‘Snoopy Brush-a-Brush-a-Toothbrush/When you wake up in the morning!/A really nice touch!’ Around a decade and a half later, this song still rolls around in the heads of many veteran tv watchers, commercial connoisseurs and Peanuts fans. Now, in the days of digital soundscapes and ‘sound design,’ the old-fashioned commercial jingle has become an endangered species, almost as hard to find in the 21st century as the Snoopy Brush-a-Brush-a-Toothbrush itself.

‘That’s long gone,’ says Jody Colero, referring to the jingles, not the toothbrush. Colero is the founder of The Einstein Bros., a commercial music and audio production house in Toronto. ‘Nobody does a jingle,’ he continues. ‘And we only do maybe four or five singing jobs a year.’

Colero believes ‘everybody wants to make everything like a movie.’ He attributes this attitude as a main reason jingles have been all but forgotten in the new era of commercial audio production.

‘It’s like before it used to be: sing the jingle, make it memorable. Now they’re into sound design – hugely,’ Colero says.

‘There was no such thing as sound design before. It was just music and sound effects. Now, the sound effects are integrated into the music track and it’s much more dialogue-driven.’

Colero started The Einstein Bros. 16 years ago with Tim Thorney (currently at Great Big Music). With clients including Molson, Labatt, General Motors and Ford, Colero has a good sense of the hot audio styles in vogue. However, he’s not so sure that the current style is as effective in sticking in people’s brains as the golden days of jingles.

‘No, [it’s not as effective]. Not at all. Not in my opinion. It’s like they’re just completely disposable and taking themselves way too seriously,’ he says. ‘I actually watched tv last week, which I never do because it makes me nervous to see my [or my competitors’] commercials. But it was like a whole bunch of ads in a row where I couldn’t tell you what was going on or what they were selling. What I saw was a whole bunch of sound design, quick-cut, stylized things that were pretty boring.’

When attacking a new job, Colero will ‘always do what they [the client] wants.’ However, the veteran music producer will create a version of the job his way, as well. His way, he says, is ‘anything that elevates the idea or the picture.’

‘I usually just execute a second one that I think is way cooler. Half the time I get something through, and the other half, not a chance.’

At post-jingle-era Einstein Bros., Colero explains they dread the derivative. ‘It’s not so much that we miss the old-style jingle, it’s more like I miss being able to do something that doesn’t sound like the new Propeller Heads single. Out of every 10 commercials we get, eight of them come in where everybody has a predisposed idea of how they want it to sound. And it’s usually whatever the flavor of the week is. Except nobody realizes that there are seven other guys coming to me with seven other projects and they’re all cut to the second track from the Matrix soundtrack album.

‘It’s not the editor’s fault,’ Colero continues. ‘Or the agency’s fault. In a digital domain you’re allowed to do more things, earlier on in the process. It used to be that they’d cut the pictures without any sound. And then, when you got to the audio guys, it was a big deal putting sound on it.

‘Now, it’s like the editors are cutting their pictures to an existing track in order to sell the cut. And the client hears it 50 to 100 times before it even gets to us. And they fall in love with it. They want it to sound exactly like the stuff [the editor put on there]. Or they want to buy the track. And then they realize it costs a whole whack of dough, so it’s ‘Can you make it sound like that?’ Which is real serious cheese.’

Einstein Bros. has also done tv theme songs (Eerie Indiana and Due South) and is entering into the world of the Internet, something Colero calls ‘a big silent movie,’ with a new company, Einstein Interactive.

Carl Lenox is a partner and producer for Great Big Music, another Toronto commercial audio production house. Lenox, too, has noticed the changes in the business over the past 10 to 15 years.

‘You know, the jingle doesn’t really exist anymore – where you’d sing ‘Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is,’ and that was the message and that was the hook. And your goal as a music person was to get people to sing that back to you. Now, it’s all about stimulating the senses. And the more you can push that button in 30 seconds, the more successful you’re going to be.

‘In the past, you would be presented with a script or a concept, come up with an idea, and then have your clients in and basically play them a scratch track on the piano. And sing to them, saying, ‘It goes something like this.’

‘The technology we have now allows us to provide stuff that’s close to finished in the demo stage. And I’m not sure if it is better or worse. Just that it’s different. It certainly has taken a little of the spontaneity and a little bit of the magic out of the making of music.’

Lenox believes the jingles of yesteryear would not be as effective today. He feels the younger generation ‘absorbs information on a much faster and higher level,’ and jingles ‘might not [present] enough information within the context of 30 seconds.’

Great Big Music does spots for ‘all the big agencies,’ and Lenox is clear about how ‘happy [they are] for any and all work that [they] get.’

In Vancouver, Griffiths Gibson and Ramsay Productions has been doing commercial audio since 1968. Peter Clarke is the creative director. Although he, too, has picked up on the trend away from jingles towards ‘sound design,’ Clarke says jingles still live.

‘Jingles were a bad word about five years ago,’ he begins. ‘You said ‘jingles’ and it was, ‘What? Jingles?’ You just didn’t say that to an agency guy. However, they are staging a bit of a comeback. They’re not quite as profane as they used to be. There are bad jingles, for sure. Like Sleep Country Canada’s ‘Why buy a mattress anywhere else?’ But people get a lot of mileage out of their jingles, whether we think they’re bad or not. I’m sure they sell a lot of mattresses.’

There is no question, thousands of Canadians still eat the red ones last, know there’s only one candy with the hole in the middle, and consume thousands of all-beef patties with special sauce, lettuce and cheese. Hey, after all, jingles are tried, tested and true. Too bad all the people with the Snoopy Brush-a-Brush-a-Toothbrush song rattling around in their heads for the past 15 years couldn’t pick up the product if they wanted to.