[A jingle is] a piece of music that’s not quite long enough . . . sounds like someone else, but not close enough to someone else to get you sued . . . uses one or two words too often, makes a lot of money for a very few people . . . and goes up at the end.

—Composer Doug Katsaros, 1988

Could this guy [Mozart] Do Jingles? Are you kidding, A Little Night Music had “beer commercial” written all over it.

—Look & Company advertisement, 1992

5

The Standardization of Jingle Production in the 1950s and After

Introduction

This chapter takes up where chapter 3 left off, with the history of the jingle, beginning in the immediate postwar era. I recommence here not because it makes sense in terms of changes in musical production but because of the historical turn toward heightened consumption practices discussed in the previous chapter: jingles continued to be the musical workhorses of the advertising industry in the postwar phase of American consumption. This wave of heightened consumption was driven by changes in American capitalism in this period, in which the increased emphasis on the mass market discussed in the previous chapter resulted in increased standardization of production as well as of products, a consequence of a new cycle of expanded reproduction in this era that was spurred by the expansion of the means of production sector, as Tom Kemp writes.¹ But with changes in the means of production, new products differed little from those manufactured before World War II. This is as true of automobiles as cultural products, whether films in the studio system in Hollywood, or jingles.

In the postwar period, the business of jingle production grew. And as it grew, the occupation of the advertising music composer became increasingly professionalized. The legendary adman and musician Bill Backer told me that when he first got into the business in the 1950s, it wasn’t clear what to charge for jingles.² But in the course of that decade, the advertising music business became increasingly regularized and professionalized as it became more of a part of the massive and growing apparatus for creating and promoting consumption in the postwar era. Such was the voracity of capitalism in this period that composers outside the realm of advertising found themselves increasingly drawn into it. While still sensitive to trends in popular music, the jingle ultimately achieved its own sound, which was dubbed the “Madison Avenue Choir” by industry insiders. Ironically, however, the achievement of this sound spelled the beginning of the end of the jingle, for almost as soon as it appeared, many in the industry began to view the sound, and the jingle itself, as old-fashioned and as too transparent a selling device to be effective in a media world increasingly influenced by baby boomers and young people.

Increasing Professionalization
From Broadway to Broadcast

The commissioning of original music for commercials took off in the mid-1950s in radio advertising. The use of music more generally was sharply on the rise in this period. In 1955, only 5 percent of TV commercials featured original music, but by 1960, about 85 percent employed music. Also by the late 1950s, independent firms made most jingles, instead of their being produced by advertising agencies in-house, as was the norm before; a 1959 survey showed that only about 20 percent of advertising agencies produced their own jingles.³ Agencies frequently employed outsiders to work on their jingles for arranging and production. As one music producer put it in 1960, “Agencies do not retain these men to make money on jingles, but for a measure of insurance; with the amount of sweat that’s been put into the tune, they want to own it lock, stock, and barrel.”⁴

Jingle writers became more professional, coaxing into their ranks some major composers from Broadway, who found it increasingly difficult to earn a living after the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Richard Adler, of Pajama Game fame, told Time magazine in 1961 that he had been approached many times to write a jingle, but, “I finally decided ‘Why the hell not?’ Rock ’n’ roll was eating up all the air time anyway, and I was offered a good big piece of money.”⁵ “At first I was ashamed of writing jingles,” he said elsewhere. “Then when I saw it catching on I saw what a jerk I was. Now I’m happy to be identified with them.” Adler and other erstwhile Broadway composers, however, tended to prefer the term “advertising musical.”⁶

And Broadway composer Frank Loesser started his own firm in 1957, Frank Music Corp. According to his daughter, Susan Loesser:

During lunch one day with an executive at Young and Rubicam, the subject of commercial jingles came up. “Jesus! What do you pay for that crap?” my father said. “I could provide you with writers who would knock your socks off, and you’d be paying them less than you pay those schlemiels you’ve got now—they’re already working for me.” A deal was struck. As Herb Eiseman [the company’s general manager] remembers it, “Everyone was happy. We were able to deliver writers to the agency at a price much lower than they had been paying. The writers were happy because they were getting ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which collects fees] performance income, we were giving them more assignments, and they were attracting attention.” FMC produced jingles for Sunkist Lemonade, Halo Shampoo, Newport Filter Cigarettes (“A hint of mint makes the difference”), Sanka Aroma Roast, and various (and very local) beers. My father just enjoyed it to tears.⁷

