Advertising is a medium that explicitly ties in with the popular: On the one hand, it takes its inspiration from the field of pop culture, but on the other hand, it also forms and shapes this field of pop culture itself. Hence, advertising is a prime resource for exploring conceptions of ‘cultural icons’. Thematically, this article focuses on audio-visual commercials which use the music from operas as the source for ‘cultural icons’ and examines how theses auditive ‘cultural icons’ are transformed into complex signs. It explores how they are functionalized within the depth structure for an appellative advertising message and argues that often a specific tension is effective here which is indeed inherent in the concept of ‘cultural icons’ itself: Initially, the opera referred to must be identified and recognized in order to decipher the context of the commercials. Conversely, however, knowing the original text or narrative too precisely proves in some cases to be an obstacle because it distorts or even counteracts the desired advertising message in many cases. This indicates that this finely balanced game of referring to comprehensive knowledge via ‘cultural icons’ thus only functions if the recipients no longer know the quoted reference texts from a well-founded study of them, but only from secondary, shortened variations, i.e. solely from a (re)productive practice.