What Masters of the Universe Teaches Us About Emotional Marketing

Generative AI is becoming incredibly good at creating content. It can write blog posts, generate images, summarize meetings, draft marketing campaigns, and produce enough LinkedIn posts to keep your feed scrolling for hours.

But there is one creative tool that still stops me in my tracks: music.

Recently, I started watching Masters of the Universe after it became available on Prime Video. Ironically, the marketing campaign almost failed to reach me. I'm exactly the audience this movie was made for. I grew up during the era of He-Man, fantasy adventures, and Saturday morning cartoons. Yet the only reason I knew the movie existed was because I happened to catch the trailer before Project Hail Mary in theaters. Judging by the box office numbers, I have a feeling many people in my generation never had that moment.

Then the opening credits started and I immediately thought, someone in the marketing department missed an incredible opportunity.

The soundtrack is fantastic. Epic. Triumphant. Quintessentially '80s. Before a single line of dialogue is spoken, the music tells you exactly what kind of adventure you're about to experience. It captures the nostalgia, excitement, and larger-than-life heroism that made the original franchise memorable.

That music shouldn't have lived only in the opening credits.

Imagine a commercial where someone cracks open a can of soda and raises it overhead like the Sword of Power while that soundtrack builds in the background. Or a fitness campaign showing ordinary people transforming into heroes before a workout. Even one of the opening scenes, where Adam completely bombs a first date by launching into his backstory, feels like a missed opportunity. Where was the dating app partnership inviting people to "Find your Adam in Eternia" or "Swipe right for your Teela"? Whether those exact campaigns would have worked isn't really the point.

What Masters of the Universe Teaches Us About Emotional Marketing

The point is that music creates emotional recall in ways that words alone rarely can.

That's why we instantly recognize the first few notes of our favorite movie themes decades later. It's why sports arenas still rely on the same songs to energize a crowd. It's why some of the most memorable commercials in history are remembered as much for their soundtrack as their visuals.

Generative AI is becoming remarkably good at generating content.

But emotion isn't measured by the number of words produced.

Sometimes it's carried by a single musical phrase that makes people stop what they're doing, smile, and remember how something made them feel.

As marketers, we spend a lot of time thinking about visuals, messaging, and distribution. Maybe we should spend a little more time asking a different question:

What should our audience hear?

Sometimes the most memorable part of a brand isn't what it says. To quote Huntrix, "this is what it sounds like."