Loesser’s firm included on its roster composers Hoagy Carmichael, Vernon Duke, and Harold Rome, as well as lyricist Ogden Nash.⁸

Time reported in the late 1950s that the J. Walter Thompson Company consulted experts for spotting potential hits so that they could be used in commercials. Many Broadway composers liked recycling their songs as jingles; it could give their songs a boost, and they could make money. Cole Porter leased his “It’s De-Lovely” to De Soto, for example.⁹ And even before Frank Loesser formed his firm, Ford made use of one of the hit songs from his musical The Most Happy Fella (1956), “Standin’ on the Corner,” whose lyrics “watchin’ all the girls go by” were changed to “watchin’ all the Fords go by,” a very successful jingle (other lyrics were changed as well; example 5.1).¹⁰ Loesser also gave White Owl Cigars the title song of his musical Most Happy Fella for a filmed commercial, which employed the six principals of the Broadway cast. “The result,” said Time, “sold not only White Owls but tickets to the show.”¹¹ There were, however, some who refused. A 1959 article told the story of Alan J. Lerner selling the rights to a song from My Fair Lady to the J. Walter Thompson Company for ten thousand dollars. His partner, Fritz Loewe, asked Lerner to purchase the rights back; Ford, the advertiser, refused to take the money but canceled the commercial.¹²

Some insight into how these deals with Broadway composers worked is revealed in a 1958 letter in the J. Walter Thompson Company Archive. A company official met with composer Meredith Willson, at that point at the peak of his fame (The Music Man had opened on Broadway the previous year), to discuss the prospect of writing music for a commercial. The company’s pitch was reported in a letter to an employee at J. Walter Thompson.

Doing a Commercial

If the maestro involves himself it will be with intensity—in talent and in money. The fact that he’s got loads of both does not diminish his interest in either. In this attitude he has my blessings and, I must say, my envy (on both counts!)

His opening gambit to my dissertation on the proposal to create a commercial sound/jingle/song/effect was quite evasive: “I want a $5,000 guarantee.”

He would then want to spend a day with you (or your representative) to gather all the facts one hoped to get into the effort. If he felt he couldn’t do it to his satisfaction, the deal would be cancelled. If he felt he could do it to his satisfaction he would want this $5,000 guarantee paid him in 1960, plus the usual residuals.¹³

Adjusted for inflation, that five thousand dollars is nearly thirty-seven thousand dollars as of this writing, giving a sense of the figures the advertising industry was willing to pay for top talent in that era. (The file contains no record of Willson having accepted the deal.)

Another effect of the entry of Broadway composers into the realm of jingle composers was that by the early 1960s, the effort to raise the quality of jingles—and, not inconsequentially, the standing of composers—continued. According to one, “A small minority still feels that there is no difference between a person who sells ten-penny nails in a hardware store and a composer-arranger. But this minority is dwindling. The trend is toward a constantly improving use of music on the part of ad agencies.”¹⁴

Fashioning Jingles

The success of some jingles meant that there were soon endless discussions on how to write them, how to choose music, and more; the trade press started to write about them as more than ephemeral phenomena or gimmicks, and advertising textbooks began to consider them, sometimes at length.

One such textbook held that, because of the paramount importance of words in jingles, which convey the advertiser’s message, “fast rhythms,” favored by youth, don’t usually work. The authors told of the difficulty jingle singers had with the name of Schlitz beer (“that orally elusive brand name”) until the director had the singers make the word two syllables—“Shuh-litz.” “Clarity of diction,” the authors concluded, “is the reason many advertisers prefer to hear one singer rather than several in their jingles.”¹⁵ Diction, and the sales message, were of great concern in the industry, and advertising textbooks from the era contain many a warning about singers. “When featuring a jingle, five or six voices are not always necessary. In some cases, groups of singers are carried away by their own harmony and fail to register clearly and audibly the important selling points of the project.”¹⁶ A 1956 memo at the J. Walter Thompson Company made several suggestions: that someone “translate” the words while they were being sung, a “singing-talking duet.” Another suggestion was to have the singer and speaker enunciating the same words simultaneously, or, the executive continued, “have the words spoken very rapidly just before they are sung.”¹⁷ Singers with impeccable diction could be handsomely rewarded. One author wrote that a vocal quartet, the J’s with Jamie, possessed diction “that makes poets out of admen,” one of whom said, “Their words seem to be coming from a foot outside of their mouths in a kind of bas-relief.”¹⁸

Composers could emphasize words also. Joey Levine, composer of many well-known commercials from the 1970s and after, told me of studying some recordings of jingles by Steve Karmen, known as “the King of the Jingle” in that era.

