Keith Syron
Saturday, 1 February, 2003

How often have you found an advertising tune buzzing relentlessly round your brain? "I want my baby back, baby back, baby back ribs" or "McDonalds: We love to see you smile". Love 'em or hate 'em, you remember 'em.

But in these days of fragmented marketing, ambient/street media and new kinds of ads that try to not look like ads, (Nike's naked man running at the soccer game, for instance) it seems ad writers have forgotten about the good old jingle.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s no self-respecting television or radio ad was complete without its signature jingle or mnemonic (spoken, rather than sung, phrase about a brand).

Jingles were part of the advertising conspiracy: ad agencies and marketers planting brands in your mind so deeply and subconsciously that you didn't even notice them going in. But it worked. Concepts delivered in jingles are processed in a different way to straightforward claims made in an advertisement, explains advertising guru Dr Max Sutherland (a psychologist and professor of the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, now consultant for Australian and Californian corporates) in his book Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer. Traditional ad claims ("Better Ingredients, Better Pizza" for example) are processed in our "true-false" processing capacity, he says, whereas musically delivered brand statements tend to slip past our critical analysis capacity and go straight into our emotional/entertainment mind. We recall and feel attached to music in a way we are not attached to news items.

Take giant US biscuit-maker Nabisco. While Sutherland was tracking the impact of Nabisco's advertising, a simple change was made to the jingle that traditionally sung the brand name at the end of the ad. A "ping" at the end of the "Na ...bis ...co" was removed to make way for a temporary promotional tag. Sutherland's tracking revealed "an amazing thing ... the ads did not cut through as much. They lost a lot of their ability to link the execution in people's minds with the Nabisco brand."

Sutherland's findings are reinforced by another study "Music as a recognition cue in advertising-tracking studies", reported in the Journal of Advertising Research (1990). This study looked at the responses of 3000 consumers to advertising campaigns - split into those with traditionally spoken cues and those with musical cues such as jingles. The study showed 62% of the consumers correctly recalled seeing an ad and associated it with the advertised product when given a verbal cue. For the musical cue ads, the correct recall level was 83%.

Taylor Nelson Sofres, one of the largest market research companies in Europe, ran another comparison between musical and visual brand cues in 2000. Participants who were exposed to visual advertising cues achieved only 49% correct recall of the ads and associated brands. The group that was exposed to advertising musical cues (with the words removed) achieved 70% correct recall.

Convinced? Here are five key rules from US advertising testing company The Pretesting Company:

1. Develop a unique brand-identifying tune or accent ("The Touch The Feel Of Cotton..." or "Always Coca-Cola...").
    
2. Incorporate the brand name into the jingle or mnemonic phrase - it's about imprinting your brand into the primal part of the consumers' brains.
    
3. Incorporate your brand essence into the jingle ("Red Bull gives you wings" or "McDonald's, We Love To See You Smile").
    
4. Stick with the jingle over a long period of time - years - and ensure it gets enough airplay to really "get in" ("Like A Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There")
    
5. Make it short and sweet - it's a brand identifier at the end of an ad, not the heart of the commercial.

Using famous pre-existing tunes (like Microsoft's use of the Rolling Stones' "Start me up" for its launch of Windows 95) is also highly effective, for similar but slightly different reasons. The use of these tunes is a significant topic in itself, which I want to discuss in depth in a future column. Another power example: Bob Seeger's "Like A Rock" for Chevy.