Value City Turns Back Time With That Cher Song

It's all about the furniture now

Cher’s annoyingly awesome earworm “If I Could Turn Back Time” keeps having a moment.

Uber Eats used the track, plus the diva herself, in an epic Aussie ad two weeks ago. Now Value City Furniture and Colle McVoy rework the song in the :75 below.

Campy tune, campy humor. It’s as comfy as your favorite couch or recliner. (But not the malevolent kind we see in the spot. Those aren’t from Value City, after all.)

“We wanted this new creative direction to highlight the superior quality of Value City products in juxtaposition to the not-so-quality options plaguing consumers,” says CM creative director Lia Khayami Quinones. “Furniture is the hero here—and people get to see the day and night differences that come when choices made don’t live up to consumers’ expectations.”

Understood. But just to be on the safe side, we’ll stand.

Ruganzu “Riggs” Howard directed. Dude’s got a great backstory. He used to be a police detective! Whodunnit? The sofa!

Hey, how did they achieve that man-eating-couch scene in the commercial?

CM creative director Ameth Barrera explains:

“A mix of hollowing out the sofa and an inflatable contraption were used to create the sinking effect at the top of the spot. It took a few tries to get the speed of the effect to match the track tempo. The stakes were high because it was the very last scene captured in a packed shoot day.”

No AI. Cool. How about the catapult-recliner?

“We used a harness attached to her waist, which an off-camera crew would then pull to have her launch across the room into some cushions,” Barrera tells Muse. “The actress was having a lot of fun doing this, giving us a lot of voice reactions whenever she got launched—one of them made it into the long-form version.”

“At the dinner table, the kid on the sofa could not hold back his laughter,” he recalls. “The actress was just naturally funny, and the way she pressed her face on the window was making everyone crack up. If you pay attention, you can tell that the kid giggling as he waves at is not acting.”