When Verizon went looking for the picture of an old-school, family-run storefront for its newest national commercial, it found one on Bayville Avenue. Bayville Pharmacy, the locally owned drugstore at 253 Bayville Avenue that doubles as a comic book shop, confirmed on its own page that the company filmed at the store, and thanked Verizon for casting it as exactly what it is: a classic mom-and-pop shop.

The ad it landed in

The commercial is the centerpiece of Feel the Love, the campaign Verizon released on its official channel on October 6. The roughly two-minute film stars Christopher Briney, the actor known to a large share of Long Island households as Conrad from the series The Summer I Turned Pretty, and it plays out as a moody road movie: Briney drives a red vintage Mustang convertible through a string of small-town scenes, an old storefront among them, while Whitesnake's 1987 ballad Is This Love carries the soundtrack.

The campaign promotes Verizon Shine, the company's rewards program, and Briney posted about the shoot on his own Instagram account in early October, where the behind-the-scenes clips drew hundreds of thousands of likes. For the few seconds a storefront fills a frame in a national campaign, a production crew descends on it for the better part of a day, and the pharmacy noted how large the operation around its small shop turned out to be.

A pharmacy that is also a comic book store

Part of what makes the location choice fit is that Bayville Pharmacy really is the kind of shop the ad needed. It is independently owned and operated in a village of under 7,000 people on the North Shore, and alongside prescriptions and front-of-store staples it runs a full comic book operation, with new issues, back catalog and the kind of staff enthusiasm that has the shop's own page reviewing horror comics between refill reminders.

That combination has made the store a stop for more than prescriptions. Comic readers from around the North Shore treat it as a destination shop, and its page keeps up a steady stream of beach reading recommendations, new arrival announcements and neighborhood photos.

Small storefront, national screen

Commercial location scouts have been working Long Island's North Shore villages for years, and Bayville's main stretch along the water offers something increasingly hard to stage: a working, unretouched small-town business district. This time the cameras stopped at the pharmacy counter.

The spot is in rotation now, on television and on Verizon's channels, so the next time a vintage Mustang rolls past a familiar-looking storefront in a phone commercial, look closely. That is Bayville.

If you want to see it, or the shop

Bayville Pharmacy is at 253 Bayville Avenue in Bayville, reachable at 516-628-3640. The Feel the Love film is on Verizon's official YouTube channel, posted October 6, 2026.

Sources