The history of jingles
MIA TIMPANO EXPLORES THE HISTORY OF MUSICAL ADVERTISING.
Jingles have been around ever since people have tried to sell things to other people, because nothing makes us hand over fistfuls of dollars faster than a catchy tune – ideally one sung by that tripledenim-wearing sex-hound Justin Timberlake (more on him later). Even the Ancient Greeks had jingles. Back then, when you weren’t gathered around Socrates copping a load of insight, or having a squiz at the first Olympic Games, you were being accosted by a salesperson who would sing out ditties such as: “For eyes that are shining, for cheeks like the dawn / For beauty that lasts after girlhood is gone / For prices in reason, the woman who knows / Will buy her cosmetics from Aesclyptos.”
Modern jingles – the kind with recognisable melodies and hooks that latch on to your brain and never let go – were born on Christmas Eve, 1926, in Minneapolis. Folks huddled around the wireless that night bore auditory witness to a game-changing song, sung a cappella by The Wheaties Quartet: “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.” Now, Wheaties was in serious trouble at that point – the cherished cereal’s sales were down by half. But when their singalong radio advertisement hit the airwaves, folks in the Minneapolis area suddenly developed an insatiable appetite for the Breakfast of Champions; in fact, they were soon responsible for 60 per cent of the entire country’s Wheaties sales.
The campaign went national, and this clever new format of sung advertisements became the gold standard in the game of Getting People to Buy Things. It was especially convenient because, at the time, overt advertising during prime-time radio hours was prohibited; having a jingle on the airwaves allowed advertisers to mention a product’s name in a more subtle way at the start of a show. Essentially, jingles provided a clever advertising loophole.
But why were they so effective? Because jingles are very easy to remember: they’re short, repetitive and rhyming. We don’t definitively know what causes a 30-second song to get stuck in our heads, neurologically speaking, but we do know earworms are real and will remain in our brains for decades. So, when cruising the supermarket aisles for shampoo in the late ’80s, you may have instantly – and involuntarily – recalled the Decoré jingle (“De-de-de-decoré, de-dedecoré, de-de-decoré,” sung to the tune of Gene Chandler’s doo-wop hit “Duke of Earl”), resulting in your purchasing the product. Countless other jingles wedged themselves in Australia’s collective unconscious over the years (1959’s “Happy Little Vegemites” composed by the J. Walter Thompson ad agency; “I like Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane Jelly for me”, and so on). This meant there was plenty of money to be made as a jingle writer – until recently, one could even make a decent living from it. These days, however, companies are more likely to use an existing pop song as a jingle, so, sadly, ‘jingle writer’ is no longer a viable career choice.
Pop tunes actually entered Ad Land in the 1960s, when commercial jingles began to jar with the counterculture, Vietnam War-protesting, flower-toting youth. Ad execs took another route to their wallets: they hired musical artists young folks admired to sell them products they didn’t need. The Troggs recorded a promotional jingle for Coca-cola; Jefferson Airplane adapted their tripped-out hit “White Rabbit” for the Levi’s white jeans campaign. And it worked.
Of course, musicians who wanted to be taken ‘seriously’ shirked offers – in the ’80s, Sting famously refused to let a deodorant brand use The Police’s classic “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” as their jingle. But then there are artists like Justin Timberlake, who recorded and released “I’m Lovin’ It” – a Mcdonald’s jingle – as a single unto itself. Not only did it chart worldwide, it also increased Macca’s sales that year by $1.8 billion. That’s a lot of fries.