People who loved Snoop Dog’s commentary during the Summer Olympics on NBC have another chance to see him in action.
The rapper-turned-broadcaster is fronting a new campaign for T-Mobile, released Friday, advertising its offers for the new iPhone 16.
In the ads, Snoop Dogg provides gameplay commentary on Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes as he dashes into a T-Mobile store to grab the new iPhone. Popular streamer Kai Cenat also shares his take on Mahomes’s shopping moves.
“Using these people together had not been done in any way and covered a lot of ground,” said Brian Klugman, who directed the ads with Panay Films, which also worked on T-Mobile’s 2024 Super Bowl spot. “It felt like a fun, unique way to put this posse together.”
The creative team shot much of the campaign in advance of Apple’s iPhone 16 unveiling on Sept. 9, and then completed the commercials with information revealed about the product at its launch.
“You don’t see the phone until you get closer” to the release date, “so you have to kind of reverse engineer,” Klugman said.
The brand had already discussed doing a campaign with Snoop Dogg before his commentary at the Olympics, according to Andrew Panay, who founded the agency. NBC’s ratings for the Games in Paris rebounded significantly from the low viewership of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic
“Since [Snoop] was actually doing the commentating and we were discussing it, the fact that [the Games] backed right into where we were headed was exciting,” Panay said.
Football fans — and Americans generally — have also seen quite a bit of Mahomes in recent years because of the Chiefs’ success; his teammate Travis Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift; and the quarterback’s commercials for brands like Adidas, State Farm Insurance and Coors Light.
Asked whether the brand was worried about consumer fatigue with Mahomes or Snoop, Klugman said, “of course.”
“There is always concern when someone has been used before,” Klugman said. “It’s about execution. In Hollywood, you have the same movie stars appearing over and over again in film. Some work, some don’t — even if you have seen them before. It’s about the execution, how you’re using them.”