Apple's new iPhone campaign for iPhone 16 Pro involved shooting a music video for The Weeknd.
Music helped brands and artists return to their roots and brought levity and fun to advertising in this latest edition of Ad Age’s Top 5 Music feature.
Steamboat Ski Resort, Gap and Apple launched campaigns in recent weeks that communicated a different side of a brand, artist or product, while Quilted Northern and Firehouse Subs used music as a device for humor.
Check out our latest selection of Top 5 music campaigns below.
For the third year of its “The Steamboat Way” campaign, Steamboat Ski Resort and agency Fortnight Collective enlisted Americana music duo Heavy Diamond Ring to perform in three commercials as the pair traverses the grounds of the Colorado ski resort. The band, featuring Sarah Anderson and Paul DeHaven, composed tracks, with the help of Coupe Studios, rich in the grassroots Western style that the resort has embraced as part of its history. The idea, while simple, calls to mind the resort’s deep Western history, which lives on through more than $200 million in changes made to the resort in recent years. The original songs are also a catchy, memorable way to communicate Steamboat’s brand identity, culture and message.
Food ads and jingles usually go together like ham and cheese, but things don’t go so well in this comic campaign from Firehouse Subs, which features a jingle sung live on set by real firefighters. Created by Orchard, the lead spot depicts three firemen attempting to sing about the sandwich chain’s Hook & Ladder sammie—turkey, ham, melted cheese, lettuce, onions, mustard and mayo on toasted bread. They croon, off-key at a slow tempo, until they are reminded that the commercial is just 30 seconds long and they need to sing faster. Alas, “the sandwich is too big for the song,” one firefighter says. The campaign is charming mostly due to the bad singing. As the firemen are not professional performers, the work maintains an authentic feel, putting a finer point on the credibility of Firehouse’s sandwich claims.
Putting a pin on singing for a second, this Gap campaign focuses on another fundamental part of music-focused ads: dancing. Pop artist Troye Sivan’s famous moves are smooth as butter as he pops and locks with dance group CDK Company to Thundercat’s hit “Funny Thing.” That Gap did not use a Sivan track for the spot underscores just how well-known his dancing is in its own right. Watching his display of musical talent—for grooving as much as crooning—injects an infectious energy, especially as his moves seem unrestricted by the loose-fitting Gap denim he is wearing. The spot brings a little joy, levity and encouragement to dance like nobody’s watching to a world plagued by noise.
Starship’s “We Built This City” has a reputation as the worst song of the 1980s (according to Rolling Stone readers, 2011), but that’s precisely what makes Quilted Northern’s remix about toilet paper, “We Quilt This City,” so comically fitting. It’s no small irony to use the worst song of the ’80s to sing about what Quilted Northern argues is the best, most comfortable toilet paper. But adding to the comic relief is the commercial itself, which parodies the Starship music video, featuring three women—the “Quilted Queens,” sporting white puffy Quilted Northern coats—as they march into a grocery store designed to look like a disco. Reader, I hope you’ve also noted the subtle shade of using a terrible song (this is subjective, of course) to sing about people wiping their rear ends. Personally, that’s my favorite part.
It’s not Apple’s first rodeo shooting a music video for an artist on iPhones (see Olivia Rodrigo and Ivan Cornejo), but its new “Shot on iPhone” spot comes in at No. 1 for its demonstration of how the iPhone 16 Pro can shoot slow-motion video and make post-production color and audio edits. To illustrate the device’s camera capabilities, Apple launched a short clip and behind-the-scenes video of The Weeknd’s upcoming music video, “Dancing in the Flames,” shot entirely on the iPhone 16 Pro and teased at Apple’s keynote event on Monday. Like its previous campaigns, the video features clips of cool camera shots and high-quality production shot on iPhone. This time, though, the campaign really focuses on capturing the look and feel of a music video characteristic to the artist.
