Advertising and Music: A Commercial Marriage?

The aim of this thesis is to explore whether artists benefit in terms of attention from having their music featured in commercials. The research follows a quasi-experimental research design and the main method of analysis takes the form of a short-interrupted time series. The data for the advertisements is collected from two main sources: (1) all Super Bowl 2020 TV commercials which contained a commercially available song; and (2) All TV commercials from brands that appeared on the Forbes Most Valuable Brands of 2019 list, which also contained a commercially available song. The data for attention towards an artist is measured as daily evolution of Spotify monthly listeners obtained from the music marketing analytics tool Soundcharts. In order to assess whether the advertisement affected the attention the time series was divided into a pre and post period with release date of the advertisement serving as the interruptive element. The research design consisted of two complementary statistical methods: (1) an OLS regression based on the differences times series and (2) an OLS regression analysis based on the analysis of the residuals. This study has found that that in general featuring music in a commercial that is related to a Most Valuable Brand, classified as ‘regular’, has a more positive outcome on the attention towards an artist, than featuring music in a mass advertising event such as the Super Bowl. It was also shown that with regards to popularity, less popular artists benefit more in terms of attention if the advertisement is released in an independent way and more popular artist profit from mass promoted events. The findings enhance our knowledge of the relationship between advertising and music, and the study has thrown up many questions in need of further investigation. The insights provided may be useful for both artists and advertisers, not only from the creative point of view but also the more economic and business side.