Back in the ’00s TV advertisers indulged in a trend I liked. Instead of licensing songs that were already popular — remember Chevrolet beating Bob Seger’s No. 1 hit “Like a Rock” to death for 14 years? — they produced commercials with tunes most people had never heard before.
The best-remembered example is Volkswagen’s use of Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” in a 2000 spot that proved so popular it spurred an enormous Nick Drake revival. Other ads used more contemporary songs, often quiet tunes in the Nick Drake mold — for example, Sony introduced its Bravia TV in 2006 with a visually arresting commercial set to Jose Gonzalez’s acoustic cover of the Knife’s “Heartbeats.”
A particular favorite of mine was a commercial for Liberty Mutual, the insurance company that these days produces humorous ads with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Back in 2006 they took a more serious approach, pulling a haunting cut from the 2002 album “Rabbit Songs” by a Brooklyn band called Hem.
The commercial that featured the song had an uplifting message, but that’s not the only reason I liked it. Watch it and see if you can spot the temporal anomaly.
Did you catch that? The guy at the start of the ad, the one who picks up the child’s stuffie and hands it to her, is also the guy who ends it. His act at the beginning triggers the string of small kindnesses that ends with … his act from the beginning. Bet your insurance company can’t do that.