So he gave me his reels and I kind of really went home and studied it, and what I picked up most from him was the way he’d accentuate the main lines. That he would punctuate them. He would do pauses, and he would do tympani hits . . . so that the words that came out, the phrases, really stood out, and I learned a lesson from that. Just listening, I said, “Ah.” So when I wrote “You Asked for It, You Got It,” I wrote it, because it was kind of—[sings] “You-oo asked for it, you got it, Toyota.” You know, it was like the accentuation of the word you.¹⁹

While words dominated, they were not the only concern. Robert Swanson, who studied with the well-known composition teacher Joseph Schillinger, had a formula for the successful jingle:

(1) Figure out the best way to get the message across in the shortest possible way. (2) Put the words together in a simple rhyming pattern. (3) The melody must be simple and memorable, never intricate. (4) If these basics have been accomplished, you can now go ahead and elaborate all you wish in the production of the commercial.

Said Swanson, “The desired effect is to catch the listener on a musical fish hook, dangle him in mid-air, and seduce him into buying the client’s product or services.”²⁰ But there was no consensus in this era about jingle composition.²¹

The types of commercials solidified in this period. According to a jingle composer and guidebook author, there was “the thematic,” which is what he called more recent radio concepts in which the song has nothing to do with the product; his examples included the instrumental pieces “Music to Watch Girls By” (for Diet Pepsi in 1966 and 1967, which sold over a million copies and was covered many times;²² example 5.2) and “No Matter What Shape Your Stomach’s In” (for Alka Seltzer in 1965; example 6.21).²³ And there was “the hit song,” a type written in the style of, or intended to be, a hit song but in which the words mention the product or service, such as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (for Coca-Cola in 1971; example 6.19).²⁴

Specialty Singers

Just as jingle houses sprang up, so did specialists in jingle performance, especially singers. Some of them parlayed jingle experience into mainstream success as popular singers, with Barry Manilow perhaps the most famous example (he also wrote some memorable jingles); there were plenty of other now-famous musicians who began in jingles but tend not to remind listeners of that fact, unlike Manilow. Jingle composers and producers I spoke to dropped many a name, from Herbie Hancock to Carly Simon. In the 1960s, rock bands could be introduced to the public as jingle musicians first, according to Brian Albano, a musician I interviewed; the idea was to get them accustomed to studio work before going into the studio to make a recording as a band.²⁵

Figure 5.1 Linda November. (Courtesy of Linda November.)

Jingle singers had to be able to appear and perform with little or no rehearsal—singers were expected to show up and sing. Reading music was a necessity according to some, like Linda November, dubbed “the Queen of the Jingle” by New York magazine in 1979.²⁶ For singers and instrumentalists, it was an attractive way of making a living and escaping the grueling life of constant touring normal for musicians appearing in public.

Jingle singers are usually the best remunerated of all advertising musicians, for they are protected by powerful unions, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Jingle singers could make quite a bit of money in this era; the hottest singers could make $10,000, even $25,000 per disc in the 1960s. The J’s with Jamie, for example, earned about $250,000 per year (they also had a brief burst of fame and recorded an LP for Columbia in 1963, which employed their signature sound).²⁷ Linda November told me that forty minutes of work on a jingle in the 1960s that aired on network radio netted her $18,000 in her first paycheck; this was the first of over twenty-two thousand commercials she recorded as one of the most sought-after jingle singers in the business.²⁸ Jingle singers could make so much money that one, Janie Fricke, told me that when Columbia Records approached her with a contract, she seriously considered turning it down since she was doing so well as a jingle singer, though she eventually left to pursue a career in country music.²⁹

November, who was the singer for the famous “Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow” commercial from 1976 (example 5.3), told me in an interview what a recording session was like in this period for top jingle singers.

I’ll never forget that when we did it . . . Tommy McFaul, who wrote it for Lucas, McFaul, said, “We are not showing you the film yet.” I said, “Oh, c’mon! I wanna!” . . . and he said, “No, no, no, no.” So . . . the group sang the underscore. . . . it’s very hip, it’s a great little piece. And then they just gave it to me [sings “meow, meow, meow”] and I did it, I laid it down in a second, and I said, “Yeah I take it, Tom, you want it breathy?” . . . and he said, “No, yeah, just do your Linda November, that’s what I want, I want that wonderful quality that you have up there.”

