GRAMMY Awards and TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles built a four-stage interactive music video around Ella Mai's Boo'd Up to promote the 61st GRAMMY Awards in 2019.
ARCHIVEHow GRAMMY Awards and TBWA Turned Ella Mai Into an Evolving Music Video
The Evolving Music Video starring Ella Mai is a 2019 interactive film campaign created by TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles for the Recording Academy's 61st GRAMMY Awards, in which viewers in the United States unlocked four progressively richer versions of Ella Mai's nominated song Boo'd Up by watching, sharing, and liking the video online.
The campaign launched in February 2019, timed to the lead-up to the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards broadcast. Its central objective was to promote the ceremony while deepening audience engagement with one of the year's most talked-about nominations. Rather than presenting a finished, polished piece from the outset, the creative mechanic withheld production value itself as the reward for participation. The first version arrived in stark black-and-white, with Ella Mai performing Boo'd Up entirely a cappella. Subsequent versions, unlocked through collective fan actions, introduced colour, piano accompaniment, dancers, and ultimately a full marching band arrangement, transforming a single piece of content into a living, community-driven event.
In the United States, where the GRAMMY Awards operate as one of the most-watched annual music events in the entertainment calendar, the campaign represented a deliberate evolution in how the Recording Academy communicates its cultural relevance. By anchoring the mechanic to a genuine nominee rather than a constructed scenario, GRAMMY Awards and TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles connected promotional ambition directly to the music discovery experience that defines the ceremony's appeal. The campaign contains one primary media asset and was archived on the global advertising record shortly after its February 2019 publication.
The Recording Academy faces a structural challenge shared by every major live broadcast property in the United States: sustaining relevance and appointment viewing in a media environment that rewards on-demand consumption and social participation over passive, scheduled spectatorship. The 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards telecast, broadcast on CBS on February 10, 2019, reached approximately 19.9 million viewers, according to Blog Hollywoodbranded, a figure that reflects both the enduring scale of the franchise and the competitive pressure it faces from streaming platforms and fragmented attention.
TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles responded to that pressure not by amplifying spectacle but by engineering scarcity around a piece of content audiences already wanted. Ella Mai's Boo'd Up was among the most culturally resonant songs of the nomination cycle, making it an ideal vehicle for a mechanic that required genuine fan investment to progress. The strategy recognised that sharing and liking behaviour, typically treated as byproducts of content distribution, could instead be repositioned as narrative infrastructure. Each collective action unlocked a new layer of production, making the audience co-authors of the final version.
The competitive context for this approach is instructive. Rival music award properties including the American Music Awards and the Billboard Music Awards have historically relied on performance highlights and celebrity appearances as their primary promotional currency. GRAMMY Awards and TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles instead drew on the agency's decade-long relationship with the Recording Academy to construct something closer to a social game than a traditional advertisement. This lineage, which according to oneclub.org includes the 2010 We're All Fans campaign that assembled artist portraits from real-time YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook content, demonstrates a consistent strategic instinct toward participation over broadcast. The 2019 Evolving Music Video campaign extended that instinct into a sequential content release model with measurable fan-action triggers.
James Frost directed the campaign for Tool of North America's Los Angeles operation, bringing to the project a background in music video direction that made him a precise fit for a brief demanding both performance authenticity and structural innovation. Frost articulated the creative logic in remarks documented by oneclub.org: the decision to open at the most stripped-back possible state and allow the music itself to accumulate was rooted in the idea that the song's emotional core should be audible before any production layer was added.
Wyatt Troll served as Director of Photography, responsible for the visual grammar that had to function across four distinct versions of the same performance without losing continuity or emotional coherence. The shift from black-and-white to colour was not merely a tonal upgrade but a structural storytelling device: each new version had to feel like a genuine revelation rather than an incremental patch. Barking Owl Los Angeles handled music and sound production, with AJ Murillo serving as Sound Designer, a role of particular consequence given that the audio architecture of Boo'd Up had to expand organically from a cappella through piano to full marching band instrumentation across the unlocking sequence.
Post-production was divided between Cabin Editing Company Los Angeles and Shape + Light Los Angeles, which provided additional post and visual effects work. The collaboration between these studios ensured that each unlocked version retained the visual coherence of a single creative work rather than appearing as four separate productions stitched together. The result, as archived on clapboard.com, is a campaign in which production craft serves the participation mechanic rather than existing independently of it. Every technical decision, from colour grading to sound design, was calibrated to make the act of unlocking feel earned.
ARCHIVEThe 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards telecast delivered approximately 19.9 million viewers on CBS on February 10, 2019, according to blog.hollywoodbranded.com, placing it among the most-watched entertainment broadcasts of that television season in the United States. The telecast generated approximately 95 million dollars in national television advertising revenue, according to blog.hollywoodbranded.com, in a year when that figure represented a modest decline from the approximately 96 million dollars recorded in 2018, per the same source.
No verified performance data specific to The Evolving Music Video campaign, including view counts, share volumes, or unlock progression rates, is publicly available at the time of this writing. What the public record does confirm is that the campaign earned recognition from The One Club, as documented by oneclub.org, affirming its standing within the advertising industry's peer evaluation framework. Clapboard's editorial assessment assigns the campaign a score of 79 out of 100, reflecting strong strategic coherence, a distinctive creative mechanic, and high production craft, with the score acknowledging that the absence of verified engagement metrics limits a complete effectiveness picture.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on its alignment between mechanic and message. The GRAMMY Awards exist to celebrate musical achievement, and a promotional vehicle that literally withholds musical richness until an audience earns it through participation enacts that value rather than merely stating it. In the United States entertainment landscape of early 2019, where social platform algorithms rewarded sharing behaviour with organic reach, the campaign's architecture was built to compound. Each unlocked version created a new entry point for discovery, meaning the campaign could re-enter feeds multiple times without appearing repetitive.
The Evolving Music Video starring Ella Mai is a 2019 interactive campaign by TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles for the GRAMMY Awards. It released four progressively richer versions of Ella Mai's Boo'd Up, unlocked when audiences watched, shared, and liked the video, beginning with a black-and-white a cappella version and culminating in a full marching band arrangement.
The campaign began with a stripped-back, black-and-white a cappella version of Boo'd Up. Collective fan actions including watching, sharing, and liking the video triggered the release of subsequent versions, each adding production layers such as colour, piano, dancers, and a marching band, rewarding participation with musical and visual richness.
James Frost directed the campaign through Tool of North America's Los Angeles office. Frost's music video background informed a production approach in which the song's emotional core was audible before any additional layer was introduced, as documented by oneclub.org. Wyatt Troll served as Director of Photography on the project.
TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles created the campaign for the Recording Academy's 61st GRAMMY Awards. The agency has a long-standing creative relationship with the Recording Academy, previously producing the 2010 We're All Fans campaign and the 2009 Celebrate the Music That Makes Us campaign, according to oneclub.org.
The 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards telecast, broadcast on CBS on February 10, 2019, reached approximately 19.9 million viewers in the United States, according to blog.hollywoodbranded.com. The broadcast also generated approximately 95 million dollars in national television advertising revenue, per the same source, across that single evening.
Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects strong strategic alignment between the participation mechanic and the GRAMMY Awards' core mission of celebrating musical achievement, high production craft across four distinct video versions, and industry recognition from The One Club, as documented by oneclub.org.
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