The Creatives Room

Music & Advertising

Music is the fastest route to emotion in advertising. A song heard in a commercial can define a brand for decades - John Lewis's cover choices, Nike's 'Revolution', the Levi's ads that launched careers for Screamin' Jay Hawkins and many others. But music in advertising is also a relationship between two creative works, and the most effective choices are the ones where the song and the film have something genuine to say to each other, not just share a tempo. This collection studies those choices and what made them work.

The campaigns in this collection

  1. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Corsair · Jack Smyth · 2024

    Cover for Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. The jumpy, cut-up bodies and clashing colour capture the novel's fractured, time-hopping structure and its restless music-industry world.

  2. Pass Thru Fire - Stefan Sagmeister · 2010

    Stefan Sagmeister's cover for Lou Reed's collected lyrics. Writing the words onto Reed's own face fuses the man and his language - the lyrics literally inseparable from the body that lived them.

  3. Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics - Da Capo Press · Stefan Sagmeister · 2010

    Da Capo edition of Lou Reed's collected lyrics. Sagmeister's handwriting laid directly over Reed's face again binds the words to the man - this crop fixing on the eye, the witness behind the lyrics.

  4. Odd Couple - Falk Schwalbe · 2025

    Poster for an "Odd Couple" music event. Two colliding ovals tied together by one blue line literalise the title - a mismatched pair held in the same loop.

  5. Die Nerven - Falk Schwalbe · 2022

    Tour poster for the German noise-rock band Die Nerven. The type shredded into vertical drips visualises distortion and frayed nerves - the "100 billion decibel" promise made graphic.

  6. In The Name of Living - Sajad Amini · 2026

    Poster for "In the Name of Living," an evening of Iranian music and conversation in solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The broken bilingual type embodies a culture asserting itself under pressure.

  7. Isolation Berlin - Falk Schwalbe · 2025

    Tour poster for the band Isolation Berlin. The vertically smeared, glitched type conjures alienation and static - the group's bleak, electronic post-punk mood made visual.

  8. Alice - Falk Schwalbe · 2018

    Tour poster for the band Karies. Repetition of the name and the crude, expressive brushwork translate the group's loud, restless live sound into a visual - noise made graphic.

  9. 44e AMR Jazz Festival - Atelier BLVDR for 100 beste Plakate · 2025

    The improvisational spirit of jazz rendered as spontaneous gesture: hand-made brush marks stand in for a live solo while the typographic grid keeps time. Poster for the 44th AMR Jazz Festival in Geneva.

  10. Beatsteaks - Falk Schwalbe · 2023

    Concert poster for Beatsteaks. Bauhaus-flavoured geometry and clashing primary colours translate the band's loud, kinetic punk-rock energy into pure shape and movement.

  11. Donots - Falk Schwalbe · 2023

    Concert poster for the punk band Donots. Interlocking, overprinted letterforms in clashing riso colours channel the band's high-energy, maximal live sound into pure typographic noise.

  12. Hot Romania Jazz Festival - Ovidiu Hrin · 2009

    Poster for a Romania-linked jazz festival at Porgy & Bess. The melting, glitched imagery translates improvisation and dissonance into visual distortion - jazz as beautiful disintegration.

  13. Pabst - Falk Schwalbe · 2022

    Tour poster for the band Pabst. The looming split sphere reads like a crushing weight bearing down on the title - matching the tour's world-weary name and the group's heavy sound.

  14. Trümmer - Falk Schwalbe · 2024

    Tour poster for the band Trummer (German for "rubble"). Type piled and interlocked into an unstable brick-like wall literalises the name - words heaped up like debris across the tour cities.

  15. Weekend en fanfare - Atelier BLVDR for 100 beste Plakate · 2025

    Poster for a Geneva brass-band weekend. The word "fanfare" blasted out in stacking, overlapping repeats visually mimics the parping, layered sound of marching bands - noise made typographic.

  16. Surface Original by Design - Microsoft

    Original by Design plays on the double meaning of original: Surface is the hardware that was designed from scratch, and it is the tool for people whose job is making original things. Inspiration sparks the idea, Surface makes it real. The work shows creators, designers, architects and engineers usin

  17. Licence To Sing - Didrik Solli-Tangen · 2023

    "Licence to Sing" with Didrik Solli-Tangen: an everyday person belting into a makeshift mic celebrates the pure joy of singing - permission for anyone to be a performer.

  18. The Makers - Balvenie · 2022

    The Balvenie's 'The Makers' celebrates craftsmanship and the human drive to take work from great to exceptional. The whisky brand profiles creators such as Mercury Prize-winning musician Michael Kiwanuka alongside its own five rare crafts, from homegrown barley and the malting floor to the cooperage

  19. IPL 2021 Anthem - India Ki Vibe Alag Hai - vivo · dentsu webchutney · 2021

    Vivo IPL 2021's anthem 'India Ki Vibe Alag Hai' by Nucleya: with fans locked at home, the celebration moves indoors - eight rappers, one foot-tapping track, cricket's energy re-routed through living rooms. The insight: when the stadium is empty, the anthem's job is to prove the vibe never needed one

  20. Mini Connected - mini · Miami Ad School / ESPM · 2015

    A student campaign for MINI Connected links the car's music system to how you drive. The insight: the right soundtrack and the feel of the drive are part of the same experience, so Mini Connected positions the tech as syncing your music to your way of driving, making the journey and its soundtrack o

  21. Sound Posters - saxsofunny · DM9DDB · 2015

    DM9DDB promoted Saxsofunny, a Brazilian sound-engineering house, with posters you can hear. The insight: a sound company can't prove its craft in silent print, so every image is composed so vividly that it triggers the sound in your head, letting a still poster demonstrate exactly what the studio se

  22. Get the Real One - Musimundo · Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Buenos Aires, Argentina · 2017

    Musimundo set out to redirect price-sensitive consumers away from cheap knock-off or counterfeit audio products toward authentic merchandise. The campaign taps into the truth that while people often settle for low-budget imitations due to cost—much like hiring a cheap cover band instead of the actua

  23. Could I Be Wrong - Coca-Cola · 2023

    A city where everyone is shouting about who is right, and the arguing is so violent that cracks open in the buildings themselves - until Natasha Lyonne stops and asks what would happen if each of us wondered whether we might be the one who is wrong. The insight is that disagreement is not what damag

  24. Eyebrows - Cadbury · Fallon London · 2009

    Two children sit in a photographer's studio waiting to be photographed. He steps out to take a call. The boy clicks his watch, Freestyle's 'Don't Stop The Rock' kicks in, and the pair perform an entire dance using only their eyebrows before he returns. The insight is that a moment of joy is somethin

Why this collection is worth studying

The campaigns in this collection are worth studying for the specific reasoning behind each music choice. Why that song? Why that arrangement? Why that moment? The answers reveal something about how emotion works in advertising - how a particular combination of sound and image can create a feeling that neither could produce alone. Music selection is a creative skill rarely discussed and usually undervalued. This archive makes the case for taking it seriously.

See also

Best Use of Music in Advertising - The Creatives Room