Loyalty programs are the least romantic thing a phone company sells, which is exactly why Verizon has decided to sell one as a love story. The Verizon Feel the Love commercial, posted on Verizon’s verified YouTube channel on October 6, 2026, casts The Summer I Turned Pretty star Christopher Briney as a brooding bad boy who spends two minutes and three seconds yearning for something. Whitesnake’s “Is This Love” does the heavy lifting on the soundtrack. The object of his desire, it turns out, is a Verizon Shine daily drop.
It is a long-form joke built for a fandom that already knows Briney for this kind of longing. The question is whether the payoff is worth the wait.
WHAT HAPPENS ON SCREEN
We open on a tight, grey-skied farewell. Briney, in leather jacket, white tee and jeans, holds a young woman and tells her, “I’ll be waiting.” Then he climbs into a red vintage Ford Mustang convertible and drives. And drives. The film is built like a late-80s power-ballad video: slow-motion hair rakes, aviator sunglasses, a hand pressed to the chin on a bridge, a general store, a firehouse, a night drive lit by the dashboard, and endless checks of a phone that will not ring.
He finally reaches the shoreline at dawn and walks to the water’s edge alone. An incoming video call arrives from “Sofia,” the woman he left behind, and he declines it. Seconds later his lock screen, reading 6:43, lights up with the notification he has actually been waiting for: “Your Verizon Shine daily drop is here!” He claims a $5 Starbucks gift card, an “Offer Claimed” badge flashes up, and Briney grins, then throws his arms in the air and runs across a field into the sunrise. The supers close it out: “Feel the love with Verizon Shine” and “Every day in the Verizon app,” over a final shot of the Mustang heading down the road, Briney’s arm raised in triumph.
CREDITS
Brand: Verizon (Verizon Shine loyalty program). Film: “Feel the Love,” 2:03, posted on Verizon’s verified YouTube channel; People describes it as part of Verizon’s “Go Crazy” campaign. Creative: developed in-house at Verizon, according to Ricardo Aspiazu, SVP of creative and brand design, speaking to Muse by Clios. Director: Mitch Ryan. Production: Cadence. Talent: Christopher Briney. Music: “Is This Love” by Whitesnake. Behind-the-scenes and campaign photography: Magda Wosinska. Verizon CMO Leslie Berland is quoted on the project. The film was shot on 35mm on the North Shore of Long Island. Not credited in any source we found: the actress who plays Sofia, the cinematographer, the editor, the post and color house, the music supervisor and the media agency.
THE EXECUTION
The craft is the strongest argument for this spot. Shooting on 35mm gives the grey Long Island light real grain and weight, and the decision to avoid the Pacific Coast Highway cliche pays off: overcast bridges, a weathered general store and a firehouse make it feel like a forgotten 1987 music video rather than a car ad. Mitch Ryan lets the clothes, the car and the song do the period work without tipping into parody.
Briney is well cast because he plays it completely straight. The jaw clench, the sigh and the stare at the phone all sit on one note of earnest longing, and he never winks at the camera. Whitesnake is the right needle drop too: “Is This Love” is overwrought enough to be funny and sincere enough to sustain two minutes.
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T
What works: the misdirect is clean. The opening “I’ll be waiting” sets up a romance, and every phone check reads as heartbreak until the reveal reframes it as deal-hunting. Declining the call from Sofia to claim the drop is the sharpest beat in the film, a small, slightly cruel joke that lands the idea of a perk worth obsessing over. The sunrise sprint, a nod to The Breakfast Club, ends the film on a laugh rather than a pack shot.
What doesn’t: two minutes is a lot of road for one gag. The middle section repeats the same beat – he checks the phone, nothing happens, he looks moody – several times, and the joke depends on viewers who came for Briney rather than for Verizon. Anyone without that fandom will be waiting as long as he is. The prize is also a problem. The film builds yearning of epic proportions and resolves it with a $5 Starbucks gift card. That gap is part of the humor, but it undersells Shine: nothing tells you what else the program offers or why it beats a rival’s rewards app. And with Verizon also mining Connor Storrie, Stephen Kalyn and Trinity Tatum for similar content, the heartthrob-plus-retro-song formula is starting to look like a template.
VERDICT
“Feel the Love” is a handsome, well-acted piece of fandom content with a genuinely funny turn in its final 30 seconds, and the 35mm craft lifts it well above the usual telecom promo. But it is a social-first sketch stretched to two minutes, and it treats the product as a punchline rather than a reason to switch or stay. Fans of Briney will happily rewatch it; whether they come away knowing what Verizon Shine is beyond a free coffee is less certain. Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
