Collaboration: Past, Present and Future

THE AD NOBODY FOCUS-GROUPED

There was a moment, in February 2011, when Chrysler hit the collaboration jackpot. Chrysler aired a two-minute anthem during the Super Bowl, featuring Eminem and a version of "Lose Yourself," that launched the brand's comeback and captivated the American public. The ad worked because it had something to say: about Detroit, about American resilience, and the choice of Eminem, lent it a cultural authority that only the he could have. Choosing the track wasn't an easy decision according to the car maker's chief executive, Sergio Marchionne. "You know, I love Eminem but... I also know that some of the choices of language that he has made are things that are not what I would consider to be commonly shared," he said, trying to be delicate about the rapper's hard-core lyrics and profanity. Marchionne kept the contents of the ad a secret even from his own management team only showing it to them about a week before it aired. When he showed it to them in the conference room across the hall from his office, some of his execs were almost moved to tears, he said. "I think we blew them away. I don't think that anybody expected this."

The bold choice paid off. "Chrysler 200" was the number two search term on Super Bowl Sunday on Google, beating out the Black Eyed Peas, the band that performed during halftime. Search traffic for the Chrysler 200 on AOL Autos was 685 percent higher than normal on Monday and it topped all vehicle searches on AOL's Autoblog.com. NBC Nightly News did a feature on the ad and a poll conducted by auto industry trade weekly Automotive News, which asked readers to rank all the auto ads in the big game, chose the Chrysler ad by a long-shot, with more than 40 percent choosing it by Tuesday after the game. Nobody had focus-grouped Eminem's suitability against a matrix of brand values. Instead someone had simply made a bold, instinctive call, and it worked so perfectly that it became a cultural touchstone.

That kind of moment having such resonance or even happening, is trickier to imagine these days, not because we don't see brand collaborations anymore, but almost because the brand-artist collaboration has never been more ubiquitous. But somewhere along the way, something fundamental has changed. To understand what has been lost, it helps to go back to where it began.

Instead of traditional commercials, Pepsi leaned into the MTV culture of the eighties, creating ad content that resembled high-production music videos, an approach that appealed to the younger viewers they were courting, and felt like an extension of Jackson's stage performances. The ads became part of pop culture conversation, right along with "Billie Jean" and "Beat It." The partnership felt genuine because it was. Jackson's creative input was woven into everything. Its impact on the music and advertising industries was powerful. "It was definitely game-changing," says Brian J. Murphy, executive VP of branded entertainment at TBA Global. "You couldn't separate the tour from the endorsement from the licensing of the music, and then the integration of the music into the Pepsi fabric. If you pulled any one of those pieces apart, it really took away from what the campaign was all about."

What Pepsi understood, and what many brands have since forgotten, is that the power of an artist collaboration is not borrowed. It is transferred. When a brand aligns itself with an artist who genuinely embodies something - an attitude, a point of view, a scene - that alignment becomes part of the brand's own mythology. Instead of renting Michael Jackson's image, Pepsi absorbed it. That logic held for decades. When Eminem appeared in the Chrysler ad, the effect was powerful because it was unexpected. Here was one of the most confrontational, uncompromising artists of his generation, a man whose entire career was built on rejecting institutional authority, standing in front of a choir in Detroit and making you believe in American manufacturing. The ad had the gloss and sophistication of a major motion picture, but its real power came from the alignment feeling real rather than transactional. Eminem was from Detroit. It felt personal.

THE TRAVIS SCOTT MEAL: COLLABORATION ON REPEAT

Let's look at where we're at now. In 2020, McDonald's launched the Travis Scott Meal. The campaign started with a universal "fan truth" that served as the anchor - no matter how big or famous you are, everyone has a McDonald's order. This idea debuted as a McDonald's 2020 Super Bowl commercial featuring the go-to orders of Patrick Mahomes, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, Garth Brooks and more. Nice idea. McDonald's reasoning for choosing Scott was as follows: "Travis is one of the biggest musical artists and cultural icons in the world, with widespread appeal and especially loyal following among the younger audience. Growing up he was a regular at his local McDonald's in Houston and had his own special order that's still his favorite to this day - a fresh beef Quarter Pounder with Cheese, bacon and lettuce; World Famous Fries dipped in BBQ sauce, and an ice-cold Sprite."

As Pitchfork critic Alphonse Pierre said at the time, "What does a rapper's soul taste like?" highlighting that while it was sold as something meaningful, the collaboration felt entirely transactional. The meal itself was nothing special — a Quarter Pounder, some fries, and a Sprite, or in corporate hell speech - a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese, (Travis-Style. It's Lit!"), a Sprite ("Sprite with Ice. Straight Up!"), and a medium french fries and barbeque sauce ("If you know, you know"). There was nothing new about it outside of Travis Scott's name being attached to it. There was no real cultural meaning, it could have been any celebrity really, with a claim to enjoying their hometown McDonald's.

