One of the interesting sidelights in the jingle business is the use of identifiable music “beds.” Dragnet’s “Dum-da-dum-dum” has been used in many a radio spot. With four notes, that theme has set the tone for radio spots that use mock interrogations to highlight products or to introduce an element of mock law enforcement gravity. The background intro for “New York New York” has served the same purpose for a number of campaigns, notably the Citizen Watch campaign several years ago. While this use of music can’t necessarily be classified as jingles, it is the use of musical snippets with their own identity, no words being necessary.
More recently, radio and television have used musical styles as background for advertisements. The sound of falsetto voices backed by a rock beat, pioneered by such acts as the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean has been employed beneath voiceovers talking about cars shown cruising along coastal highways. Rap music has worked its way into advertising, often more as a visual than as an intelligible part of the advertisement. Visuals of rappers will be intercut with product demos, establishing the product focus as a young, hip market.
“See the USA in a Chevrolet” was a classic jingle, used to introduce multiple auto models for many years. Now, a Chevrolet auto commercial may use the MTV style of quick cuts and employ music that matches the image but overlay a few spoken words to complete the advertising impression. In their truck division, driving music used with the spoken words “built tough” work together to create a contemporary jingle.
Pillsbury built a jingle into the closing segments of many of their commercials with a musical lead-in to the Doughboy’s closing “Woo-Hoo!” One award winning commercial had a jingle that most of the people watching it didn’t understand but didn’t need to: “Yo quiero, Taco Bell!” These sorts of jingles go beyond the notion of a complete mini-song, using music and words (usually along with images) to get their message across. Perhaps the simplest example of this approach is spelling out the product’s name: “J-E-L-L-O!” It’s a safe bet that over half the people reading this remember the tune that goes with those letters.
“Snap! Crackle! Pop!” stems from an old campaign that in many minds today is still inseparable from Rice Krispies. Another enormously popular series had a bunch of frogs croaking out the syllables to ‘Bud-weis-er’ in sequence. For many people it took a couple of viewings to grasp the full intent of that spot, but once it had gone through sufficient air time, the croaking became a jingle in its own right and the frogs became media personalities. “Plop plop fizz fizz” was all it took to identify Alka-seltzer and its healing properties.
It takes a little thinking outside the music bars and time signatures to create this sort of jingle, and the talented people at Sassy Slogans enjoy doing just that. Just as digital editing techniques have radically changed television commercial designs, so has the use of digital audio equipment and the ability to seamlessly overdub sounds and notes to create impressions changed the world of audio advertising. At Sassy Slogans, we enjoy cooking up the concepts that create these memorable sorts of techno-jingles: part music, part sound, part words and all of it effectively packaged.
