NEW YORK, USA — Brett Volker and Steve Milton, Founding Partners of the sector-defining, multi-award-winning sound branding and experiential agency Listen, announced today the launch of Ada, a new agency focused on experience innovation and design. Effective immediately, Ada will take over all of Listen’s existing multi-sensory experiential business, while Listen will expand its full-service sound offering in response to the rising demand of sonic branding, voice technology, and social audio. Like Listen, Ada will partner with institutions, artists, visionaries, and philosophically aligned brands in the tech, fashion, culture, and social impact spaces. Leading creative at Ada will be Executive Creative Director Inessah Selditz.
In a joint statement, Volker and Milton commented, “Ten years ago, Listen was born from our friendship, based on a shared love of music and a belief in the transformational power of art and culture. Though originally conceived as a music and sound-focused company, we quickly saw that full, multi-sensory experiences, amplified by technology, provided important new ways for us to help our clients contribute to, and push forward, the cultural conversation. Now, as our digital and physical worlds become ever more enmeshed, the time has come for us to break out the experiential side into its own, self-sustaining entity, allowing Listen to concentrate squarely on its original mission.”
“Ada is coming into existence at a particularly potent moment for institutions, artists and brands looking to re-connect and innovate within the culture and social impact space,” added Selditz. “21st century audiences are demanding more immersive, experiential, and sensory-based ways to engage, while new technologies are constantly providing us with better platforms and methods with which to engage them. The founders and I share a mutual passion for building connections around deeply held values and communal cultural experiences, and this is an incredibly exciting time to begin this new chapter.”
Building on Listen’s industry-leading capabilities in the experiential space, Ada approaches each project with a strategy-first point-of-view, helping partners identify immediate- and long-term goals, and then exploring the widest possible range of concepts designed to meet those goals. Ada offers clients a complete range of services, including strategic visioning, experiential strategy and master planning, experience concepting, experience design, and production.
Ada conceives and creates new realms of human experience, merging its roster of trailblazing partners with cutting-edge technologies, including AI, AR, and VR. Its portfolio builds on Listen’s long standing legacy of crafting boundary-breaking experiences with leading cultural institutions (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, Smithsonian, New Museum, and more); creative visionaries (Björk, Childish Gambino, Sol LeWitt, Marina Abramovic, St. Vincent, Brian Eno, and more); and philosophically aligned brands and organizations across technology, fashion, culture, and social impact (Microsoft, rag & bone, The Nobel Foundation, MIT, Ace Hotel, Bode, and more). For details, please visit https://a-da.co.
Inessah Selditz has held senior global leadership positions at renowned digital and physical agencies in New York City. Recently she was the Group Experiential Director at Huge, spearheading the agency’s experiential practice, and previously the Studio Lead and Creative Director of the LAB at Rockwell Group, the experience innovation studio of the leading architecture company Rockwell Group. She has led creative direction of high-profile projects like the Edge at Hudson Yards— the highest observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, which won several top innovation, design, and architecture awards. She is passionate about the arts and cultural sector, as well as social justice causes. Last year, she co-founded the BIPOC Directors Collective, an initiative by directors of color for fellow and future directors of color across industries.
Founded by Brett Volker and Steve Milton in 2012, Listen is an eight-time Clio Award and three-time Cannes Lions Award-winning global, full-service sound agency that strategically designs audio and music for sonic branding, products, experiences, and podcasts. Among the clients with whom Listen has partnered on crafting powerful, new sound identities are Virgin, HoloLens, Sephora, Skype, Ford, Spotify, Unilever, Tinder, Microsoft, and many more. For details, please visit https://wearelisten.com/sound.
