Jingle, Jingle

How is it that I remember all sorts of commercial jingles from 40 or 50 years ago but can’t remember a commercial I may have seen just two minutes ago? I think it’s because television advertisements today don’t distinguish themselves with a unique jingle like they used to. Why is that? It seems to me that a jingle goes a long way toward developing a brand’s identity and securing that brand in the minds of consumers.

I remember 70s-era hotdog and bologna commercial jingles the best. I can still remember the words to three or four of them, as though they were just on TV. That staying power has to be pretty valuable, don’t you think? So why not use jingles anymore?

When Meghan was a baby – and sometimes still today – I used to sing to her before she went to bed. It’s funny, when called on to sing, without a melody playing, I cannot recall lyrics to songs I’ve known for years. So what did (and do) I sing? Commercial jingles. Remember these?

My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R;

My bologna has a second name, it’s M-A-Y-E-R.

Oh, I love to eat it every day

And if you ask me why, I’ll say,

“Cause Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A!’

Or

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

That is what I’d truly like to be,

’Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

Everyone would be in love with me!

Are the Super Bowl ads really worth the money the companies put into their production and air time? The Super Bowl was less than four months ago. Do you remember any of the ads you saw? Yet the bologna and hotdog jingles from nearly 50 years ago I remember.

Did you know that back in 1967, ads during the very first Super Bowl cost between $37,500 to $42,500? In 2019, CBS charged $5.25 million for a 30-second commercial. Wow. And that’s just paying for a slot of time. It doesn’t take into account what the advertisers are spending on the production of their ads or the pre-exposure marketing of their ads. (Pre-exposure marketing is getting audiences hyped to see the company’s ads prior to the Super Bowl where they will be aired for the first time. Yes, this is apparently a thing.)

Sometimes jingles from the past weren’t jingles at all – just popular songs of the time. But still, I remember them. Whenever I hear the New Seekers’ song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, I think of the perfect harmony sung by a lot of people dressed in 70s’ attire, wandering over a grassy field, and drinking what? Coca Cola! More than forty years later!

It couldn’t be that it’s become too expensive to hire a songwriter to come up with a jingle, could it? I know that Barry Manilow used to write jingles early in his career – some pretty famous ones too (Band Aid’s “Stuck on Band-Aids”, State Farm’s “Like a Good Neighbor”, and McDonald’s’ “You Deserve a Break Today”). I imagine, if you asked him nice enough, he’d be willing to write a catchy and memorable jingle for far less than $5 million. And, it would last longer – forever, even – than thirty seconds of air time. After all, Manilow made only $500 for the jingle he wrote for State Farm in 1971. No residuals. Just $500. And State Farm didn’t stop using the jingle until 2016. Forty-five years later.

Think of all the beer commercial jingles from the 70s too. (“Jingle” doesn’t seem like the appropriate word for a beer song but I have none better.) I bet Anheuser Busch, Michelob, all of them, could save a ton of money by reusing their old jingles from forty years ago. Why not? When they first aired, I wasn’t old enough to drink their products, but I am now. Don’t you think all the baby boomers out there, upon hearing a song from their childhood, would want to go out and buy the product? It’s hard to put a price or value on nostalgia.

I was talking about old advertising jingles with my 95-year-old neighbor, Robyn, a couple of weeks ago and she told me about advertising that she remembered as a kid. She said that when she was about eight years old, she and her family would drive to visit her grandparents who lived about an hour away. The drives were long and boring. Her father had to drive 40 mph, a speed limit established by the government to save fuel. The only thing she had to entertain herself was reading the billboards advertising Burma-Shave that appeared every mile or so displaying a rhyming advertisement, one line at a time. Do you know, she, close to 90 years later, remembers and recited to me, two of the rhymes? Here they are:

If hugging

On highways

Is your sport

Trade in your car

For a davenport.

Burma-Shave

and

What you

Called him

May be true

But did you hear

What he called you?

Burma-Shave

Boy, that’s the power of advertising. I imagine if Burma-Shave was still around and if Robyn was a man, she’d be one of the brand’s biggest customers. Burma-Shave would, of course, put a melody to their rhymes for television and radio but they’d want Robyn on every one of their billboards.

And, like when you say, “Budweiser” [CUE MUSIC], I’ve said it all. ✿