FreeCreditReport.com is running at least six commercials featuring a down-on-their-luck rock band singing in various settings bemoaning the fact that their credit is bad. The actors are obviously musically talented, the drummer actually knows how to play drums, you can tell by looking at him. I found out that the singer is a French Canadian actor/musician named Eric Violette, (it’s not actually his voice we hear though, he’s lip-syncing).
I think these are very strong ads. They feature the time-tested, but somehow out-of-favor Commercial Jingle. A jingle is a song written expressly for a commercial. The music and words of a jingle are directly targeted to sell the product. When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, jingles were the way most products were marketed on television. Most people of my generation can still recite or hum the jingles from that time.
Jingles gradually lost favor with advertisers and were replaced by what we all now hear everyday on TV - the licensed pop song put in service of a product. I’ve written before about why I don’t like this method of advertising. I call it “lifestyle” advertising, where the marketer tries to create an ad that will connect with to the viewer’s sense of identity therefore connecting the product too. Using a pop song is the fastest/easiest way to do this. If you can connect your brand with a song by Wilco, for instance, that’s a valuable cultural connection to make for your product. Your product can now live in the same cultural space that the songs of Wilco inhabit appealing to fans of that music and others that want a sense of the contemporary.
In actuality, I do not think this type of ad is very effective because when the spot gets placed into the ad mix that viewers see on a typical TV day, the lifestyle that the ad is portraying gets merged with all the other lifestyles from all the other lifestyle ads and the spots’ message gets merged as well into this jumble of lifestyle imagery and pop hits. The products, however, don’t get defined and their identities and marketing messages get muddled. Viewers recognize the pop tunes but the connections to the products are lost. Even with repetition, I believe these ads are a weak way to sell the product.
Jingles on the other hand are written directly for the product. A good jingle campaign, like the FreeCreditCard.com ads, will brand the company name right into the song. A successful ad will, over time, have viewers singing along with the jingle, either subconsiously or even overtly.
Lately I’ve heard a few fresh jingle campaigns.Optimum’s Reggaeton Jingle and also AAMCO’s I Got A Guy campaign use jingles. I am willing to bet that these ad campaigns were very succcesful as well.
I was at a cocktail party last New Year’s and I was talking to a young advertising executive and I asked him why jingles lost favor. His response was interesting. He said that more often than not, it is the client, not the ad agency, that is pushing for the high-priced licensed song. He explained it as the client getting bragging rights for the company. They are able to boast to the industry and their competition that they have gone out and licensed a multi-million dollar song for their latest campaign. To me, this is to lose site of the goal of the campaign, which is to sell, no?
Target Corporation has been using the Beatles classic Hello Goodbye in its recent TV advertising. One spot aired during last Sunday’s Grammy Awards broadcast. They have changed the word Goodbye to Good Buy morphing the song’s refrain into an ad slogan “Hello Good Buy, Hello Good Buy, Hello Good Buy….” The campaign is “Say Hello to Good Buys at Target”.
Hello Goodbye is a song from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour album and was a number 1 hit for the Beatles in both the US and UK in 1967.
Licensing classic songs is attractive to advertisers (those with deep enough pockets) because they can then begin to trade on the cultural significance of the song. Hello Goodbye is part of the soundtrack for a whole generation (or more). By licensing the song, advertisers leverage this collective, accumulated experience channelling it to sell merchandise. But does our culture (do we) pay a price for this?
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There are several spots using Hello Goodbye. Each has a different musical style or arrangement. Here is one version taken from YouTube.
More evidence that the commercial jingle is making a comeback can be found in Cablevision’s campy ad for its Optimum’s Triple Play service (High Speed Internet, Digital Cable TV & Digital Phone Services).
The jingle uses the dance style Reggaeton to create a fun, over-the-top spot that targets the urban, Latin American market. Reggaeton - a dance style that blends Jamaican reggae and dancehall with Latin American dance rhythms, hip hop and electronica - first gained popularity in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican musicians and producers have spread the music to the U.S.
