This is surely one of the best commercials of United’s long-running “Rhapsody in Blue” campaign:
Do you feel better about United than you did sixty seconds ago?
Archive for the ‘TV commericals’ Category
A lot of people didn’t find that Cadbury drumming gorilla ad as amusing as I did. Well, here’s another Cannes Lions winner that I like, and which might be funnier:
Related post on my work blog: Why Ad Competitions Suck.
This Cadbury commercial won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France last week:
Logically, there’s no good reason to play lottery. Which is why lottery commercials have to be so good at appealing to our dreams. Aren’t we all flightless birds?…
Wow, right? State lottery ads are often considered showcase pieces for ad agencies. This one is by Publicis Seattle.
They Might Be Giants have recorded a whole series of Dunkin’ Donuts commercials. Here are two of the latest ones.
Some people think 2:42 is the perfect length for a song. On further consideration, I’m thinking 30 seconds.
Gradually, maybe over ten years, TV commercials have emerged as the best way to debut new music. Not radio (Over!), not MTV, not AOL, not MySpace. It’s great if you can get your song into an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s even better if you can get your song into something like a car commercial. Years ago, music fans would turn against bands that they thought were corporate sell-outs. Now I think audiences are so wise to the entertainment marketing machine that nobody is shocked to learn that some musicians are in it for the money.
For a few impossibly lucky bands, success comes in the form of an Apple commercial (like the two videos above). It’s a safe bet that Apple doesn’t have to pay these bands a dime to license their music. The labels probably lobby Apple pretty hard to get songs into these ads.
Apple advertising songs are their own genre. The tunes are happy, upbeat. They are from bands that sound familiar but that you’ve never heard of. They have a uniform volume level, so they sound good through a set of uninsulated iPod headphones in a train or on a treadmill. And most of all, they sound absolutely tight the first time you hear them in a 30 second commercial (which, coincidentally, is the length of a song preview on iTunes). But these songs aren’t destined to become classics or outshine the product they are advertising. The novelty wears out and they get tiresome just in time to make room for the next song — and the next Apple product.
Let’s coin a 30-30 rule for iPod commercial songs: They sound great in 30 second clips, and they wear out after 30 plays.
Today, I can’t get enough Yael Naïm’s “New Soul” and The Ting Ting’s “Shut Up and Let Me Go.” Ask me in six months if I can even remember the names of these artists.
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