Apple Enlists Stars to Sell HomePod Speakers in Spike Jonze-Directed Commercial
Apple is never shy about hiring celebrities to hawk its products. The latest example is a new commercial aimed at selling the tech giant’s recently-released HomePod smart speakers.
The four-minute ad is directed by the famed movie and music video director Spike Jonze (Her, Being John Malkovitch) and it stars singer FKA Twigs dancing to a tune by hip-hop star Anderson.Paak. The trippy ad finds the British singer coming home to a small apartment at the end of what appears to be a long day. When an Anderson.Paak song begins to play, FKA Twigs starts to dance and while using her increasingly animated choreography to magically expand her small, drab apartment into a huge, colorful space. In the end, her character plops down on a couch before it is revealed that she was dreaming while listening to the song through her Apple HomePod speaker.
The commercial, titled “Welcome Home,” comes as part of Apple’s marketing campaign for the HomePod, which the company is calling “the new sound of home.” In a bit of (clearly thought out) corporate synergy, the song in question is Anderson.Paak’s new single, “‘Til It’s Over,” which just happens to have debuted this week exclusively on Apple Music, the tech company’s streaming music service.
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.
The new HomePod smart speakers went on sale in early-February, starting at $349, as a direct competitor to Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. As Fortune recently reported, two weeks after going on sale, the HomePod had snagged roughly 3% of the U.S. market for smart speakers, which puts it far behind the Echo (55% market share) and Home (23%), according to researcher Loup Ventures. Fortune‘s own review of the HomePod praised its outstanding sound quality while knocking its design and its Siri virtual assistant feature, calling it “the most disappointing Apple product” in years.
