Welcome to Advertising in America, the podcast where we meet entrepreneurs where they’re at in their marketing and bust through their bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots. 

‍

Watch the video above or read the text version below.

Subscribe: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Ryan: On today’s episode of Advertising in America, we explore the art and science of jingles. Should every business have a jingle? What makes for a good jingle? And how should I get a jingle done, If I’m going to get one? And just like a great jingle, if it’s annoying, it’s likely working. Here’s Mick.

Mick: Well, I write jingles for a living, so this could come off as self-serving. And I do make a jingle for nearly every client I have, but perhaps I should sidetrack to what do I mean by a jingle and what others might mean. Back in the 70s, jingles were very popular. 30 or 60-second songs that completely stood alone. Fun fact, We’ve Only Just Begun was actually written as a wedding-themed TV commercial for the Crocker National Bank in California. They were promoting first mortgages to newly married couples. It was written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, and then, of course, they took the lines about the bank out and they wrote a second verse and gave it to the carpenters and made millions of dollars with it!

Again! But that kind of jingle, the full sing 60-second song, yeah, I don’t do that, and that’s because the full sing jingle has very limited usefulness. You can’t run a full sing jingle for 10 years. When I write a jingle, I sing one very short, memorable line that connects the client’s brand to either an important point I’m trying to make or a call to action like the client’s web address.

Short, sweet, memorable. And then I structure the song to put that sing in more than one place over the 60 or 30-second music bed. I want to be able to put the sing at the beginning or at the end or just near the end or, but not quite the end. I want options and that’s what copywriters always one. And since I’m a copywriter, I write the sort of jingle that a copywriter wants to work with.

I create the campaign and the jingle at the same time so they work together. We never crowbar one into the other. Now, do I write jingles for other partners or clients that I don’t write copy for? Yes, but I still work with the copywriter on the shape of the campaign so the jingle can accomplish the goals that we’re all trying to achieve.

A jingle is not just a sing, remember, it’s also an original music bed, which means that that music will never be heard for another company or brand. Radio stations all have music libraries, and you might hear the same music tracker under your commercial as you might hear for another company one town over. And if you have your own jingle, that music is yours and yours alone. And with my jingles, anyway, you own it forever.

So, music is the best way to connect an idea to a memory. It’s not just a coincidence that we teach children the alphabet the way that we do. Think about it. Do you think children really want to memorize 26 symbols, the building blocks of language? Well, no way. But if you put it to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, now they’re going to remember it forever. And if I ask you to recite the alphabet without singing, you can do it, but you’ll be singing it in your head, and I’ll know that you’re doing it when you go H I J K L M N O. You big cheater! You’re freaking singing it in your head!

We remember songs so easily, from years ago, involuntarily. I know every word and every note of Love Shack, and I don’t like Love Shack. We’re in the message delivery and retention business, and we want our message to be retained, even if the listener doesn’t really want to retain it.

Involuntary recall is what we’re after, and that’s where music comes in. It allows us to slip past the gatekeeper, and that’s why you can remember a jingle from a business in your hometown when you were a child. It’s locked in forever. Only music can do that. The client pays for the first few times you hear it, but every time you sing it to yourself, it costs my client nothing. So yeah, everybody needs a jingle.

Ryan: Mick, you may hate Love Shack, but you clearly love snacks. I just need to say it. I have never met anyone on this planet, that knows more about the art and science of jingles than you, man. Getting a jingle done by you is like getting Ridley Scott to direct a television ad. Chris, it’s time to put your little brother in his place.

Chris: I like a good jingle as much as the next guy. Mick will tell you all the scientific brain game ways that they work on you. They stick in your memory, they become part of the cultural zeitgeist, and he’s not wrong per se. But I will reject any statement that says, here’s a hard and fast rule about what you should do to succeed. And that includes jingles.

There is no system. There are no formulas. There’s no trick to it. There are no shortcuts. Building a brand involves doing what’s best for that specific brand at that specific time. Figuring that out is hard. It takes time. It takes talent. And then it takes more time. Do you know who makes a great case for all the ways jingles work on consumers? Jingle writers.

