executives and the agency team observed from the couch directly behind the console. The whole cast had to be captured in a single day, well enough that nobody came back. It was — on schedule, with the coordination between engineer and producer doing as much work as the microphones.

The Schick sessions

The Schick sessions at The Village ran the opposite problem: not volume of people, but perfection of pocket. The Wojahn Brothers cast top Los Angeles session singers — many of them Deyder’s colleagues from the Glee years — to build a vocal master so rhythmically locked that the commercial’s on-screen cast could lip-sync to it through high-choreography shoots. Vocal production came through the Wojahn Brothers; extended session dates and heavy revision cycles fine-tuned every detail against the agency’s evolving cuts.

The outcome

Both spots aired nationally. The masters held up where a cappella usually falls apart — on small speakers, against picture, under corporate scrutiny applied in real time from the couch behind the console.

At a glance

• 2 brands — Macy’s and Schick, national campaigns, same year
• 30+ people — one Macy’s tracking day, no return sessions
• 100% acoustic — voices and body percussion, mixed for broadcast
• 2 rooms — EastWest, Hollywood · The Village, Santa Monica