Beats 360's launch film casts Kendall Jenner as every customer in a cafe called Kendalls, to Tubeway Army's Are Friends Electric?. Uncommon made it.
Everyone in the new Beats advert is Kendall Jenner. The barista, the woman on the phone, the friend across the table, the reader with her nose in a book called The Parallel Lives of Us, even the faces in the framed photographs on the wall: all Jenner, in a cafe called Kendalls. The song underneath it is Are “Friends” Electric? by Tubeway Army, Gary Numan’s 1979 number one.
The product is Beats 360, an over-ear headphone built for the gym with ear cushions you can swap. Four headphone colours, six Performance Knit cushions for workouts and two plusher pairs for everything else, as Adweek reported. The line is “One headphone. Every version of you”, and the film launched on 22 September with the headphones going on sale online the same day and in shops from 24 September.
Uncommon Creative Studio made it, with Ariel Fisher directing and Magna Studios producing. It runs across Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, Hulu, Amazon and ESPN, with posters in Los Angeles, New York, London and Shanghai, according to Marketing Dive.
Beats chief marketing officer Chris Thorne explained the logic with unusual candour. The whole point of the headphone is that people have many versions of themselves, so rather than cast a crowd, “why don’t we get a bunch of Kendalls?” He also said Beats does not do endorsement deals, preferring long partnerships of the LeBron James kind, and that he likes Uncommon because you either love or hate what it brings you.
It is a clean piece of thinking: one product feature, one visual idea that demonstrates it, and a celebrity used as a device rather than a decoration. The song is the tell. A cold synth track about loneliness and replicas, under a film about a woman surrounded by copies of herself, is a joke for people who are listening properly.
Uncommon is having a year. The same studio is behind Clash Royale’s reinvention as an entertainment brand, and it now has a place in our guide to the UK’s top agencies. A British shop landing Apple’s headphone brand in Los Angeles is worth noting on its own.
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