Why do adverts use jingles

Her expertise includes mentoring, serving at-risk students and corporate training. By Elise Wile. Memory The biggest reason that jingles are used to promote products is that advertisers know jingles help people to remember the commercial. Repetition A good ad campaign involves repetition so that the consumer will associate the product with the company. Proven Jingles work. Branding Branding is all about creating an image of your company and having that image stick in customer's minds.

Related Articles. Whether your listeners love it or hate it, a good jingle will relate your brand name with a concept, idea, or promotion. Listeners who catch your radio commercial may not notice a jaunty techno beat in the background, but they will notice your snappy jingle.

When you're trying to think of letter placement in the alphabet, do you hum the ABCs in your head? L, M, N, O, P … why do you think this is the method that so many of us as adults, too! Plain and simple. The human brain processes memories uniquely and more easily conjures up data or information if repetition is involved — like memorizing a song. While music and radio have been around for hundreds of years, the first singing commercial is thought to have aired on Christmas Eve in — still a relatively newer approach to advertising.

Why say it when you can sing it? Ask the folks at General Mills — that first singing commercial was for Wheaties, still an American breakfast staple to this day.

That commercial ushered in a now well-known radio advertising strategy called the jingle. It didn't take long for the rest of the advertising industry to take notice, and jingles soon became a major marketing tool. A good jingle is unique, fun, and, most importantly, memorable. A radio or TV spot is a great way to advertise, but with the steady stream of information most of us see over a short period of time, it's easy for your message to get lost in the crowd.

A jingle with your phone number, company name, or other identifying features makes it much easier for listeners to remember you, and what makes your company unique. A good jingle is catchy and creative, boasting the information you want listeners to remember above all else. Like most effective advertising methods, a jingle should tell the world what you have to offer that your competitors do not. As a memorable and attention-grabbing song , the right kind of jingle will enhance what your company has to offer.

A good jingle will get stuck in listeners' heads, but will also make a statement about what makes your company unique. This area of the brain is vital in early childhood for developing vocabulary and in adulthood for learning new languages. Researchers have noted that the shorter and simpler the melody, the more likely it is to get stuck in your head -- this is why some of the most common earworms are jingles and the choruses of pop songs.

Earworms tend to occur more often in musicians than nonmusicians and in women more than men. Those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder can be particularly irritated by earworms. Sometimes, actually hearing the offending refrain or replacing it with something equally infectious can clear an earworm from the mind, but, unfortunately, there is no surefire way to get rid of them.

But now that jingles have been largely supplanted in advertising by pop songs, do they still have a future? Before we can answer that, we'll look more closely at their decline in popularity. Professor Kellaris has noted that experience is highly individual, but through several surveys he's been able to compile a list of the tunes not necessarily jingles most frequently cited as earworms. Jingles were an advertiser's dream for the same reason the public can grow to hate them: You can't get them out of your head.

But, as with most other stimuli, the more you experience them, the less of an effect they have on you. The widespread use of jingles on radio and TV has caused the newest generation of consumers to see them as hokey. As we've mentioned, the commercial licensing of pop songs caused the decline of the jingle. In , the Beatles tune "Revolution" was licensed for a Nike shoe campaign, which would prove to be the start of a revolution in advertising. As markets became increasingly clogged with indistinguishable products, it was no longer possible or relevant to tout the absolute supremacy of a product.

To gain a loyal brand following, a good product was simply not enough -- a company now had to represent a lifestyle or an identity. Piggybacking on emotional and cultural experience became the most effective way to sell products. It's widely known that most humans have a deep emotional connection to music -- so instead of trying to form a new connection with consumers, why not let the Rolling Stones, Mike and the Mechanics, Fall Out Boy or Bob Seger do it for you?

Music purists derided the commercialization of their favorite tunes, and musicians who wanted to be considered "serious artists" vowed never to allow their songs to be used in a marketing campaign.

In the s, Sting famously rebuffed an offer to use the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me" in a deodorant commercial but he and his music later went on to star in a Jaguar campaign in But for all the cries of ruination, these ad campaigns have significantly helped revive the music of several critically acclaimed but widely unknown musicians -- like Nick Drake, Stereolab and Spiritualized.

In fact, marketers are quick to point out that much of the hype surrounding the licensing of pop songs for commercials comes from major record labels. Major labels are in crisis mode, desperately seeking new ways to promote their albums.

Deals with advertisers -- and prime-time shows like "Grey's Anatomy" -- have helped record companies find new ways to promote their music and create additional revenue streams. Product placement , the conspicuous inclusion of name-brand products in TV shows and movies, has also gained hold in recent years.

In the realm of licensing old music, again, Michael Jackson had a role. In time, album sales dropped with the rise of digital downloads and streaming services, which last year started bringing in more revenue than physical recordings.

As it got harder to gain exposure and make money, many more stars allowed their music to be licensed in commercials. And no longer is licensing just about placing top hits and classics in commercials. Since the early aughts, advertisers wanting to cultivate a sense of authenticity—and perhaps wanting to save some money on licensing fees, too—have sought out obscure and undiscovered songs.

The electronic musician Moby kick-started that trend when he licensed every single on his album Play for brands like American Express and Nissan , a move which had the added bonus of making his album go double-platinum.

Once maligned as selling out, licensing singles is now an accepted part of making money as a musician. Of course, the music industry is only half of the story: The advertising industry has undergone a number of shifts that, combined with the changes in the music industry, have solidified the decline of the jingle. Ad campaigns with jingles worked best with repetition, which was well-suited to an era when there were three main TV channels and advertisers could reliably reach the same viewers over and over again.

By , there were channels in the average cable package. That audience fragmentation has multiplied with the rise of streaming services and digital recording devices. Now viewers may watch few commercials, if any at all.

Ad agencies have changed their tack accordingly. They started borrowing techniques from the film industry for commercials, including story arcs and background music that evokes a feeling or mood. Jingles, by contrast, are preachier and more instructional. The inclusion of pop music has made commercials even more aspirational, but the sell more subtle. His new job, in keeping with current advertising music trends, includes overseeing a music library available for commercial licensing.