So then before they let me see it, they said, “We’re not happy with the last shot where the cat licks her chops and she says ‘Meow.’ So we would like you to look at it. . . . ” So I had to look at the footage, and they finally found a piece of footage that they liked, this last piece, which is wonderful, when she licks her chops, she went “Meow.” And on the third take . . . I got it and they went, “Perfect! Come in,” they handed me a glass of champagne, I said, “I have six more jobs”; he says, “I don’t care; we want you to have a glass of champagne. . . . ”

They synced the thing up . . . and played it and all of—we just burst into tears, it was the most darling, plaintive [song].³⁰

Making Songs: The Advertising Industry Meets the Music Industry

In the postwar era, the music and advertising industries were beginning to move closer together, a trend that continues to the present. Mitch Miller, who was the head of A&R (artists and repertoire) at Columbia Records beginning in 1950, addressed the American Association of Advertising Agencies in 1956 on the subject of jingles. He raised the importance of sounding like the popular music of the day, for “music spots are competing with hit records for the listeners’ ear—therefore—an appealing spot must have all the appeal of a good pop record.” Good jingles, then, must possess the same characteristics as a pop song: mainly, they can never be uninteresting but must also be “simple—and yet have enough color, performance and humor not to be dull.”³¹ Miller also said commercials with music must have a personality, which is often sacrificed in the making of a music commercial since composers and musicians have to please so many masters, from advertising agency personnel to their clients.³²

A 1961 story on Miller said that he made his first foray into advertising music in 1955 when he was contacted by an executive at the J. Walter Thompson Company, which had been using cover versions of popular songs to sell Ford automobiles with little success. Miller realized that music could have been employed as a means to break up the commercial message.³³ Miller also introduced the concept of having known singers such as Frankie Laine and Rosemary Clooney sing commercial parodies of existing popular songs, since it would aid their careers in a variety of ways: greater exposure and promotion of their recordings.³⁴ Miller was also credited with lowering the price of licensing a song from a publisher, since the exposure publishers received was so profitable.

Rosemary Clooney and “This Ole House” for Ford

The story of a song popularized by Clooney provides a good example of how ingenious advertising agencies, clients, and musicians such as Miller could be in using popular music to sell products in this era. Clooney, a big star in the 1950s, had recorded a version for Ford of “Come on ’a My House,” which had generated an enthusiastic response. So in 1954, Miller’s assistance was sought in choosing another song that could be used in a similar fashion. “This Ole House” by Stuart Hamblen was selected. Two J. Walter Thompson Company employees wrote a Ford version of the lyrics, which were recorded by Clooney. The noncommercial version was released, and charted at number 1, and then a version with the Ford lyrics with the same backup as the original.

Sponsor magazine perused the J. Walter Thompson Company files to chronicle the rise of this commercial, revealing its genesis.³⁵ It is clear that the idea to use Clooney appeared early in the song’s development. Robert V. Ballin, head of Ford radio-TV programming at J. Walter Thompson, wrote to the Thompson Company on 18 May 1954 and responded enthusiastically to the question of employing Clooney, indicating more generally that “we have felt that the technique of tying in with a popular number, either current or revival, gives us plus values that are unbeatable, even if not precisely measurable.”³⁶ Then a snag emerged: stars were becoming chary of associating themselves too closely with particular products for fear of being denied guest appearances on programs sponsored by competing advertisers. But, according to Joe Stone, the Ford Group copy head, “Mitch Miller of Columbia Records is going to talk with Ed Sullivan. As head of the popular record division of that outfit, he is naturally interested in seeing us make a deal with his top recording star. He is certain that such an arrangement means a big lift for the song parodied [i.e., the Ford commercial version of “This Ole House”].³⁷

For various reasons, the potential problem was avoided, and a song selected. A letter from 7 August 1954 informed the client that Stone and Miller had “turned up a tune, ‘This Ole House,’ that is back-to-back with ‘Hey There’ which is now going well.” But the latter tune wasn’t deemed suitable to be turned into a commercial; it was “too slow for a commercial which has to make as many points as Ford copy must.” They thought “This Ole House” was extremely promising, however:

Musically, it appears perfect for commercial exploitation; it is fast, lively and novelty in character. And the Rosemary Clooney rendition of the number is tops. Joe and Mitch admit that there is no way to guarantee these things, but they feel rather strongly that this song has hit possibilities, and that these will be achieved by the time our version hits the air.³⁸

Another letter with the same date announced that the deal was set: Clooney would record several versions. The price was high (and not disclosed) but was thought to be worth it. The composer was located, the broadcast deal struck. The commercial was recorded at the end of September 1954; Ford dealers wanted to broadcast it as early as 26 October. A rough demo was sent to the client at the end of August, in several versions for him to choose from. Six were offered, and, unsurprisingly, Clooney’s “This Ole House” was the favorite (it’s not clear what the others were). The client thought, “It is going to do a big job,” and agreed with Miller’s recommendation to use “exactly the same quartet and orchestra. Part of the success in the performance of the original is doubtless due to the unique combination of talent and arrangement, and we might do well to duplicate it.”³⁹ The song was evidently recorded in different styles, common in this era as a means of using the same melody to appeal to different groups, for a letter reporting on the recording session said, “One of the tunes was changed from a cowboy beat to a mombo [sic],” at Miller’s suggestion, an attempt to cash in on the popularity of “Latin” music in this period.⁴⁰ Some delays in Clooney’s recording contribution ensued, but the song was recorded. Several sighs of relief were written, concluding with a letter from W. Eldon “Hap” Hazard, J. Walter Thompson radio-TV representative on Ford, Detroit, that included a quotation from a Kansas Ford district committee that said, “In our opinion the most exciting part of the campaign is Rosemary Clooney singing ‘This Ole House.’ We consider it the best musical commercial we have ever had and the finest to appear to date in the automobile field.”⁴¹

This spot was the beginning of a string of successful commercials produced for Ford and other clients by the J. Walter Thompson Company, described by the vice president and copy group head thus: “We just spot potential hits and hitch-hike our way to the top.”⁴² (This person was in charge of this initiative because J. Walter Thompson staff wrote new lyrics for the existing songs, promoting Fords.)

Kodak: “Turn Around”

In the 1960s, it was fairly normal for an advertising agency to find a song that it felt was right to promote a particular product, and then attempt to get a known singer to sing it. In the early 1960s, the J. Walter Thompson Company campaign for the Eastman Kodak Company called “Turn Around” featured an existing song (by Malvina Reynolds, Allen Greene, and Harry Belafonte) with that title. An agency copywriter heard the song “Turn Around” on a Belafonte record and noticed the lyrics, which refer to a little girl growing up: “Turn around and you’re two / Turn around and you’re four.” The copywriter thought that the lyrics would go well with a Kodak commercial promoting photography. It proved to be easy to find photographs to go in the commercial, since some had been provided by a California doctor, documenting his daughter’s passage from childhood to motherhood, and had been obtained by the agency for a print advertisement that had never been run.

J. Walter Thompson and Kodak liked the resulting commercial, but Belafonte, who owned the rights to the song, had to be convinced that such a usage of his music was acceptable; the agency was able to convince his company that the song would be used tastefully, so a version of the song for the commercial was recorded by guitarist Tony Mattola and singer Paul Arnold (example 5.4).⁴³

This campaign was hugely successful, and generated significant fan mail to Kodak; some of the received letters were retained by the Thompson Company, which later claimed, “In one year, Kodak received more letters of praise . . . than all the letters of complaint about all commercials received that year by the FCC.”⁴⁴ “Thank you so much for the best television commercial I have seen in a long time,” wrote one viewer, going on to praise the commercial’s taste, and inquiring when it would be aired again. Another described the music as “enchanting,” saying that the commercial was “a joy to watch and listen to.” Yet another letter writer said that the commercial was “the finest I have ever seen.”⁴⁵ Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American described the commercial as “warm, simple, lovely and unexpectedly fine hearthside huckstering.”⁴⁶ Kodak said in Kodak Dealer News that the commercial “caused a boom in records and sheet music for the background theme. One tele-watcher pleaded, ‘Please let us know if it’s been recorded . . . being in the record and sheet music business, we get lots of inquiries about it.’ ”⁴⁷

The Madison Avenue Choir

Despite the success of some commercials, however, most advertising music in this era was becoming increasingly homogenous and similar in sound. A style of music emerged in the postwar era that sounded like nothing else, which was commonly referred to as a jingle that employed the “Madison Avenue Choir.” These jingles drew on popular music styles and sounds, but were nonetheless unique: they were always upbeat, contained crisply enunciated vocals that were usually sung by a group, or a group interacting with a soloist. A composer of jingles said in 1976, “Up to now, original music had its share in tv commercials, but mainly they were influenced by what the record industry was doing. Now, because of the quality of music available to the agencies, the music is developing a style and dignity of its own.”⁴⁸ Jingles offer positive affect as well as lyrical information about products, and use particular musical signs to convey this positive affect.

