Axe and Martin Garrix Turn Shared Earbuds Into an Anthem of Connection
Axe's 'These Are the Times' is a 2019 film campaign created by 72andSunny Amsterdam, launched in The Netherlands in July 2019, that positions music — specifically a collaboration with DJ and producer Martin Garrix — as the central metaphor for human attraction and connection between young men and women.
The campaign's central visual device is deceptively simple. A couple in different physical locations share a single pair of earbuds connected by an improbably long cable, allowing them to experience Martin Garrix's track together across distance. That image — intimate, playful, and rooted in a universal youth behaviour — functions as what the creative team described as an anthem of connection. Rather than relying on the brand's legacy tropes of conquest and seduction, the campaign locates attraction in a shared moment of listening. The Axe fragrance product becomes ambient to the emotional experience rather than its transactional cause.
Published in The Netherlands on 18 July 2019, the campaign launched in direct alignment with the official release of the Martin Garrix and JRM single 'These Are the Times', released on the same date according to Wikipedia. The song, which also carries songwriting credits for Brandon Green and Giorgio Tuinfort according to Wikipedia and Genius, was distributed under STMPDRCRDS, Garrix's own label. The synchronisation of the advertising campaign with a genuine commercial music release gave the film a cultural legitimacy that conventional brand soundtracks rarely achieve. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard.com and earns a Clapboard Score of 79/100, reflecting strong creative and strategic coherence. It contains one primary media asset — the film itself — and operates across the Health and Music industry categories. Its launch market, The Netherlands, is also the home base of 72andSunny Amsterdam, making this a locally rooted production with global creative ambition.
Axe entered the 2019 Dutch market carrying the weight of a brand identity that its own agency had already declared obsolete. Carlo Cavallone, Executive Creative Director at 72andSunny Amsterdam, described Axe's previous brand expression as 'anachronistic', according to Muse by Clios. Danny Feeney, Strategy Director at 72andSunny Amsterdam, stated that men were performing masculinity rather than living it, according to Muse by Clios — an insight that had already driven the 'Find Your Magic' global platform, launched in January 2016 and created by 72andSunny Amsterdam, as reported by Adage and Campaign Live.
That 2016 platform represented a documented strategic pivot, shifting Axe away from portraying fragrance as a mechanism for sexual conquest toward encouraging young men to identify and express individual qualities, according to Vox and LBB Online. 'These Are the Times' extends that logic into music culture. In The Netherlands, where festival attendance and DJ culture carry significant social currency, the decision to partner with Martin Garrix — a Dutch national who ranks among the world's most followed electronic music artists — is a precise piece of cultural targeting rather than a generic celebrity endorsement.
The competitive environment in 2019 placed Axe alongside Old Spice, Nivea Men, and Dove Men+Care within a broader men's personal care segment dominated by multinational companies including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Beiersdorf, according to GII Research. Unilever, Axe's own parent company, is described as the global leading deodorant company by GII Research, meaning the brand competed internally as much as externally for shelf relevance and audience attention. Against Old Spice's humour-driven creative and Nivea Men's functional messaging, Axe's music-as-attraction positioning in The Netherlands represented a meaningfully differentiated emotional territory. The strategy also built directly on the predecessor campaign 'Burn Out', a 2018 Axe and Martin Garrix collaboration that generated 57 million global views according to Muse by Clios, validating the creative partnership before 'These Are the Times' extended it.
Ivana Bobic directed 'These Are the Times' for production company Riff Raff, with post-production and visual effects handled by MPC London and sound design executed by Wave London. The combination of Riff Raff's production reputation, MPC London's post capability, and Wave London's sonic craft placed the film within a tier of production quality more typically associated with entertainment releases than personal care advertising.
The film's central device — the extended earbud cable connecting two people across space — operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Visually, it literalises the idea of a shared listening experience, transforming a mundane piece of consumer hardware into a symbol of emotional proximity. The cable's physical improbability is the point: the campaign asks its audience to accept a heightened, slightly magical version of a real behaviour they already practise. This approach aligns with the campaign's stated positioning as an anthem of connection, giving the metaphor room to breathe without tipping into sentimentality.
