This morning, the 2025 Clio Grand Music Award winners were announced. I’ve been in these closed-door debates before, and it’s always a riveting conversation.
By Nue Agency’s Jesse Kirshbaum
Normally, they reveal the big winners at the show. But this year, there was a delay when the show was canceled due to the wildfires in Los Angeles. All of the winners were announced last month except “the grands,” which they saved for today. With this announcement, we can dive deeper into what the esteemed panel of jurors deemed best in class music marketing for 2024.
Here are some key themes and takeaways:
Trend: Cultural Regional Storytelling
Why It Matters → Act local and think global. Brands that embrace local storytelling, languages, and traditions create deeper, more meaningful connections with their audiences. This approach fosters authenticity, making campaigns feel more personal, rooted, and impactful within a specific culture, rather than appearing as globalized, one-size-fits-all advertising.
Clio Winner Examples:
- Oliveira Dos Cen Años: C. Tangana created a football anthem that honors Galician culture by spotlighting local musicians instead of singing himself. Featuring the Coral Casablanca choir, Lagharteiras tambourine group, and Celta fans, the campaign fuses tradition with modern artistry, making it a deeply authentic and emotional tribute to the club’s 100-year legacy.
- Magnificent” (Yotkan Ancient City): This campaign promotes the historic Yotkan Ancient City in Xinjiang, China by creating a visually poetic short film featuring traditional performances, historical figures, and local culture. The video’s dreamlike journey through time, paired with the song, “A Thousand Years” by Ma Shang You, brings the city’s rich history to life, inspiring both tourism and cultural appreciation.
Trend: Fusing Music and Technology to Innovate
Why it Matters → Being early on technology and leveraging it in new, creative ways is a surefire way to get people’s attention. The integration of music and technology allows brands to push creative boundaries, offering interactive, immersive, personalized experiences and trendsetting. This trend reflects the growing role of AI, data visualization, and digital storytelling in shaping how audiences engage with sound and culture.
Clio Winner Examples:
- Spreadbeats, Spotify: a B2B campaign that transformed an Excel spreadsheet into a dynamic, animated music video, speaking directly to advertisers in their own language. It visually reinforces Spotify’s message—that music enhances ad effectiveness—while proving B2B marketing can be as creative as consumer-facing campaigns.
- TEKOÁ Music Album Digital Graphic Design: by fusing graphic design and digital interactivity, this project enhances album artwork as an experience, showing how music packaging can evolve beyond static visuals in a digital-first world.
Trend: Creative Levels Up Collabs
Why it Matters → In a brand bonanza… How do partnerships get their due respect and cut through the noise? We see that bold creative direction elevates brand collaborations, transforming them from simple partnerships into culturally significant moments. These campaigns prove that when brands, artists, and agencies take risks, they create unexpected, memorable experiences that go viral and resonate deeply.
Clio Winner Examples:
- Cuckoo” (NEON): instead of relying on existing tracks, the score was crafted specifically to heighten the film’s unsettling atmosphere, using jarring electronic stabs and an ’80s Cronenberg-style horror sound to immerse audiences in the film’s eerie world. The result? A viral horror trailer that built massive anticipation for the film.
- No Smiles (McDonald’s Japan): faced with a Gen Z workforce shortage, McDonald’s Japan partnered with the Gen Z icon “ano” to reframe its “Smile: 0 yen” slogan. By releasing a song titled “I won’t give you a smile”, they transformed smiles from a job requirement to a personal choice, improving brand perception as an employer.
Trend: Artist Driven Creative
Why it Matters → When artists take creative control of their brand collaborations, the output is more authentic, emotionally resonant, and culturally impactful. It allows the work to extend beyond a song or an ad, influencing broader social and artistic conversations. With moves like PgLang, they can have the final say on their own creative while applying their lens to other brands that want that same lens.
Clio Winner Examples:
- PgLang (Not Like Us): More than just a diss track, Kendrick Lamar’s self-directed visual storytelling turned the song into a larger cultural commentary on music, power, and artistic independence.
Trend: Music Amplifies Emotion
Why it Matters → Music, when applied right, has a compounding effect that can create exponential impact. An emotional campaign can be made more powerful with the help of music. It can come in the form of a sync, an original song, a voice, or a single instrument…but music is the universal language that can take a message and make it that much more emotionally resonant.
Clio Winner Examples:
- A Piece of Me (KPN): To combat online shaming, KPN collaborated with Dutch pop star MEAU, who interviewed victims and wrote a song inspired by real experiences. The emotional storytelling, showing how a private moment of flirtation turns into devastating public humiliation, resonated deeply with Gen Z. The campaign’s emotional impact led to massive online engagement, a viral music video, and real legislative change, proving that music can drive both cultural and legal shifts.
Jesse Kirshbaum
Co-Founder of Nue
