What brand wouldn’t want to advertise against the Ryan Gosling concert Oscars?
SiriusXM, which is four months into a major rebrand, certainly did. As part of its new brand platform, Closer, the audio giant debuted an ad in the form of a three-minute short film on March 8, followed by a 60-second cut that aired during the Oscars on March 10.
The ad is part of SiriusXM’s play to position itself as “part of culture” for current subscribers and potential new listeners alike, Chief Growth Officer Suzi Watford said. The brand is showing up alongside culturally relevant programming that attracts big audiences, like the Oscars and ad-supported viewing of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour on Disney+.
And the Oscar goes to…
The creative, which depicts a woman dancing to different songs throughout the stages of her life—starting with Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red”—was designed to appeal across age groups, and was inspired by feedback from Sirius XM customers, Watford said.
“The stories that we hear from people are about the emotional connection that they have to Sirius XM, and how it’s been a companion with them, how they’ve grown up with it,” she said.
Three minutes is a long time to ask someone to tune into an ad, but Watford said the length is meant to be “a reflection of our ambition for the brand.” Plus, the creative team cut that short film, called A Life in Sound, into a variety of 15-, 30-, and 60-second spots that are running across digital, over-the-top, and owned-and-operated platforms, she said.
Go big or go home
The Oscars felt like “an important place for us to show up,” Watford said. Her team had already decided on a narrative, short-film approach to the creative, so airing the ad during one of the country’s most prestigious celebrations of storytelling in film, she said, “just makes sense.”
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The ad also just so happened to air close to the presentation of the awards for Best Sound, and Best Director, one of the night’s biggest awards. And audiences showed up: This year’s Academy Awards attracted an average of 19.5 million viewers on ABC, according to parent company Disney, the biggest viewership of any awards show since before Covid.
“It definitely felt of-[the]-culture and more accessible than it has, perhaps, in the last couple of years,” Watford said.
In addition to the Oscars and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, SiriusXM’s “A Life in Sound” ad is appearing alongside other “marquee releases,” Watford said, like Peacock’s miniseries Apples Never Fall. Out-of-home ads are also running across New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, Boston, and Atlanta, with creative featuring real SiriusXM subscribers.
Taken together, the incorporation of real customers combined with the emotional connection SiriusXM is trying to create through A Life in Sound is an effort to convey the brand’s commitment to human curation over algorithm-driven recommendations.
“The fact that [the ad shows] a woman with a life story that people can relate to is reflective of the fact that SiriusXM is a very human-led brand,” Watford said.