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Lots of music created on behalf of brands are catchy and hard to forget—that’s why attempted earworms have been part of the marketing landscape from the age of jingles up through the modern era of “sonic logos.” But can a brand-commissioned song cross over and become a bona fide pop hit? A growing number of advertisers are certainly trying to make that happen—by commissioning music specifically for use on the social media juggernaut TikTok.
TikTok, after all, is deeply rooted in music: It evolved out of a music-centric app; many of its viral videos involve dancing or lip syncing or otherwise riffing on a particular song that everyone else is reacting to. This has fueled both new hits like Harry Styles’ “As It Was” and exhumed such revered relics as Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”—and now TikTok is even reportedly plotting to take on Spotify. Obviously, brands want to get into this groove, but that can be tricky: As ModernRetail recently pointed out, songs that go viral on the platform, like “As It Was,” get recycled in millions of user videos — but brands often can’t barge right into those trends because of commercial licensing restrictions. (Broadly speaking, brands are limited to royalty-free music unless they obtain a license from artists to use songs in sponsored content.)
So, some brands have just commissioned their own TikTok-friendly hits. Pepsi, for example, recently recruited Chlöe Bailey to cut a cover of the 1980s’ staple “Footloose,” to promote a line of “soda shop” inspired drinks. (This picks up on a dance-video trend featuring the original track, this past summer.) “Consumers across the nation are encouraged to follow @Pepsi on TikTok and Instagram,” the company announced, “and share their best dance moves using Chlöe’s reimagined ‘Footloose’ track along with hashtags #PepsiSodaShop #PepsiSweepstakes.” (Prizes were even offered for a limited time.) Plenty of others are trying variations on the same strategy. McDonald’s tapped rapper and TikTok star TisaKorean to devise a clubby ode to getting Sprite from Mickey D’s; fans were encouraged to share their riffs tagged #McDonaldsStaticSprite. American Eagle got TikTok musician Katherine Li to create a new version of her song “Happening Again” tied to the brand. Pizza Hut hired Jon Moss, a Detroit musician popular on the platform, to make a song, literally titled “Pizza Hut Anthem,” touting the chain’s Detroit-style pizza offering. And it turns out that before working with Pepsi, Chlöe Bailey made a song called “Trident Vibes” for Trident Gum’s #ChewTheVibesChallenge campaign.
#ad IT’S STATIC FR Y’ALL!! @mcdonalds #McDonaldsStaticSprite
While this cacophony of experiments is all pretty recent, the first breakthrough brand-created song for TikTok was one released in 2019 by Elf Cosmetics: “Eyes. Lips. Face. (e.l.f.),” attributed to iLL Wayno and Holla FyeSixWun (and owing a sonic debt to Kash Doll’s “Ice Me Out”). This song, according to Vox, was “the very first commissioned for a TikTok campaign.” And it was a genuine viral hit. According to agency Movers+Shakers, which created the campaign and claims credit for the song, it inspired more than 5 million user-generated videos, racking up 7 billion views. The song ended up on Spotify, iTunes, and elsewhere, and was streamed more than 20 million times. (And Elf and Movers+Shakers have continued to launch new campaigns for TikTok, including a 2020 dance challenge tied to another original song, “Vanishing Act,” by M. Maggie.)
eyes lips face… **waist ???? #makeup #fyp #transformation
It’s a routine wish for brands to strive to be a part of the pop culture conversation, and it makes particular sense to pursue this strategy around TikTok now. Brands can essentially “lean into what the platform is already offering and doing with creators,” as one digital marketer told MarketingDive recently. “You have songs that take over the entire platform in just a matter of days.”
But what’s really telling about that comment is how often “a matter of days” is actually the full length of any TikTok craze, musical or otherwise. Even a bona fide viral TikTok smash is unlikely to linger in the cultural pantheon.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that songs written for brands had become hits well before the social media era—the most famous example being the 1971 Coca-Cola jingle that became the international smash, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony),” performed by The Hillside Singers—and written by Mad Men’s Don Draper. (Just kidding: Bill Backer, of Coke’s real-life ad agency at the time, McCann Erickson, was involved in the writing of the song, which inspired the fictional iteration of its creation in the finale of Mad Men.)
That kind of jingle-to-icon journey has always been rare, but it’s even harder to imagine now, in a fragmented and fast-moving digital culture that’s always thirsty for what’s next. It’s notable, actually, that the current wave of experiments includes a de facto reboot of a “Footloose” trend clearly driven by ersatz nostalgia — for a time, perhaps, when every trend wasn’t quite so transparently fleeting.
What is easy to imagine, however, is “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” reemerging today as something for TikTok users to embrace and riff on. Perhaps that would only last a week or two, but given the digital marketing environment, isn’t it exactly what Don Draper would suggest?
The post Why brands like McDonald’s and Pepsi are creating their own songs for TikTok appeared first on Fast Company.
