Marcel Winatschek

Is This a Band or an Ad Campaign?

The video for "Wasted My Time" by Superpowerless ran as a full-length spot on MTV—which is already a strange sentence to write, because MTV hasn’t played actual music videos in years, let alone as commercial breaks. The whole thing felt off in exactly the right way to make you wonder whether Superpowerless is a real band that got picked up by Vodafone, or a marketing construct assembled specifically to look like one.

They do have an actual web presence, which suggests real people behind the name. But then, Vodafone has the budget to build convincing fake web presences. The song is fine—the kind of indie-flavored track engineered to feel discovered rather than sold to you. Which is, of course, exactly what a well-made ad does.

I genuinely don’t know. If anyone has actual information about whether Superpowerless exists independently of the campaign, I’d like to hear it.