Japanese popular music as embedded in television commercials is taken as a point of departure for understanding consumer aesthetics and practices, and how music and image can touch – or, create a lasting impression on – an audience. This phenomenon, called the tai-appu (tie-up), or an alignment between artists and products, results in an imēji songu (image song). These contracts between manufacturers and artist have been ubiquitous in the Japanese media landscape since the early 1980s. While tie-ups can be considered a kind of celebrity endorsement, common in many consumer cultures, they play a more prominent role in Japanese popular culture, edging out MTV-style videos as the primary method that artists use to promote their music. The success of these mini-videos can be attributed to the tie-ups' multisensory impact (with multiple images, text and sound in movement) and their overall audience accessibility. Understanding these compressed media messages is important due to recent concern about the way advertising invades, rather than enriches, the media landscape. Advertising analyses contribute to our understanding of how a society's economy and culture are inter-related; tie-ups give us particular insight into the connections between culture (music and image), economy (product popularity and sales figures) and society (audience formation and reception), and highlight the importance of sensory experience in popular culture.