Sonos Brings LED Lighting Design to Superbowl Commercial

It was a less than a minute long and likely cost between $3-$5 million to air, but it was one of the commercials that most caught my eye during this year’s Super Bowl (besides Budweiser’s perfect use of puppy love, of course). Sonos' commercial for wireless speakers also highlighted the beauty and dynamism of interior LED lighting with their "Fill Your Home With Music" commercial. In it, a vast, stark residence is transformed into a light-infused, color-drenched home.

A growing interest in the use of color-changing LEDs in interior design may be behind Philips' ever expanding line of related products and their increasingly lower price points. And more design resources are covering the growing trend - just consider OXP’s coverage of LED interior design options with their “30 Creative LED Interior Lighting Designs” article from late last fall or Dwell magazine’s interview with Flos USA CEO published just yesterday.

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how media and marketing attention - inadvertent or otherwise - to LED lighting possibilities augments the overall market. LED lights are highly efficient, and some say LEDs are more reliable than CFLs and last longer. Combined with this year’s anticipated slump in high LED costs, we may just see eye-popping, color-changing architectural lighting become a standard demand for interior designs of all building types.

Alright, alright - so perhaps I wasn’t getting the right message out of the ad that’s aim was really to promote Sonos’ new wireless speaker systems and beats music. But I’d be willing to bet money that I wasn’t the only one thinking, “Wow, that would be awesome if my house could do that crazy thing with the colored lights.”

[On a side note, it’s too bad Sonos doesn’t actually offer any such sound sensitive lighting solution. Is their commercial misleading? I’ll leave that up to the critics to decide and instead just focus on what’s relevant. If you’re interested in playing around with your own music-sensitive LEDs, I came across this simple “how to” from Instructables that’s been tried and tested according to the numerous comments.]