Playing The Hip-Hop Name Drop

Finding success with rap tie-ins, marketers are now looking to insert their brands into the sheet music. Can they—and the artists—pull it off? By Todd Wasserman n 2003, executives at Courvoisier were toasting their good fortune. Thanks to a ditty called "Pass the Courvoisier," sales of the cognac were racing up the charts. The hit Busta Rhymes/P. Diddy song, released the previous year with no engineering from the brand, was credited with boosting Courvoisier sales 18.9%, per Impact, New York. Marketers took notice, and began to step up rap tie-ins with everything from cars to sneakers to cell phones. Now, they are going further. In a deal with Maven Strategies, Lanham, Md., McDonald's earlier this year began dangling payments to rap artists who include the name of the brand in their songs—turning the music, in effect, into a... [read full story]