Days of jingles past
For a while in the 1980s and 90s, my dear departed father, Jack Taylor, had an agency partner, Jim Jordan, who was considered, by many, to be the king of the advertising jingle. As a copywriter and Creative Director, Mr. Jordan’s favored tool wasn’t a pencil ... it was the upright piano that was always found, front and center in his office.
These advertising professionals did a lot more than create catchy tunes to promote products. They crafted little, unforgettable slices of pop culture and Americana. And if you are, like me, a person of a certain age, it’s pretty likely these jingles STILL run through your head as you walk down the supermarket aisles. They may actually STILL guide your purchase decisions. That’s what happens when your message has made an enduring emotional connection. That’s what’s possible when you turn Strategic Messaging into a pop culture extravaganza.
Let’s have a beer.
From the earliest days of advertising, marketers have always struggled, just a bit, with what to say about beer. Flavor is a tough attribute to describe. Music helps paper over that challenge—and that’s why there are so many memorable beer jingles found throughout the history of advertising. The jingle for Schaefer Beer ran throughout my childhood and adolescence. That is until we collectively agreed that, while we’re very likely to have more than one beer, binging isn’t necessarily a strong value proposition.
The Lowenbrau jingle was so well-written and so ubiquitous that The Persuasions—to my mind the greatest acapella group of all time—used to actually perform it as part of their stage show. So for them, and for you, Tonight, Let It Be Lowenbrau.
The cured meats.
Back before every large supermarket would slice your deli meat for you, packaged bologna and hot dogs were big business ... and they had the big-time jingles to match.
Oscar Mayer liked them so much, they have two jingles that surely rank among the most oft played and remembered of all time.
Not to be outdone, Armour had its own ear worm. Not sure if the concept of a group of kids following the Pied Piper of Hot Dogs would fly today, but the song sure holds up.
Some of history’s most successful products were launched with a jingle.
Even if you’ve never eaten one, I bet you can recite the ingredients of a Big Mac. Its jingle wrote them right into our collective national DNA.
Heck, the song was such a powerhouse that it didn't even matter that the dude at the front of the spot says the ingredients in the wrong order at one point. More evidence that the best jingles, like Clint Eastwood’s Man Without A Name, travel best when they travel alone.
Speaking of traveling, The Big Mac song was just traveling the well-worn path of such other epic product launches as Rice-A-Roni. Who knew it was “The San Francisco treat” until there was a jingle? We never would have guessed that a sodium-laden processes rice mix was the pride of one of the world’s great culinary cities. But that is the power of the jingle!
From coffee to cat food.
What’s the best part of waking up? What’s the cat food cats ask for by name? If you know the answer by heart, there’s a jingle to thank.
Do jingles still work?
The jingle is still there, but it’s taken a different form. It’s the audio mnemonic, which some folks also call an audio logo or earcon. A really good example is what McDonalds has done. (McDonalds leading the way on brand advertising. Imagine that …) They have done such an excellent job building brand equity, all it takes is that ba da da dum dum.
These mnemonics are jingles for the digital age. We may not see the likes of the classic jingles again, but it’s hard to argue they really worked.