Beats by Dre (Beats) teams up with Grammy Award-winning artist Lil Baby and NBA All-Star Ja Morant in its latest campaign. The 90-second video will air in Game 3 of the NBA Playoffs, during which Morant will be playing.
The campaign is centered around Lil Baby and Ja Morant’s friendship and mutual admiration, which ultimately led to Lil Baby writing “Dark Mode” about the player. Both the track and the campaign play off Morant’s ethos around basketball, which can be summed up with the phrase, “welcome to the dark.” While many want to bask in the spotlight, one’s work ultimately illuminates itself as a result of relentlessly honing their craft in the darkness.
Lil Baby’s track focuses on “going into dark mode,” a behavior which has ultimately made Morant one of the most exciting players to watch in the league. The spot also visually reflects darkness, with both superstars appearing solely in monochromatic black and white throughout the entirety of the video.
“Ja has been one of my favorite players to watch. We’ve been locked in,” said Lil Baby. “This is not my first time partnering with Beats, but we took it up a notch with this original song. The world gets to experience ‘Dark Mode’ for the first time in a way that’s crazy!”
Beats first partnered with Lil Baby on its 2020 award-winning campaign titled “You Love Me,” while Ja Morant was recently signed as an ambassador to the brand. In the new spot, Lil Baby sports Beats Studio Buds in Moon Gray and Morant wears Beats Studio Buds in Sunset Pink, available exclusively at Target.
Watch the video on YouTube HERE. It will also go live on Beats’ Instagram, TikTok and Twitter once officially launched.
Credits
Brand: Beats by Dre
Creative Direction: Translation
Production: Love Song
Production: Quality Films
Edit: Trim / Cosmo Street
Color: Company 3 London
Finishing: The Mill London
Sound Design and Mix: Barking Owl
Music: Lil Baby (Motown Records)
About Lil Baby:
fines a generation. The GRAMMY Award-winning rapper has smashed records, made history, and impacted the course of modern hip-hop with his instantly identifiable and inimitable style. He has garnered dozens of multi platinum certifications and tens of billions of streams as arguably the biggest new rapper to emerge this decade. Following the success of his platinum full-length debut Harder Than Ever in 2018, he seized #1 on the Billboard Top 200 with 2020’s My Turn, becoming “the year’s #1 selling and #1 streaming album in the US.” At first, it cemented him as “2020’s first and only artist to go double-platinum,” but it has since gone quadruple-platinum and has logged 85 weeks in the top 10 of the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart – marking the longest top-tier run in the chart’s history.
He notably tied Prince and Paul McCartney for Billboard Hot 100 hits and Taylor Swift for “most weeks atop the Billboard Top 200 in 2020” with a total of 6. Out of eight nominations, he scored his first GRAMMY® Award in 2022. He has appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone and the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players Issue in addition to receiving honors from VEVO, Rap Caviar, the Apple Music Awards, and more. He teamed up with Lil Durk for The Voice of the Heroes, marking his second #1 debut on the Billboard Top 200. It’s just the beginning though. He’s bound to revolutionize the culture again with his third album in 2022. Most recently, he released “Right On” and “In A Minute” which both songs debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. This feat puts Lil Baby in rare territory, making him the youngest of only 12 artists to have ever landed 100 or more songs on the Hot 100. This generation belongs to Lil Baby.
