Those who enjoyed Snoop Dogg’s commentary during NBC’s Summer Olympics now have another chance to watch him do it live.
The rapper-turned-celebrity stars in a new campaign for T-Mobile, released on Friday, promoting offers for the new iPhone 16.
In the ad, Snoop Dogg provides gameplay commentary as Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes rushes into a T-Mobile store to buy the new iPhone, and popular streamer Kai Senat also shares his own thoughts on Mahomes’ shopping habits.
“Putting these guys together has never really been done before, and it covers a lot of ground,” said Brian Klugman, who directed the ad for Panay Films, which also produced T-Mobile’s 2024 Super Bowl spot. “We felt it was a fun and unique way to bring this crew together.”
The creative team shot the majority of the campaign ahead of Apple’s iPhone 16 announcement on September 9, then finalized the commercials using product information released at the launch.
“You don’t see the phone until it’s closer to launch, so you have to reverse engineer it,” Krugman said.
The agency’s founder, Andrew Panay, said the brand was already considering doing a campaign before Snoop Dogg’s commentary at the Olympics. NBC’s ratings for the Paris games rebounded significantly from low ratings for the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which took place during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Since [Snoop] He was actually doing the commentary and we were talking about it. [the Games] “It was exciting to back up to where we were heading,” Panay said.
Football fans, and Americans in general, have seen a lot more of Mahomes in recent years thanks to the Chiefs’ success, his relationships with teammates Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, and his appearances in commercials for brands like Adidas, State Farm Insurance and Coors Light.
Asked if the brand was worried about consumer fatigue with Mahomes and Snoop, Klugman said, “Absolutely.”
“There’s always a concern when someone’s been used before,” Klugman says, “It’s a matter of execution. In Hollywood, the same movie stars appear in movies over and over again. Some work, some don’t, even if you’ve seen them before. It’s a matter of execution – how you use them.”
