The 58th annual Clio Awards handed out a bevy of awards to innovative advertisements and their creators Wednesday night (Sept. 27) at Lincoln Center in New York, including a trio of distinctions for the top commercials utilizing music from ads appearing on the Billboard & Clio Music’s Top TV Commercials charts, powered by Shazam.
Using tagging data from Shazam as well as sales and streams tracked by Nielsen Music and factoring in creativity in musical integration, the three charts produced for the awards – Breakthrough, Collaborative Debut and Classic – ranked ads that either pushed an existing song to new prominence, helped debut a new song to the masses or brought new life to a classic hit.
The charts are year-end versions of the monthly Top TV Commercials rankings that appear on Billboard, with data for the 2017 awards running from July 2016 to June 2017.
The New York ceremony, hosted by Saturday Night Live cast member Cecily Strong, included a pair of performances of songs featured on the Breakthrough, Collaborative Debut or Classic charts. Marian Hill performed a shortened rendition of “Down,” the duo’s breakthrough hit (and eventual No. 21 hit on the Billboard Hot 100) that ranked No. 1 on the Breakthrough chart following its appearance in an Apple iPhone 7 ad, and Iron & Wine sang a tender acoustic take of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” that ranked No. 5 on the Collaborative Debut chart after its inclusion in a McDonald’s commercial.
Along with Marian Hill and Apple, the other winners for 2017 were Alex da Kid and IBM for Collaborative Debut (the producer’s “Not Easy,” featuring X Ambassadors, Elle King and Wiz Khalifa, debuted as part of an IBM ad) and The White Stripesand Beats Audio for Classic after the company utilized “Seven Nation Army” in its “Be Heard” commercial.
The full year-end charts for 2017:
