All this talk of jingle bells got us thinking. What happened to the advertising jingle? Many of us can still sing the Oscar Meyer Weiner jingle or the State Farm theme song, but let’s be honest. Advertising jingles aren’t what they used to be. There was a time when advertising jingles were integrated into every part of the marketing mix. They were catchy and blatantly promoted on shows like Howdy Doody. In the holiday favorite A Christmas Story, Ralphie is pumped to FINALLY get his Ovaltine decoder only to find it’s yet another plug for the marketing message.
The story below from The Atlantic delves deeper into the evolution of the the advertising jingle and how Michael Jackson got us to where we are today.
-Ally
What Killed the Jingle?
by Tiffany Stanley
Most Americans can recite their share of jingles. Perhaps they can’t remember their partner’s cell phone number, but they know every digit required to reach Empire carpet. Or every word of “I’m a Toys ‘R Us Kid.” Or that the best part of waking up is Folgers in their cup.
And yet, despite its effectiveness, the jingle has become a relic of the mid-20th-century commercials it once dominated. Today’s pop songs and yesterday’s classics have effectively replaced the jingle: A Kanye West song plays in an ad for Bud Light Platinum, Lady Gaga’s “Applause” is a party anthem for the Kia Soul’s spokeshamsters, and a Bob Dylan track helps advertise Victoria’s Secret. Amid all this, Oscar Mayer decided to retire two of the most popular jingles of all time, “My Bologna Has a First Name” and “I Wish I Was an Oscar Mayer Weiner.” In 2010, the company announced a new ad campaign, sans the old tunes. “What we did not want to do was write jingles,” an ad exec told The New York Times.
The decline of jingles does not stop with a few big-name brands: A 1998 survey of television commercials by the American Association of Advertising Agencies counted 153 jingles in a sample of 1,279 national, 30-second ads; by 2011, the last year the survey was produced, those numbers had dropped to only eight original jingles out of 306 commercials. (Between 1998 and 2011, the survey’s sample size shrunk as national, 30-second ads became rarer.) Meanwhile, marketers are focusing their efforts on licensing existing music from recording artists. Last year, the revenue from such deals reached a high of $355 million, according to the recording-industry trade group IFPI.
This is what advertising music means today: Instead of jingles, we have singles.
“The industry that I was in is no more,” says Steve Karmen, who has been nicknamed “The King of the Jingle” and whose greatest hits include the long-running “Nationwide Is On Your Side” and the state song “I Love New York.” At 79, Karmen, a lifelong composer and show-business veteran, laments, “There are no jingles.”
What killed the jingle? It owes its demise not only to shifts in the advertising business but also changes in the music business, and how the two industries became more entwined than ever.
Have you tried Wheaties?
They’re whole wheat with all of the bran.
Won’t you try Wheaties?
For wheat is the best food of man.
They’re crispy and crunchy
The whole year through,
The kiddies never tire of them
and neither will you.
So just try Wheaties,
The best breakfast food in the land.
It was straightforward, and sounded more like a dirge than the upbeat ditties that would come in the following decades. But the promo worked spectacularly, and the jingle made its way around the national market. It was a new way to advertise: The jingle was a natural fit for radio, and later television, both mediums well-suited to audio.
Jingles soon developed into a distinctive musical genre. “If you heard a jingle, you wouldn’t mistake it for any other kind of music,” says Timothy Taylor, an ethnomusicologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. “People talked about the ‘Madison Avenue choir,’ the sound of lots of voices singing together in praise of something and a soft jazz or light orchestral background.” What resulted was as effervescent as a nursery rhyme, whether or not the product was aimed at kids.
These jingles didn’t sound like pop songs, but as their popularity grew, a few found crossover appeal. 1939’s “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot” became a hit in its own right, and Pepsi released more than a million recordings of the song. The “Chiquita Banana” jingle, first broadcast in 1944, taught American listeners how to store and eat the tropical fruit (Don’t refrigerate! Brown spots are good!). At its height, the song was played, on average, 376 times a day on the radio, according to the company, and a number of popular artists covered it.
The zenith of jingles came during the postwar period, when the booming American economy spurred tremendous growth in consumption and, in turn, the advertising sector. “In its heyday it was a very, very lucrative business,” says Eric Korte, a former music director at the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and now the head of music production at the marketing firm Mixtape Club. “The top jingle writers and top jingle singers made fortunes,” Korte says. Peter Bell, a producer, started a jingle-writing studio in Boston in the early 1980s. “I was living like a king,” he says. “And I left every day at 4 to go play squash.”
Because jingles promised a reliable cash flow, a number of stars got their start writing them. Barry Manilow, for one, is to thank for “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” and “I am stuck on Band-Aid Brand, ‘cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” At some of his shows, Manilow has played medleys of his most popular jingles, which he once called “these obnoxious little melodies that won’t leave you alone.”
In the ‘80s, many advertisers wondered: Why stop at present-day hits? As Baby Boomers became corporate admen—and, as a generation, started families and ramped up their consumption—songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s took on a new life in commercials. Their interest in mining nostalgia led them to see that a Motown classic like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” could be revived to sell raisins. In the realm of licensing old music, again, Michael Jackson had a role. In 1985 he bought the publishing rights to the Beatles’ catalog for $47.5 million. When the band’s song “Revolution” appeared in a 1987 Nike ad, thanks in part to Jackson, some diehard fans were indignant, and the surviving Beatles sued Nike. An undisclosed settlement was reached, but the signal was clear: Not even the most sacrosanct counterculture bands of one’s youth were safe from advertisers.
Once maligned as selling out, licensing singles is now an accepted part of making money as a musician. “It’s no longer a bad move for an artist to license a song or partner with a brand,” says Chris Clark, the director of music at the advertising agency Leo Burnett. “It’s become more of an essential move.”
Where does that leave jingles? For now, they live on through online “best of” listsand YouTube videos, for the nostalgic benefit of anyone born before, say, the new millennium. Local advertisers still employ them, mostly in third-rate spots for car dealerships and discount stores.Occasionally a legacy brand will resurrect a jingle, or at least a remnant of it, in an attempt to capitalize on any residual sound recognition. But even when this happens, jingles are usually played with a wink: In a string of State Farm ads, actors conjure up insurance agents out of thin air simply by reciting the old line, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” In one ad, a man explains the source of his magic to his amazed friends—“It’s the jingle,” he says—and they take turns reciting it and summoning a sandwich and a hot tub. Meanwhile, the actual jingle’s melody is relegated to a pared-down synth number that plays over the State Farm logo at the end of the commercial.
At least one ad agency tried to resurrect the jingle, as sung by pop stars, but the results were mixed, to say the least. In 2008, after Chris Brown’s song “Forever” became a top-10 hit, the gum company Wrigley revealed it had sponsored the song as an ad for its Doublemint Gum. Translation Advertising, a firm co-founded by Jay-Z, had brokered the deal, along with jingle-single hybrids for Justin Timberlake and Neyo. But even before Brown’s eventual criminal charges ended the campaign, the marketing sleight of hand provoked outrage. Under the headline “Boycott Wrigley If You Ever Want To Hear Real Music Again,” Gawkerwarned that the promotion could “be the first of many” and that soon “kids won’t see any problem with the fact that all of their favorite songs are ads for one company or another.”
And yet, musicians have always been selling something—if not their corporate sponsors, then at least their sounds, their looks, their labels, or themselves. The revenue source may have changed, but artists still need to make money. So who can blame them for using commercial exposure to support themselves? The lines blur between selling out and getting by.
Still, all this can make one miss the lowly, old-fashioned jingle, which, despite its commercial origins, has come to represent a kind of wholesomeness: It was simple and straightforward, advertising that sounded like advertising. The days of the jingle as a distinct, easily identifiable genre are over. But its spirit lives on, in a way that’s getting ever harder to detect.
Tiffany Stanley is a writer for The Atlantic, where a version of this article originally appeared.