Jingles All The Way

The holidays are just around the corner, and we all know what that means: Christmas songs on the radio and holiday jingles in just about every store. But there's one kind of traditional jingle we aren't as likely to hear these days: the commercial jingle. If you used to wish you were an Oscar Mayer wiener, if the best part of waking up was Folgers in your cup, if you were ever stuck on Band-Aid brands because Band-Aid's stuck on you, then you probably grew up in the heyday of advertising jingles. So, whatever happened to those jingles? Do they still have a place in audio branding, or have the Toys R Us kids all grown up? In many ways, jingles were the first step in the history of audio branding, and they're much older than you might think. If you know the Muffin Man or can sing along to Hot Cross Buns, then you're already familiar with the jingles of the colonial era. Those rhymes started with vendors in the Middle Ages who had to find ways to make their street cries stand out and get people's attention. That meant short, simple phrases often set to music, and the fact that we can still recite some of those rhymes today shows just how well they worked. With the invention of radio came the modern jingle. Now vendors had to grab and hold the attention of millions of people, and General Mills did just that in 1926 with a barbershop song called "Have you Tried Wheaties." That one commercial turned Wheaties sales completely around in the Twin Cities market, and when the company aired the song nationwide the following year, Wheaties went from a failing brand to a household name. Want to hear the jingle that started it all? Here's a link to the original ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLy5tANvXhY Other companies quickly caught on and started coming up with their own musical numbers, and the jingle era was born. From radio to television to the internet, jingles became pretty much synonymous with audio branding. Promoting a brand meant giving it a jingle, whether it's the Chiquita banana song, the singing Meow Mi