The rise of this sound was due in part to economic factors. Steve Karmen, a major figure in advertising music in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote that evolution of multitrack tape recorders from four to more in the mid-1970s meant that what was once recorded live could be assembled piecemeal. New multi-track tape recorders also meant that vocals could be doubled (that is, the same singer could record one part and then record another), and doubling, said Karmen, “became the rage,”⁴⁹ in part because of the sound, but also because, as we have seen, singers’ contracts were more lucrative than for any other musician in the studio, including the composer—it was cheaper to hire one or a few singers to sing multiple parts.⁵⁰

Some in the industry believe that multitracking led to the increased homogeneity of the jingle sound. Norm Richards, composer and owner of a jingle house in New York, wrote in 1979 that jingles had become so standardized that

a composite profile of your next jingle can be drawn up now, with a reasonable probability of being accurate. Chances are good that it will utilize males and females singing the client’s name in full harmony before the announcer’s message and at the end. . . . The 30-second spot will be bright, up-tempo, having a pop, disco, rock, country and western or middle-of-the-road style and have a rhythm section with prominent guitar(s), and maybe some trumpets.⁵¹

Another article in a trade magazine complained about the advent of the “Boring Middle-of-the-Road Jingle.”

No one claims to be its mother or father, but many are its silent and devious practitioners. They use very few chords and many singers and musicians; they use the same ways of resolving songs over and over again, and they leave bored Woman and Man to the point that only nine out of the top twenty-five commercials of 1983 . . . are musical.⁵²

A vice president and art supervisor for Doyle Dane Bernbach said in 1984, “What I hear from many music companies are similar sounds. Music has become middle of the road and anonymous. If someone does something successful it’s copied. People tend to go with something that’s already established.” This observer also noted that soft drinks, automobiles, and airlines alike were using similar sounds, all of which employ an “anthem-like feel which is soulless and almost bubble-gum.” He thought that the problem was in the creative process, which was not hospitable to new sounds, and the fact, commented on by many observers in the industry over many decades, that musicians weren’t brought into the process of devising a commercial until late in the game.⁵³ Another author wrote that in the late 1970s, “the solo voice is de-emphasized in favor of the large, anonymous choral effect. The attempt is no longer to link the product to a specific singer, but to bathe the listener in a sea of friendly voices.”⁵⁴

This, then, for better or worse, was the sound of the Madison Avenue Choir jingle: 1950s and 1960s big-band-style music with a chorus, or sometimes a vocalist backed by a chorus. For this sound, advertising composers employed a vocal ensemble to make a chorus of approbation for the advertised product in a kind of secularized gospel music style (and it is perhaps no accident that advertising executives frequently referred to commercial songs as “anthems” in the 1970s and 1980s).⁵⁵ A Burger King jingle by Jake Holmes from 1981, for example, employs a soloist and chorus format and ends with a plagal cadence, the same as in a hymn on the word amen (example 5.5). The “informational” content of this commercial is left to a male soloist, as though he were the religious leader imparting timeless truths, while the chorus chimes in with more emotional, even ecstatic, music. The Madison Avenue Choir sound was a pinnacle of advertising music, but quickly this zenith became its nadir: the more advertisements sounded like advertisements, the more objectionable many found them to be as the baby boomers came to power in the industry in the 1980s and 1990s, as I will discuss in later chapters.

Detractors, Complaints, Decline

This industrially produced, homogenous sound contributed to the decline of the jingle in the 1990s, though some in and out of the industry had assailed jingles for decades.⁵⁶ As the advertising music business became increasingly industrialized and rationalized in the Weberian sense, and populated more and more by organization men throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the means of assessing its effectiveness also became increasingly rationalized and scientistic; jingles weren’t just homogenous in sound, but were brought into the rationalized and bureaucratized world of midcentury American capitalism. The modes of polling described in chapter 2, however, became increasingly sophisticated and expensive. One study, published in 1950, is fairly straightforward, concluding that jingles effected the highest level of memorability after two months compared to other kinds of commercials.⁵⁷

Later polls and studies were more sophisticated. A 1958 memo in the J. Walter Thompson Company Archive noted that 88 commercials out of a survey of 350 “contained some jingle material.” The research corporation it hired determined that commercials with jingles were slightly less effective than those without jingles. The research also determined, however, that “effectiveness varied with the amount of time devoted to jingle,” and concluded that “(a) Just a little jingle is usually not enough to have much impact, and is apt simply to distract; (b) A commercial that is mostly jingle may be entertaining, but not leave much time for serious sell or meaningful demonstration.”⁵⁸ Only a few years later, however, Schwerin Research Corporation concluded, “Jingle melodies and background music are certainly desirable commercial elements,” for they make television “less strident, more palatable.” Commercials with music are more liked than those without, but not necessarily more effective, they claimed.⁵⁹ Subsequent studies, of which there are many, varied as these do, and did little to support jingle’s advocates or vanquish its opponents.⁶⁰

