Like almost any other job, Josh Rabinowitz’s work as executive music producer at Young & Rubicam (Y&R), New York, has its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys. Instead of dwelling on the chores, however, he likes to talk about the high points, like the three spots he completed a little while ago for Dr Pepper.
The spots, this year’s flight in the three-year-old "Be You" campaign, continue to feature younger musical acts saluting or recognizing those who came before them. The new spots are: "LeAnn/Reba," pairing LeAnn Rimes and Reba McEntire; "Patricia/Ana," linking Patricia Manterola and Ana Gabriel; and "Motown," with B2K and Motown legend Smokey Robinson. Samuel Bayer of bicoastal RSA USA directed the trio of spots.
Rabinowitz supervised the recording sessions, as he did for previous spots featuring LL Cool J, The Black Eyed Peas, Thalia, Run DMC, Cyndi Lauper and other music notables. "The coolest thing was for me to get heavily involved in it," relates Rabinowitz. "Then it’s kind of me and the artists—it’s as if I’m a record producer. A lot of these people are heroes to me, people I’ve been influenced by. It’s a dream to go into a studio and actually work with Smokey Robinson."
Furthermore, Rabinowitz takes pleasure in the fact that the Dr Pepper spots are built around original music, not something licensed from the artists. "A lot of what really excites me about this stuff is that it is a jingle," he says. "Licensed music is effective, but it’s more effective to come up with a song you can associate with your brand. It’s being creative—coming up with something original. It’s my preferred route. Long live the jingle."
While the concept has been tweaked over the three years of the campaign, the process has been pretty much the same. "The account team, the creative team, the producer and I get together and discuss the artists we might use," Rabinowitz recounts. "We have a list of people we’d really like to work with and we try to make different combinations. Then we go out and see who is willing, able and available."
Some pairings are fairly obvious, like putting pioneer rappers Run DMC with LL Cool J. Others are somewhat surprising. "Two years ago, we did Cyndi Lauper being saluted by Anastacia," Rabinowitz recalls. "Her music doesn’t relate to Cyndi Lauper really, but we thought it was a really interesting combination. It was the juxtaposition of two varied people who are very talented."
The songs in the spots are variations on lyrics written by copywriter Harold Kaplan, Y&R’s creative director on the Dr Pepper account. Then after the artists are picked, the next step is to produce a demo at New York music house Crushing Music to approximate what the artist would sound like. "That lets us test it with consumers," Kaplan explains, "and it tells us what we’re doing wrong and how to fix it. We play those demos for the client, and they get a much richer sense of what we’re trying to do."
The talent is given approval of the song’s treatment and is encouraged to adapt it further to their particular style and taste. "Different groups did different things with it," Rabinowitz says. "Black Eyed Peas completely changed it around, using elements of the melody but creating their own sound. They felt that was vital and important for them. With Thalia, her producer Cory Rooney put his own flavor on it, [and it wound up having] a lot of live horns."
While Rabinowitz pulls the recording sessions together, his role varies, depending on the artist’s wishes. "Some of the artists, when they recorded their vocals, they wanted to work with the producers who have worked on their records," he notes. "There is a comfort zone involved."
The current flight illustrates the different approaches. For the Latin-flavored spot with Mexican legend Ana Gabriel and actress/singer Patricia Manterola, Rabinowitz used the arrangement that Crushing had done early on in the process. "The Nashville session with Reba and LeAnn, I worked directly with country producer Dann Huff, who does LeAnn’s records. We talked about musicians to hire, but I didn’t actually hire them. On the Smokey/B2K spot, it’s not necessarily a lot of live players. I get to be incredibly hands-on. It’s as if we’re working on a record."
The biggest hurdle, Rabinowitz says, is that record producers and agency music producers approach laying down a track quite differently. Some record producers don’t work on corporate time. They want to record from midnight to 5 a.m. And often they don’t appreciate agency deadlines or realize that a high-priced director is waiting to shoot the spot the next day. In one case, Rabinowitz had to enlist the talent’s management to back him in firing a well-known producer. "We had a strict deadline and needed to come up with stuff quickly," Rabinowitz recalls. "He couldn’t relate to that kind of deadline. I had to step in and say ‘This is what we need to do,’ and kind of take over. They are used to a more leisurely pace. What we accomplish in five hours they might do in a week."
The latest campaign continues the practice of having a Latin spot—in English and Spanish versions—along with a rap/hip-hop spot and a rock or country spot, but Kaplan points out that this year’s package is more mainstream than previous work. "With this generation, we wanted to get back to the heartland," Kaplan says. "We had done rap with Black Eyed Peas and then LL Cool J and Run DMC. This year we went to musical people like B2K and Smokey, who are more mainstream. In the heartland, which is really Dr Pepper’s home, nobody could be more so than LeAnn and Reba. Even on the Hispanic spot, we chose not to use a Hispanic setting. We chose a setting that could be Anywhere, U.S.A. That was also an effort to stay mainstream."
For now, there are no firm plans in place to continue the campaign for a fourth year, but neither has the plug been pulled on it. "We are trying to continue it," Kaplan reports.
