In the early days of TV advertising, and on radio before that, jingles were the body copy of commercials. Whether it was ‘Hey Mabel, Black Label’ or ‘Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it,’ jingles were the pitch, sung so that listeners would have brand recall next time they were in the supermarket.

But then advertising grew up, and the humble jingle fell by the wayside. Faced with the task of breaking through a wall of media clutter, most hip copywriters have stopped employing jingles under the rationale that a few seconds of warbling is an overly simplistic solution to the very complex problem of creating meaningful brand messages.

But is it?

Try shopping for mattresses without thinking of (and cursing) Sleep Country Canada, or ordering a pizza without singing the ‘967’ song.

‘All a jingle is,’ says David Martin, chief creative officer at TBWA in Vancouver, ‘is an audio mnemonic to trigger brand recall. There are lots of ways to keep that vital and contemporary and relevant for people. It doesn’t have to be something with a bad instrumental track and the Andrews Sisters bleating out about margarine or soap.’

Old-fashioned evolution

The fact is, people really haven’t changed, and jingles can work as well now as they ever did. What happened to jingles is just good, old-fashioned evolution.

‘There is an old saying in our business,’ says Martin, ‘If it sounds ridiculous, don’t say it; sing it.’ That truism certainly captured the thinking as radio evolved into the television of the ’50s. And if you want proof, think of one of Martin’s all-time favorite jingles for Chiquita bananas.

‘That was when bananas were still exotic as a product, and the business problem was that people didn’t know what to do with them or how to store them. So they had this: ‘I’m Chiquita banana and I’m here to say, bananas have to ripen in a special way.’ But the one line that’s in it you could never get away with in body copy was: ‘Bananas like to ripen in the very, very, very hot equator, so you should never put bananas in the refrigerator.’ It was instructive. It was body copy actually telling you how to use a banana, but it did it through lyrics.’

With the arrival of the ’60s and ’70s, the ridiculous evolved into the sublime. With the birth of FM radio and a mass-market music industry, music evolved from entertainment to the embodiment of culture. Music became ‘commoditized,’ notes Martin, ‘and I think advertising took its cues from that… Jingles themselves were no longer simply body copy. They became much more song-oriented.’

Everyone knows Coke’s ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing.’ Jingles weren’t just ad pitches – they were climbing the music charts. Martin points to Salada Tea’s The Homecoming as another example – a classic Haygood Hardy wrote for a TV commercial that charted in Canada and made Hardy a known name.

As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, music slipped into teenage rebellion mode: alternative rock, art rock, punk, MTV and 24-hour videos – the paradigm had altered again.

Notes Mark Hukezalie, a partner at Goldfish Music in Toronto: ‘We shifted into the whole notion of conceptual advertising where you might have an ad and not actually see the product or no one would say the product’s name. The music was not there to sell. It was there to work like a film score, either setting the mood or providing musical sound design. The notion of music as the key selling feature became sublimated.’

Apple Computer’s ‘1984’ was the archetype for its time: No pitch. No product placement. No sell – just sound and vision. ‘Everybody went, ‘Wow, look what an ad can do,” recalls Hukezalie. ‘It’s not saying price and item. Let’s go with that notion.’

As in George Orwell’s 1984, it was a time when individual creativity was subjugated to a single omniscience – in this case, technology. The ’80s and ’90s saw the wide-scale introduction of computers. The simplicity represented by jingles didn’t seem to jive with progress.

Observes Doug Robinson, president of Toronto’s Doug Agency – whose former boss Gary Gray asked the immortal question: ‘When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?’ – ‘We went through an era of technique. Not great ideas but incredible technique. Then in comes the computer and everyone is learning what it can do and that influences technique more than idea generation.’

But there was also a creative revolution going on. Jingles were just so 1950. Notes Robinson: ‘Creative people don’t want to do what’s been done. I don’t want to do what my boss did. My boss did this incredibly successful jingle for Smarties – sure, I’d kill to do that – but I want to do something different.’

Jingles got branded as the ‘lazy approach to creative, and people felt a little pigeonholed by it,’ observes Robert Armes, partner/composer at Toronto’s Pirate Radio and Television, the company behind the Mini Anthem – ‘my money’s on the little guy.’ ‘I think a lot of the negatives associated with songs in advertising really had to do with the fact that creatives felt kind of force-fit by them – we gotta use the song, we gotta use the line – even if it doesn’t necessarily fit with where we want to go. Accounts would move from agency to agency and sometimes they would even want to hold onto the same song.’

It was also only natural, as music had become synonymous with culture, that many clients and brands took the next step, turning away from original musical pitches to try to grab a piece of pop culture by licensing hits.

Says TBWA’s Martin: ‘You didn’t have to use a song to teach people how to ripen a banana. [A known hit] could establish style and an attitude far more quickly for you than probably any other individual element could in the commercial.’ Think of what the Beatles’ Revolution did for Nike (in free and outraged press alone), or what the Stones’ Start Me Up did for Microsoft’s Windows 95.

Robinson used The Smith’s How Soon is Now to launch Labatt Ice. Molson Canadian was Dancin’ in the Streets and Levis (U.K.) asked the unanswerable Clash question: Should I Stay or Should I Go? ‘What was interesting,’ notes Robinson, ‘was that the impact of the advertising was so great that it caused that song to re-chart again.’

But licensed music only allows a brand to borrow equity from a hit for a limited amount of time, unlike original, brand-specific music. ‘That is absolutely one of the Achilles heels,’ says Martin. ‘If you buy a song that is obviously a hit single, you better have a lot of other brand linkage in your commercial to help remind people who it was that brought it to you. I think that’s one of the advantages of being able to write a lyric around your brand name or around your brand proposition.’

After 30 years of experimentation and evolution, the industry entered the new millennium with a hodgepodge of theories and styles. Moby licensed his entire first album and did the same for most of his second before it was even released. The audio branding for video game manufacturer Sega became someone dementedly yelling the brand name. For Molson Canadian’s Bubba comes a song celebrating lager-induced cheer. And for Dairy Queen, the audio is two dudes turning over their Blizzards and making goofy whoop-whoop noises.

But Doug Agency’s Robinson points to the effectiveness of the DQ spot as an example of how the jingle hasn’t disappeared – just evolved.

‘That [spot] is highly effective with young boys,’ he notes. ‘They go wacky when that ad comes on. They retain it.’ And wasn’t that the traditional goal of the jingle? ‘It’s audio retention,’ says Robinson, ‘whether it’s in the form of a jingle or a song or a voice-over… Long live the jingle, although today I don’t even know if [you can call it] a jingle. Long live devices that help brand.’

And the simplicity of the medium should appeal to both marketers and consumers today. ‘This is a very complicated world, and you need hooks,’ says TBWA’s Martin. ‘We love to hate pop singles and we all love to hate jingles, but what works in both of those cases is that they’re hooky. They are simple, short, maybe disposable, but certainly memorable pieces of audio that find their way into our brain and often don’t leave, much as we’d like them to… My personal belief has been that there is a lot of merit in taking a look at why jingles worked. The role of music has changed over the years, but the basic principles of what makes people remember things haven’t.

‘To this day, people can still recite the ‘Two all-beef patties’ commercial – how could you possibly get that across without music? Music is just a conduit for a brand-selling message and smart advertisers recognize the power of that. Smart copywriters and art directors recognize the power in that. And it’s a secret weapon waiting to be used again.’