Despite whatever data the surveys produced as well as other fears, agencies continued to push jingles, to a point, using the kind of unscientized, impressionistic mode of argumentation common among creative personnel in the industry when combating facts and figures beloved of those on the business side. Robert T. Colwell of the Thompson Company said in a speech in 1965:

There is a warm welcome for jingles that are bright and ingenious musically and lyrically.

Moreover, jingles are durable. A good song will not wear out its welcome as fast as the little drama whose ending surprises us the first time. People who tire of repetition in other types of advertising feel just the other way about their favorite words and music in advertising. They like to sing them, not just once but over and over. Familiarity breeds popularity.⁶¹

Or so it was hoped. This is one of the most frequently articulated justifications of jingles, still used today.⁶²

But by the 1980s, jingles began to be seen by many as too obvious a selling device, too hard-sell. Those employing the Madison Avenue Choir sound, which had grown out of 1950s mainstream popular music, no longer sounded like any other music, exposing their function. A 1990 report by an advertising music composer to the J. Walter Thompson Company office in Chicago addressed the question of the death of the jingle, saying that jingles weren’t dying, “but they’ve been beat up pretty badly” for, among other things, being “phony and insincere,” unable to sound like anything other than something that was industrially produced. The recommendations included: jingles should sound like good records, not “jingles,” and that lyrics should be sincere, real, and warm.⁶³ The quality of sincerity was coming to be paramount. Chris Wall, an executive creative director at Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide, reflecting on the waning popularity of the jingle, said in 1999 that the jingle represented “everything that’s wrong, dishonest and insincere” about advertising.”⁶⁴ The perceptions of “dishonesty” and insincerity were a result of the jingle’s role having become increasingly obvious. The jingle by the 1990s had become tainted by the selling process.

The public’s and advertising industry’s shifting views on the jingle were actually tackled in a few television commercials from the 2000s, ads aimed at the jingle and its formulaic, hard-sell associations. A good example is Nabisco’s Crispy Thins ad from 2002, in which the music generally signifies folk authenticity in music, for the musician is a lone woman with an acoustic guitar who sings in an intonation-challenged, warbly voice to an advertising agency boss and two underlings. But even this authenticity is tarnished, its effectiveness diminished. The boss rejects the jingle and instead offers a kind of straightforward description of the product, a mode of advertising, that, incidentally, ad agencies had eschewed for decades in favor of ads that depicted goods as part of a desirable lifestyle. The language of sales has been presented as refreshingly direct through its juxtaposition with the suspect jingle, now so discredited that all the folk music signifiers of authenticity that can be crammed into a few seconds of music are rejected. Interestingly, though, the jingle concludes the ad, still poking fun at its hard-sell past (example 5.6). In this ad, the jingle music is a sign of the hackneyed hard sell. What this ad accomplishes is a kind of cleansing of the language of sales: the jingle is so obviously a jingle, so obviously a sales mechanism, that it is constructed as false. The boss’s plain speaking is thus rehabilitated after the opening jingle—it’s straight talk, removed from the realm of selling.

Around the same time as this commercial, IBM aired a few commercials that also lampooned the jingle for being old-fashioned and insincere. “Hip Hop Guys” shows two young African Americans in a room full of suits, being questioned about using their music to help this fictitious computer company improve relations with its customers. Music is made to be useless in this endeavor—the whole point, the ad seems to say, is that products and services should be of high quality. And yet, this commercial ends with a jingle, though obviously not one that would have been written by the hip-hop musicians, and is more in the now-outmoded Madison Avenue Choir style, as if to emphasize the complicity of music with sales (example 5.7). This ad is similar to the Crispy Thins commercial in that music is tried out and rejected (in this case not even heard), in favor of plain speech. This IBM ad is also poking fun at a spate of commercials in the last decade or so that use hip, underground music (though rarely hip-hop) for selling, as advertisers try to attract youth audiences for their products (see chapter 8). A different IBM commercial, from the same year and entitled “The Rockers,” depicts aging rock musicians who are expected to perform the same service (example 5.8). The taint of the jingle was so strong in these ads that IBM took them off the air. A representative from IBM told me that the company had tested the commercial and found that “frankly, it didn’t do too well. People thought the jingle was kind of silly and not really appropriate for IBM, which is one of the reasons why we haven’t done any jingles for a long time.”⁶⁵