The same way the guy who sells you billboards will tell you all the things that are great about out-of-home advertising. And the same way the sales guy from the radio station will tell you how high their ratings are and how many people listen to the station every day when they drive to work. It’s one of the traps that I reference all the time. If all you sell is hammers. All your problems start to look like a nail. Ask a jeweler how to fix things up with your girlfriend. Do you think he’s gonna suggest taking her out for a nice dinner? Or do you think he’s gonna suggest a lovely pair of diamond earrings that we just happened to have on sale this month?

Are they wrong? No! I agree with plenty of that stuff. But anytime someone tells you they’ve got a system, and if you just follow their system, you’ll succeed no matter what, I start to wonder if you might actually be full of crap. There are plenty of brands that I have written jingles for, co-written, or commissioned, and they have taken all kinds of different forms, and they have always really helped. But I also have plenty of customers where a jingle was the wrong way to go, so I didn’t. It’s not the only tool in the bag, and it’s not necessarily one you should use every time. So, should every brand have a jingle? No.

Ryan: So what makes a good jingle?

Mick: Well, I mean, I can only speak from the ones that I do and I kind of have my own way of doing it. It just occurred to me, while we were having this conversation that the last full sing jingle that I could think of is one that you wrote actually, which is the one for Coors Light, the one that James Taylor sang,  which actually was a full sing.

Chris: Well, that was in the 80s so. No, the 90s.

Mick: But, you know, that’s, that’s also on a very, very different level. And in that world, you don’t run something longer than six months anyway. The sort of clients that we’re working with are generally, you know, owner-operated businesses, and when they’re investing in a jingle and I use the word investing cause they’re frigging expensive.

This is not something you’re just going to use for six months and then toss it away. It costs too much to do that. So, you know, I kind of have my own system, where I don’t do the full sing because you need to leave room for the campaign to get in there. So I want to have that option of having that sing part be at the beginning, at the end, you know, almost at the end other places so that you can write around that and make and make some sense of it. Another thing I also want to be really clear about. You know, at the Wizard of Ads organization, there are lots of other guys who write jingles. I know Adam Donmoyer writes jingles. I know Jack Heald writes jingles. There are probably other people who write jingles that are not coming to mind right now. But, you know, what the heck, I’m here. So, I can tell you how I do it, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it.

Chris: It’s interesting that you referenced the Coors Light thing too. I think where jingles got, you know, there’s that love-hate relationship with jingles, or that sort of tendency for people to crap on jingles as a sort of cheesy way that advertising used to be done. That’s an interesting reference, you know, beer commercials went through this phase in the 80s and 90s where they were basically just kind of montages with a piece of music behind them. And in fact, the way we used to make them is we used to go through director’s reels and just pull interesting clips and put it together and say, yeah, you put the sing over that and there’s your commercial. And it was kind of, you know, there’s nothing wrong with it. It worked for a while, but that whole approach to advertising is, as you say, different from what we do.

We come up with a campaignable idea that we can expand from commercial to commercial. And so you need the jingle to play a different role as opposed to, you know, just being a soundtrack to a montage.

Mick: Well, there’s also another sort of artistic way of looking at it. You know, sometimes people will say to me, you know, you’ve always liked jingles. And I’ll be like, no, I think jingles were terrible. Kind of all of ’em. That’s kind of why I got into it. I remember something I heard Pen Gillette talking about, Pen Gillette from Pen and Teller, and people very often ask him, you know, did you always want to be a magician? You must have admired magicians your whole life and he’s like, no, I didn’t like magicians at all. I didn’t like what they did. I didn’t like what they pretended to do. I didn’t like Kreskin who pretended that that he was actually really able to read people’s minds and didn’t acknowledge that he was doing magic tricks. And so he specifically went into magic because he wanted to do it right.

Chris: Do a better job.

Mick: Like if you really like the Rolling Stones and you want to write Rolling Stones music, well, don’t do that. The Rolling Stones are still alive, depending on when you’re watching this. You know, if you find something that you don’t like and then do it properly. So that’s why I got into jingles as I found them cheesy. I found them repetitive. I found them annoying. And most of them were garbage, by the way, most of all art is garbage. Most paintings are garbage. Most music is garbage. Most TV shows are garbage. Most movies are garbage. Most of everything is garbage. So just there’s, there’s no good response to say, well, most jingles are shit. Well, of course they are. Most of everything is shit. I specifically said that I want to make a jingle that is not that, and that serves the client for an entire campaign and has the flexibility to be able to even move from one campaign to another. So that meant that the structure of the music had to be different and that’s how I created the system around which I build a jingle. Doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it.

Ryan: That’s fascinating. You know, as I was researching the sciencie bits and pieces of this, and things that you already know about this in such a nuts and bolts kind of way, that there were things like ear cons that came up. Ear cons are those little tiny pings and dings that we hear on slot machines, and on our phones and the little bells that we hear, but it’s also those little markers that we have showing up, those distinctive sounds that reoccur in advertising that are done at a high repetition. Those are very distinctive ways of anchoring into our brain and holding, an anchor in our literal brain to actually go back to and pattern recognize for the power of the auditory message is five times that of the auditory message of the visual. So one of the things that as you get into deep weeds of marketing and psychological science of consumer behavior and, and effects that it has on people, persuasion, there’s the thing called the audio logo. The audio logo is literally five times more powerful than the actual logos that you see on the side of buildings and trucks. And a lot of people, I have no idea that it even exists. Like we’ve all heard of earworms, but no one’s heard of an eyeworm.

Chris: It’s funny, I worked in Japan in the 90s and it struck me there because we weren’t doing it in the West at the time. They called it a sound signature, which is that little thing that just goes at the end of the spot and it is the very same way that you would super the Nike swoosh at the end of your Nike spot. It’s that little audio thing and they would do with all their brands. Just a little thing at the end. The only one in the West that was doing it was Bimedic. But everyone else would have a jingle. They would sing a couple of lines or they would sing, do a full sing. They would do all kinds of things.

Mick: Intel started doing that.

Chris: It’s interesting that we’ve started to do it. Intel does it now. Frankly, that’s, you know, here’s McDonald’s that used to sing, all of you deserve a break today. And now it’s just da-da da da daaaaaa. It’s just that little sound signature. But it is a, it buttons it all up at the end and it, and it is that sort of permanent logo attribution of everything. If you just like everything you saw in the last 28 seconds, you attach it to that brand.

Mick: Well, and everything that Ryan said was true, but in fact, you’re still talking about the left hemisphere of the brain, uh, the, the audio auditory association area has such a capacity for remembering sounds and remembering them for a long time and remembering them with a tremendously great degree of accuracy.

But if you go to Wizard Academy and take the Magical Worlds course, you’ll hear an hour’s worth of interesting content about the right hemisphere of the brain. And that’s where music lives. Words are on the left and music is on the right. And what’s cool about the right hemisphere of the brain is that there is no gatekeeper there. You will hear music, and you will store music, and be able to recall music, simply because the right hemisphere of the brain doesn’t edit properly as compared to the left hemisphere, and that’s why you remember Love Shack. Even though Love Shack is, in my opinion, not a particularly good song. ‍And I like, I like coming up to people and saying, Hey, sing me a, sing me a jingle from your childhood, from whatever town you grew up in, and everyone can do it. Everybody can sing a song about a random, well, in your case, it was a, it was a taxi,

Ryan: Casino Taxi, they’re the fast ones.

Mick: Sing the whole song. Sing. What’s a little more, what’s the number?

Ryan: 4-2-5 6-6-6-6

Mick: Woo. So every human has built… When was the last time you took a cab? Never. The point is, it’s not relevant anymore. You don’t actually need this information. It is stuck in your head involuntarily and will probably never leave. And that’s simply because of the power of music.

So it’s important not to, when you’re building your brand, when you’re spending your money to try and get the name of your company into people’s heads, to ignore the value of something that can imprint your brand and then attach it to something else, right? It’s not just the name of your brand and the phone number. I mean, as ridiculous as it is. Casino Taxi, we’re the fast ones. They actually attached, they attached a position to it. I don’t know how they’re able to get there faster, or even if they do. But the point is, they made you, they made you remember…

Chris: You have now associated those two ideas together. That idea is attached to that brand in your head.

Mick: And if I just said, you know, Casino Taxis is the fast ones, I think I’d probably go, I’ll bet you they’re not, and reject that. That’s Broca’s area doing that saying, I don’t buy it.  But music doesn’t attach any judgment to the memory and that’s a really powerful thing that if you don’t take advantage of that, because it’s, I mean, I talk about how jingles cost money and they do, but the value proposition on how much it costs and how well it it allows people to remember who you are, what you stand for and how to get ahold of you. And the fact that you can do all that in one go, pay for it once, run it for 10 years and burn it into the brains of people.

Yeah. It’s practically free now. It’s a remarkably efficient and cost-effective way to do that.

Ryan: Martin Lindstrom in his book, Brandwashing, talks about nostalgia and how powerful a drug nostalgia really is. And when you start to look at those fond memories of all those, of those ads that we heard, those Saturday morning cartoons, those things that were sung into existence and then lived in our brains rent-free for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, man, that is a power that is so hard to tap into effectively. Now, there are a couple of things that have to happen. We have to have frequency and the proper repetition in the marketplace for you to hear it enough for it to anchor in, you have to have captured that melody and or those words that are in it, and we see it all over the place now. I mean, who doesn’t know the Netflix to dumb, right? Everyone knows that sound signature.

Mick: Law and Order. That’s their theme.

Ryan: Seinfeld. We all know the Seinfeld sound. Even if you haven’t ever watched Seinfeld, there’s a pretty darn good chance that you’re going to know that, saxophone, right? So there’s a, there’s a huge power to that and it drives customer loyalty. Most people don’t really appreciate that. Look at McDonald’s. I’m loving it. All we’d have to say, let’s do a pop quiz. da-da da da daaaaa.. We know what that one is. Nationwide is…

Chris: On your side.

Ryan: Give me a break.

Chris: Give me a Kit.

Ryan: Give me a Kit Kat Bar. That’s right. The idea of this whole audio logo is something that the Sonic identifier, as you were, as you were mentioning. These are powerful, powerful things that we’re looking to embed. Those are all done astoundingly strategically. There is so much strategy put into this. And just having a jingle for the sake of having a jingle is not what’s serving the purpose. You may get lucky. You may find something that hits. But cute and clever are not a good replacement for good strategy.

Mick: And the reality is that most jingles are written by musicians. And musicians are generally songwriters and they’re used to writing songs. And I’m probably a copywriter first and a musician second, although I’ve been doing music longer. But I don’t write as a jingle, as a musician. I write as a copywriter. I write with a strategic plan in mind and what you’re trying to accomplish with a jingle is not actually the same thing you’re trying to accomplish with a hit song. So in a sense, I would definitely recommend that you work with someone who’s used to writing jingles.

If you’ve got a friend of yours who is really great with a guitar and can write songs, he might not necessarily be able to accomplish the goal, even if he writes you a nice song about your business, it might actually not be a strategically beneficial thing. It’s harder than it looks.

Ryan: It could be cute and clever, it could be fun, and it could be something that can be reused and leveraged, but it’s not doing the strategic thing that you need it to do for embed-specific purposes.

Mick: I like putting this in a simple matter of putting an idea to music.

Chris: Mick talked about that idea of putting things at the beginning and the middle and the end or being able to put it. It’s that idea of giving the jingle a role of beyond just being branding. Like, it’s interesting about da-da da da daaaaa. Well, that’s fine. It certainly attaches that brand to the story that we just saw. What I find we end up doing a lot is using a piece of music or a little sing or something just to intro the spot right? So there’s a cluster of radio commercials and then there’s a sung line with a piece of music that only belongs to this brand. And that first line then gets you in. And if this campaign has been running for a few years, then, as soon as people hear that line, it’s like, Oh, it’s another one of these commercials, right?

It sort of draws you in, you know, where you are. But it’s that you’ve given that job to the jingle or to use it as the wrap-up, right? You tell a big story and then in the end you, you sum it up with a tagline. If the tagline is that summation. It’s that idea of using the jingle to play another role. So your speaking people, your announcer, or your characters or whatever it is, the spoken part of the ad does this, and then the jingle does this other thing. And you’re not trying to get these people to do three things now, because you know, one of them you can leave to the jingle. And we’re at the beginning, you leave the first one to the jingle and let them pick up from there.

Mick: Well, I also think there’s a larger lesson to be learned because it just sort of occurred to me that the idea of finding something you don’t like and fixing it, applies to more than just music. Like I did it with jingles. I didn’t like jingles. I thought they were all shitty. And so I started writing jingles. If you don’t like country music, write country music.  Like don’t do something that’s great, but that applies to business too. Like if in your town there are four great carpet stores, don’t open a carpet store. If there are two shitty carpet stores that are really awful and don’t do a very good job, open a freaking carpet store.

Chris: Find the opportunity,

Mick: Find the thing that you don’t like that everyone’s doing wrong. I think that’s what Dewey Jenkins did when he started his HVAC company. He’s like, everybody’s screwing this up. Like there’s nobody good. So I’ll, I’ll do that.

That’s a bigger lesson. In a sense if you can’t do that, if there’s not something that you’re fixing. If there’s not something that you’re truly doing right, that everybody else is doing wrong and would all admit that they’re doing wrong, then that’s not good.

Chris: Then by definition, you also doing it wrong.

Mick: Then you’re just one of many. But if you want to be a standout in your category. Find a category where they’re making mistakes and then do it correctly.

Ryan: So, say, you had to write a jingle for, say, I don’t know, a bingo hall in Sudbury, Ontario. What might your approach be?

Mick: It’s funny you say that because I actually wrote a jingle for a bingo hall.

Chris: What was the name of this bingo hall?

Mick: In Sudbury, there were four bingo halls at the time. This is back in the 90s. This is a long time ago. So there was Star Bingo, Delta Bingo, Bingo Country and Bingo World. And so I was working for another agency at the time and my boss had sent me to Bingo Country, that was the one that we were going to see. And I did write what I believed was perhaps the best jingle ever for a bingo hall. And I think strategically it worked really well for this particular brand and in a sense, that’s sort of the cornerstone of a good idea. If you’ve got a good idea for a particular company brand service, it shouldn’t be interchangeable that you could just use it for another.

Chris: When you hear it, you’ve got to know it’s for them.

Mick: Yeah. It can really only be that one bingo hall. If you could just simply replace it with the name of the other company and then sing it, that’s not a particularly good jingle. I mean, I don’t know if Casino Taxi could have easily had Dave’s Taxi and have that same jingle, how it worked. But in the example with the bingo hall in Sudbury, I think it really was specific to that brand, perhaps the best jingle that I’ve ever written.

Chris: So we’re talking about this in the abstract. I mean, can you share it with us?

Mick: Well, absolutely. No, because I wrote it and when you’re to truly be able to tell how good a jingle is, you want to be able to hear it over and over and over again, and then remember it and be able to sing it back to you. Actually, it’s even better if you can play it for children because children are very, very good at remembering everything.

Chris: They like to repeat things back.

Mick: They read the same stories over and over…

Chris: Especially if it’s got a good hook.

Mick: They love to listen to the same music. They sing along. So this particular jingle — I’m going to prove that it’s a great jingle because I’m going to sing it to you once. I’m not even going to sing the whole thing, I’m going to sing it to you once. And you’re going to remember it forever on one hear. Which in my opinion is kind of proof that it’s such a great jingle.