Wave London's sound design work is particularly significant given that the campaign's entire emotional architecture depends on the audience believing in the primacy of the listening experience. The integration of Martin Garrix and JRM's track into the film required the sound to feel both like a music video and like a coherent piece of brand communication — a balance that Wave London's involvement was specifically tasked with achieving. The synchronisation with the official release of 'These Are the Times' on 18 July 2019, as documented by Wikipedia, meant the film circulated alongside genuine music promotion, lending the advertising content an organic cultural context that most brand films cannot access. 72andSunny Amsterdam's creative direction ensured the Axe brand remained present without overwhelming the music-first narrative, consistent with the agency's documented approach to the brand's repositioning according to Muse by Clios.
No independently verified performance data specific to the 'These Are the Times' film campaign in The Netherlands is publicly available beyond the predecessor benchmark established by 'Burn Out', which generated 57 million global views according to Muse by Clios. That figure establishes the scale of audience the Axe and Martin Garrix creative partnership was capable of reaching, and provides a meaningful baseline against which the 2019 follow-up was positioned to perform.
The structural effectiveness of 'These Are the Times' rests on several compounding factors. The campaign's launch on 18 July 2019 — timed precisely to coincide with the commercial release of the Martin Garrix and JRM single of the same name, as documented by Wikipedia — meant the film benefited from the organic search and streaming traffic generated by genuine music promotion. In The Netherlands, where Martin Garrix commands a culturally elevated profile as a nationally recognised artist, this alignment between brand content and music release gave the campaign a discovery pathway unavailable to most personal care advertising. The activation layer, which according to Markhub24 invited fans to submit stories and videos about sharing earbuds, including a planned TikTok component, extended the campaign's participatory potential beyond passive viewership.
The Clapboard Score of 79/100 reflects the campaign's success in resolving a difficult creative brief: making a body spray brand feel emotionally relevant to a youth audience without reducing that relevance to product function. The combination of a credible music partner, a grounded human insight, and production craft from Riff Raff, MPC London, and Wave London produced a campaign whose emotional coherence is structurally sound regardless of the specific view metrics that remain undisclosed.
Axe's 'These Are the Times' is a July 2019 film campaign created by 72andSunny Amsterdam in The Netherlands. It features a couple sharing earbuds connected by an extended cable to experience a Martin Garrix and JRM track together, positioning music as the primary language of attraction and connection for the Axe brand.
Ivana Bobic directed the Axe 'These Are the Times' film for production company Riff Raff. Post-production and visual effects were handled by MPC London, and sound design was carried out by Wave London, making it a collaboration across multiple specialist production companies to serve the campaign's music-first creative concept.
Martin Garrix provided the campaign's musical foundation. The Axe film was synchronised with the official release of the Martin Garrix and JRM single 'These Are the Times' on 18 July 2019, according to Wikipedia. Additional songwriting credits belong to Brandon Green and Giorgio Tuinfort. Garrix had previously collaborated with Axe on the 2018 campaign 'Burn Out'.
Axe's 'These Are the Times' extends the 'Find Your Magic' platform launched globally in January 2016 by 72andSunny Amsterdam, as reported by Adage. That platform shifted Axe away from conquest-based messaging toward celebrating individual expression. The 2019 campaign applies that logic to music culture, using shared listening as a metaphor for authentic attraction rather than product-driven seduction.
The predecessor campaign was Axe's 'Burn Out', a 2018 collaboration also featuring Martin Garrix. According to Muse by Clios, 'Burn Out' generated 57 million global views, establishing the creative partnership's reach before 'These Are the Times' was developed as the follow-up for The Netherlands market in July 2019.
Axe's 'These Are the Times' campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 on Clapboard.com. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative coherence, culturally precise music partnership with Martin Garrix, and the structural effectiveness of synchronising a brand film with a genuine commercial music release in The Netherlands in July 2019.
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