In the mid-2000s, two commercials for Snickers candy bars also parodied the jingle. “Happy Peanut Song” makes fun of the innocence of jingles past with sweet music and naïve lyrics (example 5.9). The object of these commercials’ parodies is complex—the old-fashioned hard sell wrapped in a sweet package, the faux sincerity thought to be characteristic of jingles, the idea that music could make a weak product seem better. But they also parody the sound of capitalism itself, a sound that was designed for selling and nothing else, and was thought to have outlived its usefulness.

In addition to perceptions of its insincerity, the jingle also fell out of fashion in part because of changing demographics in the advertising industry, which became increasingly youth-oriented and therefore attentive to youth music and, later, music associated with the baby boom (chapters 6 and 7). The jingle’s demise was precipitated by still other factors, such as the rise of the fifteen-second commercial in the 1980s, which made it more difficult to devise an ad with a memorable jingle, so music went more into the background. Additionally, what people in the industry are calling the “convergence of content and commerce”—that is, the growing symbiotic relationship between the production of popular culture and advertising (chapter 8)—has edged out the jingle as real songs become increasingly common in advertising.

Also, a massive shift from acoustic to digital sound production in the 1980s and early 1990s meant that many musicians who were slow to adapt found themselves unemployed. Younger musicians from the world of rock who did know how to use these technologies began competing for jingle jobs and were not union members, which meant they could charge less; they were also not in the jingle business and had no allegiance to the way things had been done.⁶⁶ Many people I interviewed who had been in the business during this shift described it as one of the biggest changes they witnessed in the industry; one such veteran said that these older studio musicians hated the new technologies.⁶⁷ Composer Steve Karmen wrote of how MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface, introduced in the early 1980s, which standardized the way that computers and electronic musical technologies communicated with each other) put advertising musicians out of work, since a single machine could produce many sounds. Only the jingle singer has survived, Karmen said;⁶⁸ but not very many years later, jingle singers were almost gone as well. As Karmen said, one the signs that convinced him it was time to leave the jingle business was when a client told him that his twelve-year-old son used the same synthesizer.⁶⁹ When the person hailed as “the King of the Jingle” for the better part of two decades decided to leave the business, as Karmen did in the early 1990s, it is clear that an era had ended.⁷⁰

To conclude this chapter, let me return to the question of insincerity. The decline of the jingle spoke to desires for the authentic, the sincere, in this era. Jingles, perhaps the quintessential sounds of capitalism, couldn’t compete with rock and pop songs, which were being increasingly employed in commercials (as I will discuss in the following chapter) and which were thought to be ideologically purer and more authentic. Steve Karmen wrote that a music director with many years of experience told him,

“Today, advertisers don’t want a jingle, they want a song. Jingles, meaning an original happy melody written about a product or service that extols the benefits, qualities, and excitement that come from owning or using that product, are no longer considered honest. The world has changed. We have to be more honest in our advertising. More real. We use music that is real because the best ads are real. Pop songs are real. They reach the young market. Jingles do not.”⁷¹

With this, we are in the realm of what some have called the postmodern, a world awash in goods—and pretty advertisements for them—to the extent that what is “real” or “original” or “authentic” has become increasingly difficult to discern. Theorists of postmodernity argue that the world by the 1980s or perhaps sooner had become a mass of signifiers ungrounded in history or any meaning other than those on the surface, and thus concepts such as authenticity or the “real” become mobilized in attempts to rescue fragments of an objective reality no longer easily discernible. As Jean Baudrillard writes, “When the real is no longer what it used to be . . . there is a proliferation of myths of origin and designs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity.”⁷²

Pop songs, of course, are no more—or less—“real” than jingles: they were made and performed by some of the same people, and there was a considerable overlap in styles by this period. It’s possible to make the same case for popular songs and jingles that Baudrillard famously made about Disneyland: the theme park is taken as a fantasy world because of its obvious fabrication as opposed to the real world surrounding it, but it is that very artifice that characterizes the “real” world today.⁷³ Jingles, particularly those that employed the Madison Avenue Choir sound, had come to be seen as artificial and as mass produced as the commodities they purveyed in this era, but, of course, they serve to point out the way things really are in a world in which commodities, advertising, and consumption play even greater roles in people’s lives than they ever had before.