In Los Angeles at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, pop music superstars Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and rap icon Kendrick Lamar graced the stage at the Crypto.com Arena to profess their love for the city, its unique neighborhoods and its resilient people as residents begin to assess the devastation from the multiple deadly fires that tore through the city over three weeks in January.
While these sentiments from Sunday night’s “I Love L.A.”-themed Grammys were certainly sincere from Eilish and the like, they’d be expected at any major awards event broadcast after an unprecedented national emergency devastating the town where much of the industry operates. But this year, for Grammy top brass Ben Winston, who executive produced Sunday’s show along with Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins, sentiment and platitudes weren’t enough and he and his team decided that the show’s scheduled date, just days after the Eaton and Palisades fires were finally fully contained, as no curse but an opportunity to give back to L.A.’s impacted businesses.
“It’s funny,” Winston told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. “The way everyone thinks about it as a three-and-a-half hour show, but it’s actually a two-and-a-half hour show with an hour of commercials. “I just thought, well, actually, what [if] we gave commercials to local businesses?”
This rather brilliant and charitable idea came to Winston midway through January as the fires were blazing infernos, relentlessly destroying tens of thousands of acres and structures across L.A., leveling many local shops and other businesses that were left in ruin. The idea was greenlit ahead of the broadcast, giving Winston and his team a mere fortnight for business identification, outreach, booking red-hot musicians for the production and for his in-house team to script and finalize edits on all five ads.
Research into the businesses leveled by L.A.’s massive and monstrous fires yielded 200 potential picks to be featured. Once that was narrowed down, five made the final cut: One was the irresistible Lost Stuffy Project, which aims to help replace beloved items like stuffed animals, toys and blankets for kids who lost them in the fires.
The Lost Stuffy Project was close to Winston’s heart, given that he’s a father of two. The Project’s ad featured The Jonas Brothers — a close relationship with Winston sure helped get the young Jonas men clear a day to work on the project.
In fact, all of the celebrity music acts and artists asked by the Grammys to appear in these local business ads gave a resounding “yes” when receiving the invite. This included Avril Lavigne appearing in the spot for Paliskates, a Palisades-based skateboarding and clothing shop that has been a longtime community center; Doja Cat’s turning up in the final seconds of an ad for the displaced Orla Floral Studio, whose location in hard-hit Altadena was burned beyond recognition; Anderson.Paak in a spot for Rhythms of the Villages, an Altadena-based African cultural goods and apparel store that doubled as a community pillar; and Charlie Puth for the Steve Two Dragons Martial Arts in Pasadena.
Credit for the diverse selection of local businesses and for turning the whole concept into five slick ads in two weeks — celeb-spokesperson-led spots that these owners could never imagine self-producing — is owed to their producer, Dave Piendak and co-producer Kate Dowd and director Lexa Payne.
“We tried to get a range of locations and different businesses, and we went to those five. Dave called them. Dave ran it with Lexa, and they all instantly just loved the idea and were really grateful,” Winston explained, adding that while he did not know the actual cost of an ad spot for the 2025 Grammys, he reckons it must be at least a million. And if he’s not correct, he’s close: Data shows the 2019 rate was $725.000 per 30 seconds.
“We were giving them something that would have cost them many millions. It was just, ‘Let’s use the Grammys for good in every way that we can — both as fundraising on the show, bringing attention to the disaster, and also [attention to] specific businesses like these,’” Winston added.
It’s unclear if the businesses now own their spectacular ads, though. These spots were not paid for as your car manufacturer or latest prescription medication would for any Grammys ad time, but each was rather an incorporated element of the show’s production. Winston insists that the spirit of the concept presumes that these five L.A. upstarts have full permission for the spots.
The music industry may remember the 2025 Grammys as the year of fire relief and love for L.A. as the tragedy hung over the event and it came up at every turn. While some insisted that in the wake of such devastation across L.A., the awards should be canceled; for Winston, Sunday’s show and broadcast had to go on, simply because so many locals — caterers, drivers, florists and the thousands of gig workers — have financial ties to its success. And of course, there’s the massive giving opportunity the Grammys created this year. Closing the show, host Trevor Noah told the crowd that $7 million had been raised for fire relief efforts during the four-hour broadcast.