It’s a jingle. The music is original and was written specifically to underscore the important elements of Cablevision’s Optimum campaign. The catchiest part of it, and the part that seems to be resonating with viewers, is the chanting of the toll free phone number - the “8–7–7-3-9-3–4-4-4–EIGHT” part.
Here are some comments pulled from YouTube, Yahoo and other sites…
lmao i lovee that comerical.. its catchy lol.. i cant even memorize my boyfriends number that fast..
HAHAHAHA <3333
I Love this ssongg everyone sings it in school
When I was sick in bed this was the only thing that kept going through my head “877 393 444 EIIIIGHT!” I want to kill them.
This is GREAT!! Especially love when the hot mami’s sing,. “8–7–7-3-9-3–4-4-4–EIGHT!!!” Great!
there is no point to this video but i love it it is so funny!!!
When viewers are laughing and teasing each other with your commercial and the music, the jingle, has embedded your toll free number into their consciousness, then you have hit an advertising grand slam.
Yes there are negative comments about the commercial as well but they are mostly complaints about frequency. The ad is being shown a lot. It is currently bombarding the NYC market. But again, the frequency is probably driven by the ads apparent success.
I’ve been writing about jingles lately because I believe their power has been neglected by creatives at ad agencies. Jingles have an uncool or old-fashioned stigma and have, until recently, been ignored.
Taken individually, lifestyle spots, which typically license hit songs from the 1970s/80s/90s pop catalog as their soundtrack, seem creative and funny but they run into problems when watched one-after-another during a commercial break. The ads tend to blur together. Instead of shining a light on the product, the overall effect is weakened by a slew of similar approaches. Everyone is branding the same upbeat lifestyle. There is no product differentiation. The commercial goes to great lengths to keep viewers entertained but it forgets its actual purpose.
Jingles, on the other hand, get right to the point and directly sell your campaign.
I’m very happy to see AAMCO using an actual jingle in their latest “I Got A Guy” campaign. I believe jingles sell better than today’s “lifestyle” spots. Lifestyle spots typically show glossy images of contemporary folk enjoying life while accompanied by a recognized hit song. The ad tries to gain influence from the song’s established popularity. Lifestyle ads are the most popular type of TV commercial. And that’s the problem. The spots all merge together in the viewer’s mind. So many ads are created in this style that viewers don’t differentiate between one spot and the next. Everyone is basically selling the same upbeat lifestyle therefore the products become muddled together or just forgotten.
A jingle is more specific because it is written for the actual product. It’s a custom piece of music writing tailored tightly to the spot or campaign. Jingles are seen as hokey throwbacks but their power is still evident. If you are over 25 years of age you can probably still think of jingles you heard in your youth. That’s real branding. The jingle has ingrained the product into your consciousness, probably for life.
Jingles have been out of the picture for so long that AAMCO is almost breaking new ground with their campaign. Their “I Got A Guy” campaign features the upcoming band Whiskey Falls. With echoes of great southern rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Whiskey Falls creates a hard-driving and very entertaining spot. Make no mistake - this is a jingle. It sells the AAMCO brand and even ends with AAMCO’s famous “Double A - M - C - O” brand slogan (a slogan which was conceived during a time when jingles were valued).
The AAMCO spot shows what today’s jingle could be. The song doesn’t have to be lame or corny. There are plenty of modern music styles that could be composed directly to the product. The me, the jingle is a far better way to sell. It might not be the hippest way to sell but I’ll bet it pulls better.
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The other thing I like about the use of jingles is that they are a move away from the rampant plundering of our greatest recordings and the excessive attempts to link hit songs to products which they have nothing to do with.
Devo re-records their biggest hit “Whip it good” as “Swiff it good” in a TV ad for the floor cleaner Swiffer.
The Beatles song “All you need is love” is licensed by Luvs who use it for their campaign, “All You Need is Luvs”
“Blister In the Sun ” by the Violent Femmes, a seminal punk bank, is used in an ad campaign for Wendy’s hamburgers.
