I spend more time than I would like to admit watching commercial from the 1970s-1990s and have DVDs of ads from the 50s and 60s and notice that one thing that remained a constant through those decades was the simple, catchy jingle.
You hear some now, on the radio, on TV but it’s not the same. Advertising, while it may just be silly to think, used to have more heart.
Why do you think jingles have went away for the most part?
LOL, OK, you can’t have a discussion about jingles without the classic from Cheers.
“Beer and Pretzels, that’s our game, C-H-E-R-S!”
As to an answer to your question; I wish I knew the answer. It was clearly an effective form of advertisement. I bet there’s a lot of people here who could still name the ingredients of a Big Mac, and a fair number of them could even say it backwards!
If it wasn’t jingles it was annoying advertisements. Growing up in the Oklahoma City/Tulsa area you would still know who B.C. Clark is (Jewelry Store), or Linda Soundtrack (Hi Fi store where the sales people would dress in lab coats). That was over 30 years ago and I still remember them like it was yesterday.
Just because you remember a jingle doesn’t mean you bought more of the product.
Jingles have never gone away, they’re just less frequently used. That’s probably a good thing: some studies indicate that overuse is counterproductive; the brain turns itself off to a familiar stimuli. You know the jingle but you don’t act on it.
Worse, lots of jingles aren’t good. A bad jingle is annoying. You may have favorites from when you were a kid but that doesn’t mean you’d respond to hearing a new jingle a hundred times with anything but a vow to never buy that product.
Mostly, though, jingles seem old and hokey and out of fashion. The fact that you associate jingles with the past means that few modern advertisers would want them associated with their product.
That might mean that in the future jingles will be so old and forgotten that they’re new again and the pendulum will turn the other way.
The jingles I hate the most are just starting for the year. I absolutely dispise when they take a Christmas song and change the words to sell crap. By the time December rolls around they have taken all the joy out of the songs and the season for me. I’ve always been only so so about the season in the first place but the twisting of the carols push me over the edge into the hate zone.
It’s interesting that the most notable jingles in TV advertising now are all insurance companies:
“We! Are! Farmers! Bum-be-dumbum, Bum bum bum!”
“Nationwide is on your side”
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there!”
The first is so ubiquitous, it was a joke on the Oscar telecast. The second is such an earworm that they have a series of ads making fun of the melody. The third has the song as the cornerstone of their campaign, since singing it brings help immediately.
I defy anyone to think of three advertising jingles in current use today that are as widely known as these three–in any industry, let alone the same one.
In fact, it’s almost strange that Progressive, Allstate and Geico don’t have jingles, since it seems like a standard practice among their competitors.
Hey, Springfield! Are you suffering from the heartbreak of … monster-itis? Then take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka!
Paul Anka:
To stop those monsters, one-two-three,
Here’s a fresh new way that’s trouble-free,
It’s got Paul Anka’s guarantee …
Lisa:
Guarantee void in Tennessee.
Just don’t look! Just don’t look!
Zombieing this because I was in the midst of starting a basic “which are the worst/best ad jingles?” thread (in hopes it would be distinguishable(?) from other ad threads) when the “this subject similar to…” pop-up, on the right, appeared, showing this thread, and figured why not just merge things, so, examples that come to mind would be:
the worst: “Red Bull gives you wiiiiiiiii-iiiings!”
still a soft spot for: “I can’t believe I ate the whooooole thing.”