Given that he spent most of his teenage years in Osaka, Japan, with zero exposure to western TV, it's not surprising Daniel Marocco thought Oscar Mayer was standard fare for most North American TV spots. Jingle-based advertising is "okay", the 23-year old Texas native concedes, "but it's not the music I see
myself writing".

Nominated for his spaceship-themed work on Snapple's "UFO" spot from Deutsch, NY, Marocco says he was inspired by the fact that, when he arrived in North America from Japan, every second commercial seemed to vibrate with the ambient electronica strains of Moby.

He studied at NYU, and by 2001 was working at New York-based Duotone Audio as a technician's assistant. Marocco dabbled with a couple small composing jobs, including the Sundance Film Festival's trailers. By the time he started writing music for another Duotone client, Snapple, it was apparent that Marocco had found his calling. His bosses hired him.

Marocco's musical background - honed by a music-teacher father - was steeped in "straight rock and roll" and tinged with classical. His first two instruments were piano and trumpet, he picked up the guitar in high school, and these days he plays most of the instruments on his ad work. While comfortable with almost any genre - one of Marocco's first ad scores was a "jazz piano thing" for Clear Blue Easy pregnancy test - he confesses to a penchant for electronica. Chalk it up to computer savvy. "I've spent hours tweaking one electronic sound to get it right, all the right modulations and filters." It's evident in the "UFO" spot, where the music is a series of spaceship-like sound blips and noises. In two ads for Hill, Holliday's campaign for Marshalls department store, he relies on 'traditional' electronic effects, one is "hip-hop lite" while the other is classic electronica.

The tech toys and his over-active imagination have a tendency to conspire, making his music - Marocco thinks - too cutting-edge for mainstream acceptance. "Sometimes I write a piece of music but get comments [like], 'It's too cool for Crest'." He knows he must continually strive for balance. "You have to make the tracks cool for the commercial, rather than just cool tracks."

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