This summer Wilco licenses 6 songs from their new album Blue Sky Blue to Volkswagen who use all 6 songs in ad spots for their latest campaign marking the first time a multitude of songs by one artist/band is used in a single campaign.
Where is today’s cash cow for the music business? It’s the placing of famous or upcoming pop songs in TV commercials. We’ve all heard and seen these ads. Led Zepplin’s “Rock’n Roll” has become the main branding vehicle (no pun) for Cadillac. The ad speaks to those 40-year-olds that can now afford Cadillacs by co-opting an anthem from their youth.
There’s no doubt the trend will continue. Commercial jingles are a thing of the past. Today’s ad strategy is about branding. You put a product, no matter how bland, next to a song that has some “coolness” factor to it, or, in the case of the Beatles “All You Need is Love”, acknowledged cultural value, and voila, the product achieves instant significance or even hipness.
But by glorifying a product, no matter how banal, the song is immediately devalued. If today’s protest song can be tomorrow’s theme for toilet tissue, then the power of a song to effect culture becomes weakened. The power of the song becomes about how much money it commands when it is licensed for commercial use.
The Culture Is the Commercial
Jay Babcock, the publisher of the art and music magazine Arthur makes this point…
“What kind of culture sets up a system where the only way to hear good music is through TV commercials for products you don’t need?” Babcock said. “What little art is out there has to sneak in wherever it can, being stand-ins for jingles. It’s the sign of an unhealthy culture. The culture is eating itself.”
A recent New York Post article reports that the recording artist Fergie recently inked a $4-million deal to sing about Candie’s teen apparel on her next album. “The 32-year-old Black Eyed Peas singer is the first global star to consent to product placement in her songs - agreeing to include the provocative clothing line Candie’s in her lyrics.”
I don’t know that this matters to some bands, they are living in a music business that is sinking into chaos by the day and they are looking for cash, a reward for their work. When Wilco, a major act, licenses 6 songs to Volkswagen saying they are doing it as a way to get their music out there, you know the music business has drastically changed and these artists are looking for the type of payday that used to be available to successful bands through albums/radio play/touring. That old model of success is, apparently, broken.
According to Greg Lane, senior vice president of ad agency GSD&M in Austin, Texas, ad pop it is a mutually beneficial relationship. “It’s a marriage of two brands. It’s the client’s brand, be it AT&T or iPod, as well as the brand of the band itself,” Lane said.
“Part of the deal is, you’re never going to make everyone happy. And there’s no such thing as bad press. Even if fans are upset, it might not affect sales of what’s being advertised — it might increase sales.”
As the respected musician Tom Waits says “By turning a great song into a jingle, advertisers have achieved the ultimate: a meaningless product has now been injected with your meaningful memory of a song,” he said. “The songs and the artists who have created them have power and cultural value, that’s why advertisers pay out millions for them. Once you have taken the cash, you, your song and your audience are forever married to the product.”
Wilco song in Volkswagen commercial
Of Montreal song “Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games” re-recorded with the words changed to “Let’s go Outback tonight” for Outback Steakhouse
In this month’s newsletter, I talk about jingles - those little tunes composed specifically to sell products on TV. Jingles are all but are dead now, you hardly ever hear one. This article examines why. Was there a selling power that jingles had that today’s commercials lack?
Excerpt…
There was a time when TV advertisers packaged their marketing messages within the lyrics and melodies of songs written specifically for ad campaigns. The songs came to be known as jingles because they were catchy, singable tunes. Today, this form of advertising has essentially disappeared from American commercials.
Advertisers now are more sophisticated. The jingle is seen as a corny, throwback to a time when viewers would accept a sing-songy tune written about a product.
These days advertisers seek to position their product within the “lifestyle” of their target market. The task is to create an ad campaign that reflects this lifestyle. Commercials today often don’t even mention the product, you just see happy people using it, hopefully dressed the way you do. The implication is; they use it - you should use it too.
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