And McDonald's, having discovered the formula, immediately replicated it: after the Travis Scott Meal, the chain quickly followed with a meal tied to J Balvin, then BTS, then Saweetie, turning celebrity endorsements into a rolling programme based on whichever artists were pulling in numbers rather than a well aligned statement. When everything is a collaboration, nothing is a collaboration. This is not a criticism of the artists involved, nor of the commercial ingenuity of the campaigns. It is an observation about what happens to the idea of collaboration when it loses its cultural impact. The Jackson-Pepsi deal felt seismic because it was rare, because it was genuinely co-created, and because both parties were taking a real risk. McDonald's Famous Orders programme is a well-engineered content machine. These are not the same thing.

THE ADIDAS-YE RECKONING

There is also a structural reason why bold artist partnerships have become so difficult, and it goes beyond the short-termism of marketing departments. The risk calculation has fundamentally shifted. The Adidas-Ye partnership is the cautionary tale we're pretty sure every brand now carries in their head. Yeezy products generated nearly $2 billion in sales for Adidas, accounting for 8% of the company's total sales, and helped the brand gain shelf space at major retailers and attract new customers. It was, by any commercial measure, the most successful non-athlete brand partnership in sportswear history. Then, in October 2022, Adidas ended the partnership after Ye made a series of antisemitic statements, with the termination resulting in a €250 million hit to the company's fourth quarter sales.
What made it particularly striking was the revelation that Adidas executives had feared for years that the Yeezy relationship could "blow up at any moment," and had commissioned a 2018 presentation to the then-CEO that detailed the risks of the arrangement and contemplated cutting ties. The brand had knowingly carried the risk. When that risk actually became reality, the cost was enormous.

In the aftermath of that episode, brands have become more cautious. Artist partnerships are now subjected to the same due diligence frameworks as mergers and acquisitions. Managers and agencies maintain what amount to controversy risk profiles on artists, and brands run prospective partners through legal and PR stress tests before signing anything. Even the Travis Scott deal, which preceded the Astroworld tragedy, saw pushback from McDonald's franchisees concerned about the content of some of Scott's music. That tension, between cultural relevance and institutional risk aversion, is now the defining tension in every significant brand-artist negotiation. The artists, for their part, are equally wary. The social media ecosystem has made brand association permanently visible in a way it never was before. A Pepsi commercial from 1984 aired, was seen, and faded. A brand partnership announced today is searchable, and retrievable for the remainder of an artist's career.
What emerges from all of this risk management is a gravitational pull toward the safe middle. Brands want artists who are culturally credible enough to feel relevant, but unthreatening enough to create no controversy. Artists want deals that pay well and carry minimal reputational risk. The result is a category of partnership that is perfectly engineered and almost entirely without impact. You can see it in the nature of the collaborations themselves. Rather than deep alignments, we now get limited-edition products, short-term activations, and co-branded merchandise that exists primarily as social media content. The timeframe has shrunk from decade-long relationships to month-long campaigns. The ambition has narrowed from cultural statements to engagement metrics.

The question a brand might have once asked about an artist was: what do they stand for? The question now is: what is their reach, and what is their controversy score? This is the central irony of the current moment. Brands have more data about artists than ever before: streaming numbers, demographic breakdowns, sentiment analysis, engagement rates. And yet the partnerships they are producing are less culturally resonant than those made by executives in the 1980s who knew nothing except that Michael Jackson was the most exciting person on the planet, and decided to back that instinct.

The data has made decisions safer, but not better.

Now, let's be honest about what this is, because it is not some executive's blind hunch. "Better in Denim" sat on top of a two-year brand transformation. Katseye arrived with 22 million followers, and "Milkshake" already had a second life as a TikTok sound. The inputs were thoroughly measured. But look at the decisions the data couldn't have made. Katseye were enormous inside their fandom, but at the point Gap signed them they were largely unknown to the general public and had no major crossover hit, so it was a bet on trajectory, not proof. A 22-year-old radio hit is not what a sync dashboard recommends. And the timing revealed something too: the ad landed weeks into the American Eagle 'great jeans' backlash, and was instantly read as a rebuttal, a contrast Gap never engineered, but one it had earned, having committed to a globally diverse cast months earlier.

Having a point of view means the moment sometimes finds you. It paid out in both directions: eight billion impressions and double-digit denim growth for Gap, and Kelis's daily US streams nearly tripling in the week after launch. That last number is the tell. When the value flows to the artist as well as the brand, you are looking at an exchange rather than an extraction. And the follow-up confirms the direction of travel. Gap handed Young Miko even more ownership - a film built on her own track, and the brand's first campaign produced entirely in Spanish. Towards the artist, not away.

The sharpest small-scale example might be Salomon's XT-Whisper campaign with Dina Ayada, built entirely around her real story of dropping out of law school to make music. Remove the artist and the campaign doesn't get weaker, it ceases to exist. That's the test the Travis Scott Meal failed and the Chrysler ad passed: could anyone else have fronted this?

If the answer is yes, you haven't got collaboration.
You've just fulfilled a casting brief.