Apple Dances Through Day and Night in Joyful AirPods Pro Spot That's Two Ads in One

Apple unveiled a splashy and pleasantly escapist two-minute AirPods Pro spot on Wednesday, bringing in a number of A-list collaborators to create a song-and-dance number that feels like a cross between two of its recently lauded commercials: “Bounce” and “Welcome Home.”

At its core, the spot, titled “Snap,” is a fanciful product demonstration. It shows the difference between Transparency mode and Active Noise Cancelation mode on the AirPods Pro—the former allows you to hear what’s going on around you, while the latter blocks out the sounds of the world.

“Snap” dramatizes this by showing woman walking around a city. In Transparency mode, she’s experiencing the usual humdrum big-city daytime routine, crowded and colorless. But with a click of a button, she enters Active Noise Cancelation mode, and is suddenly dancing through a pulsating, neon-drenched cityscape at night.

Made by TBWAMedia Arts Lab, “Snap” essentially a new version of “Bounce,” the jazzy 2019 spot directed by Oscar Hudson that showed a man—with his AirPods cranked up—walking around a town where the surfaces have magically transformed into trampolines. With its original music and choreography and its young female dancer, though, it’s also reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s celebrated “Welcome Home” spot for Apple’s HomePod in 2018.

The campaign features a brand-new track titled “The Difference” from Flume, the Australian musician, featuring the American singer Toro y Moi. Ryan Heffington did the choreography—he was also the choreographer for FKA twigs on “Welcome Home.” The dancer is Matilda Sakamoto, a Los Angeles native and Juilliard grad who’s a relative newcomer.

“Snap” was directed by Kim Gehrig, the Somesuch director who’s made some incredible spots, including “This Girl Can” for Sport England, the “Womankind” spot for Berlei bras, “Dream Crazier” for Nike, “Viva La Vulva” for Libresse and (released just this week) “Where There Are Cooks” for Lurpak.

Gehrig shot the entire film both in the daytime and at night. The footage was then stitched together to create the single transitional world.

The new spot comes just a day after Apple released another notable piece of creative—a five-hour-plus, single-take film, shot on iPhone, giving a tour of the famous Hermitage museum in Russia.