Why so many brands are releasing music videos

Brands are facing the music. And they want you to dance.

In the last few years, Gap has revived its ’90s advertising strategy of creating branded, choreographed music videos with celebrities and artists ranging from Parker Posey to KATSEYE. But it’s not alone: Other brands including Hollister, Cheetos, KFC, and Hawaiian Tropic have joined in on the trend this year, promoting their products in the form of song and dance.

It’s not exactly a new concept—music videos have long been vehicles for brand messaging. But while product placements in artists’ music videos were big in the 2010s, it seems brand-created music videos are making a comeback as marketers are increasingly feeling pressure to create organic, original content to break through on social, particularly with younger audiences.

“We’re an attention economy, and I’m a firm believer that people hate advertising,” Chris Bellinger, chief creative officer at Cheetos’s parent company, PepsiCo, told us. “Everyone pays for ad blockers, so in order for me to get your attention, it has to be worth your attention…We want to make something that’s worth your time and worth that share.”

Guess who’s back?

“Bringin’ back the Flamin’ Pickle, Cheetos really wanna let the world know,” Chad Kroeger, lead singer for the band Nickelback, sings in Cheetos’ four-minute-long music video released in March. “That’s why they paid us for a huge commercial.”

The song “Pickle’s Back” is a play on the band’s 2001 song “How You Remind Me” and features rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who helps promote the return of Cheetos’s Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle flavor. It’s not PepsiCo’s first rodeo when it comes to music videos—remember the 2004 Pepsi video set to “We Will Rock You,” featuring gladiators Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyoncé? The company has also done branded music videos with stars like Anna Kendrick and Jimmy Fallon over the years.

Bellinger told us that this music video was inspired not only by the rhyme of “nickel” and “pickle,” but the unexpectedness of the Meg x Nickelback collab. The hope was to go viral and make waves on music-centric platforms like TikTok; so far, the brand has received an “insane” amount of comments and shares in addition to millions of organic social views, he said.

In Bellinger’s experience, the key to a successful brand music video is to treat a product like a character, not the main focal point. It’s something that Joanna Ewing, SVP of creative marketing at Abercrombie & Fitch Co., also emphasized when we spoke with her last month about Hollister’s latest music video with Gigi Perez, which features people wearing Hollister clothes but isn’t overtly branded.

“People forget that we’re supposed to be entertaining people, and the product, while [the brand] can be front and center, it’s not the star of the show,” Bellinger said. “If you open with ‘presented to you by Cheetos,’ everyone’s gonna scroll away. So figure out how you can authentically integrate yourself into the story, but let the story be the driver, and you’re along for the ride.”

Step and repeat

When discussing Gap’s music video strategy, the brand’s then-head of marketing, Erika Everett, told us in 2024 that it sought to leverage talent, dances, and songs that would resonate with a broad audience and hopefully encourage reproduction. Last year, the brand saw just that in a big way when its KATSEYE x Kelis music video encouraged thousands of UGC dance videos.

It’s a concept that other brands seem to be catching on to. Hawaiian Tropic’s latest ad campaign and first music video features influencer Alix Earle dancing and lip-syncing to the 1990 song “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls. The brand tapped award-winning choreographer Robbie Blue, who also worked on Gap’s KATSEYE ad, in the hopes of creating the “hottest dance of the summer,” Shaylin Winterer, senior brand manager at Hawaiian Tropic, told us.

“We definitely weren’t interested in creating something that consumers would just passively watch,” Winterer said. “We wanted to create something that they could engage with, re-create, and really make their own.”

A dance tutorial video will be released this summer, and dance influencers will be posting their takes on the choreography as part of the social-first campaign strategy, Winterer said. She hopes the UGC from the campaign will drive brand relevance and cultural conversation around Hawaiian Tropic.

KFC took a slightly different approach in terms of replicability with its latest music video for an original song, “Finger Lickin’ Machine,” which, at one point, shows a dancing Colonel Sanders walking up the side of a building. Still, choreography was a key focal point in the video’s creation to make it feel “culturally credible,” Steven Fogel, executive creative director at the agency Highdive NY that worked on the campaign, told us via email.

The brand released the track on Spotify to further legitimize it as a piece of original content, Fogel said. While song streams are sub-5k on the platform, the 60-second version of the ad has more than 1.2 million views on YouTube. Beyond that, Fogel said the brand has seen traction on social and in earned media.

“When people connect with a track, a visual or a performance, they remember it in a much deeper way than a traditional product demo or price callout,” he said. “The song, choreography, and filmmaking gave a campaign a re-watchability and memorability you don’t usually get in value advertising.”