"Justify my love for a brand": Madonna in Advertising (1984-2017)

Madonna is not only the most charismatic pop star but also the pioneer creating new advertising formats. This video shows a sample of her commercials from 1984 to 2017. In this period, she (or her music) has appeared in more than one hundred commercials advertising brands such as Pepsi, Microsoft, Max Factor, Motorola, Gap, H&M… She launched for first time in MTV the first musicverting video to promote Pepsi and her new album Like Prayer in 1989. The ad/music video was seen the same night in forty countries, by 300 million or so people.

From a rhetoric point of view, Madonna is an example of how brands persuade through music. Madonna is symbol which means courageousness, authenticity, freedom, strength and success. For this reason, brands try to absorb all these significant values from the pop star. All brands want is “madonnise” their products because Madonna helps them to build the brand personality, create engagement and gain more costumers in a long term. Madonna is a cultural polymath: music, films, music videos, fashion designer… All these characteristics run as connotations when Madonna is placed in a commercial.

However, creatives are more egocentrics and less adventurous than Madonna because, as we can see in this video, they try to mellow the real meanings of the pop star. In other words, brands have adapted the Madonna’s signified to their particular values. In fact, artists who license their music for use in advertising risk losing credibility. But on the other hand, advertising offers Madonna an alternative platform to sell his music, as the artists pointed out.

In any case, the use of music in advertising links with old debates about the status of popular music as art, the status of art as a commodity and the tensions between artistic values and commercial aims.

Read more in: Sanchez-Olmos, Cande (2018). "Justify my love" for a brand: la estela de Madonna en la publicidad. Bitch She is Madonna. La reina del pop en la cultura contemporánea. Viñuela, E. (Ed.). Madrid: Dos Bigotes.
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