How Busy Signal “Everybody Move” Wound Up in That LG Smartphone Ad

Chicago Ad Agency Energy BBDO Explains Why They Chose The Turf  Prez For Their Cool New Spot

Turn on any radio station in the world for thirty minutes right now and you’re guaranteed to hear tropical house dancehall tracks by Rihanna/Drake and Justin “Natty Dread” Bieber/Skrillex. But thankfully the current boom in Jamaican music is not completely bypassing Jamaican artists. “Everybody Move,” a track produced by DJ Karim and featuring vocals by dancehall star Busy Signal, provides the soundtrack of a new ad campaign for South Korean multinational conglomerate LG. The super-fly ad, which has over 2 million views on Youtube, also features the British actor Jason Statham in a mind-bending array of characters. But judging by the comments, most of the excitement centers around the futuristic music. “The feedback has been incredible,” says Daniel Kuypers, Director of Music for Energy BBDO, the Chicago-based ad agency responsible for the trend-setting spot. “From the moment we heard it we were like, ‘This song is really cool!'”  Video & Interview After The Jump…

“This is what would be termed in my field as a success,” the ad agency music director continues. “Not only do I love the track—and that’s really nice when you get to use music that you love and you would listen to anyway—but the amount of conversation that’s being garnered and the praise for the spot makes it a success for sure. The client is ecstatic.”

“This track kind of just fell into our laps doing an exhaustive search for music that was unique and cool and really embodied the spirit of play and playfulness that we were looking for the for the LG spot,” he explains. “We do an exhaustive search and people send me hundreds of songs. This was part of a batch of songs that someone sent me, and once we put it to the picture it was kind of magical.”

“There’s a lot of things we liked about it: the rhythm is really fun and playful, the lyric is really fun and playful. It’s cool that it’s made by a guy in Jamaica who samples a Japanese producer who made a remake of a Finnish Polka song. So we liked how it was really all over the place—and kind of bridging these cultural gaps all over the world. The original song is a Finnish song by Loituma ‘Leva’s polka.’ It was a lot working tracking it all down and getting everyone to sign off. That process went down to the wire but it was worth it.”

“On the Youtube comments, I’d say 75 percent of the comments are about the music. Some are fans of Busy Signal, and some are fans of Hatsune Miku, the Japanese vocals that were sampled by the Jamaican producer.”

Hatsune.Miku.full.63467[SIDENOTE: Sometimes referred to as “Miku Hatsune,” Hatsune Miku a humanoid persona voiced by a singing synthesizer application developed by Crypton Future Media. She is usually portrayed as a 16-year-old girl with long turquoise twintails.The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初 hatsu), sound (音 ne) and future (ミク miku), thus meaning “the first sound from the future,” referring to her position as the first of Crypton’s “Character Vocal Series.”]

“Reggae is not used very much in advertising,” said the Energy BBDO music director. “For whatever reason, most television commercials stay pretty center of the road with the music, especially something this big. I’ve worked on a couple things at points in my career where we toyed around with maybe Jimmy Cliff or Bob Marley. But that’s really the extent of the reggae that’s been used—those mainline artists. This is really cool because it’s going to expose people to this really wonderful genre of music.”

Purchase Busy Signal “Everybody Move” pon iTunes

Like Boomshots on Facebook.

Subscribe to Boomshots TV

Follow @Boomshots

2 Responses

  1. mhygit says:

    do not like the commercial at all, it is too fractured.

  2. […] This wildly popular commercial has been deemed a huge success, director Daniel Kupyers of BBDO told Boomshots — both by the client, LG, and, apparently other ad agencies who’ve since sought out the […]

Leave a Reply