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, spoiler alert. They didn’t buy it. They didn’t actually buy this jingle. I think they should have because it was the best jingle frankly ever that I think had ever come through their door and this the other part is gonna made you it didn’t even take me that long to write it. I was actually in the bingo hall walking around when the idea came to me.

Chris: Flashbulb moment.

Mick: Exactly, and it all became clear. And all I had to do is go back and, you know, get it down.

So I’m going to sing the jingle to you now for Bingo Country, just the one. And I think you’re going to appreciate just how great a jingle it was and what a tremendous missed opportunity it was for the good people of Bingo Country in Sudbury, who just didn’t appreciate the genius of it. And it’s not their fault. It was a long time ago. I’m not even sure if it’s the same ownership now or management.

Mick: So here’s how it goes. And you’re not going to get the full production idea, ’cause I’m just going to be reading- singing it to you a capella here, but I think you’ll get the idea. It kind of went like this.

Hey, bing, bing, bing, bing, bingo country. Count, count, count, count, country. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bingo. 

And it kind of went like that. And that was sort of a 30 second idea with that sing. Now not everyone at Bingo Country agreed with me that that was a great Jingle, but I think, well, it’s memorable.

Ryan: It’s memorable.

Mick: What’s our first job as advertising people? Get noticed. There’s so much clutter. There’s so much advertising. So many other people trying to get into your brain with their advertising message. So you have to get noticed. Ideally, someone would turn up the volume, and go, did I just hear what I think I heard? Yes.

Ryan: Yes, you did. You did hear that.

Mick: Turn that volume up. Listen to it again. Now, could they confuse that jingle with Star Bingo or Bingo World or Delta Bingo? No! It could really only be Bingo Country. So, with those big three competitors going up against them, I think really the only company that people would have remembered had this jingle been sold, and we gone forward, would be Bingo Country.

Again, tremendous missed opportunity. Not everybody has that visionary perspective on how music can be so powerful. But unfortunately, we can’t help everyone.

Ryan: I can see how it would work very, very well. It could take over the country really in a lot of ways.

Fun fact, the very first jingle broadcast on radio was for Wheaties in 1926. It aired locally and boosted sales so effectively that General Mills rolled it out nationwide, helping save the iconic cereal brand from being discontinued.

Chris: Good heavens.

Ryan: We wouldn’t have Wheaties today if we didn’t have jingles. I mean, that’s kind of a big deal. I’m just putting that out there. You know in the olden days, jingles predate radio by a long shot. In Elizabethan England, traveling musicians would sing-song sponsored by the local businesses. Essentially, early jingles.

You know, Chris, you sang me a catchy little jingle a few months ago and I still can’t get out of my head. Do you want to hear it, Mick? Shampoo. It’s the only poo you should put in your hair.

Chris: It’s shampoo.

Mick: His ten year old nephew really likes that one.

Ryan: Shampoo. It’s the only poo you should put in your hair.

Chris: Shampoo. If it’s another other poo, don’t put it in there. Shampoo. 

Mick: There’s a lesson in that song. I mean that’s for nephews. That’s a song for nephews.

Chris: All those uncles out there. That’s yours.

Ryan: That’s royalty-free. No copyright infringement. Now that I’ve blessed the 13 people left listening to this podcast wondering what they’re doing with their life. If you don’t have any good ideas on what to say about your brand, a full-sing jingle may do something to get locked into the market echoic retention. If your advertising isn’t frequent enough that it will struggle to get into the prospect’s long-term memory, it may work out for you. If you want to get the full impact of a jingle, start with how it fits into your strategy and what you’re trying to get people to actually remember.

You’ve got one shot. One opportunity. Don’t lose yourself in too much cute and clever. You see what I did there? Great strategy outpaces cute and clever every time.

Now I’m Ryan Chute, and these two co-hosts who were geographically convenient enough to do a live podcast economically together, Chris and Mick Torbay. Want to spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and audience captivated.

Latest posts by Advertising In America (see all)