Summary: Dean and Sam discuss the decline of jingles in advertising and the reasons behind it. Reflecting on their favourite jingles from the past and the effectiveness of these catchy tunes in creating brand recall, they uncover why jingles have become less popular in recent years and why they may potentially be making a comeback. The hosts also discuss the importance of effective advertising and the role of jingles in conveying key messages to consumers.
Key Takeaways:
- Jingles are highly effective in creating brand recall and conveying key messages to consumers.
- Marketers have moved away from jingles in recent years, considering them uncool and outdated.
- The decline of jingles may be due to a lack of talent and interest in creating them, as well as a shift towards co-opting pop music in advertising.
- Jingles are particularly effective for new brands or brands in saturated markets, as they help create brand awareness and differentiation.
- Simple and memorable jingles that convey a clear message are the most effective.
Quotes:
- “Jingles are highly effective in creating brand recall and conveying key messages to consumers.”
- “The decline of jingles may be due to a lack of talent and interest in creating them, as well as a shift towards co-opting pop music in advertising.”
| Timestamp | Summary |
|---|---|
| [0:00:00] | Introduction and discussion of recent news and activities |
| [0:03:56] | Conversation about the leadership of brands during the pandemic |
| [0:05:24] | Discussion about the oldest ads remembered |
| [0:08:31] | Topic introduction: the disappearance of jingles in ads |
| [0:09:24] | Questioning why jingles are no longer used |
| [0:10:17] | Explanation of why jingles are effective |
| [0:10:59] | Reflection on the decline of jingles in advertising |
| [0:11:27] | Examples of nostalgic ads and their production values |
| [0:11:27] | Discussion on the decline of jingles and their effectiveness. |
| [0:13:12] | Speculation on the reasons for the decline of jingles. |
| [0:15:23] | Prediction that jingles will make a comeback. |
| [0:17:30] | Mention of the Grout Guys jingle and its execution. |
| [0:18:34] | Reference to the history of jingles and their shift to using pop music. |
| [0:19:38] | Mention of the relationship between the music industry and advertising. |
| [0:20:59] | Discussion on the effectiveness of jingles with classical music. |
| [0:22:08] | Importance of making a boring message fun in a jingle. |
| [0:23:05] | Mention of jingles for Ream hot water systems. |
| [0:23:10] | The effectiveness of jingles and catchy ads. |
| [0:24:29] | The dying skill of writing a good brief. |
| [0:25:44] | Examples of successful jingles in advertising. |
| [0:31:48] | The possibility of brands being “too cool” for jingles. |
| [0:32:43] | The role of data and focus groups in ad decision-making. |
| [0:33:26] | Jingles as a way to make an impact for new brands. |
| [0:34:18] | Small and local brands being more open to jingles. |
| [0:34:30] | Examples of memorable jingles for local brands. |
| [0:34:39] | The power of jingles for brand recognition and recall. |
| [0:34:46] | Discussing the Eric Planinsek jingle |
| [0:35:49] | Importance of jingles and their effectiveness |
| [0:37:28] | The effectiveness of jingles in brand recall |
| [0:38:13] | Robert Swanson’s formula for a successful jingle |
| [0:39:10] | Housekeeping: leaving reviews and video format on YouTube |
| [0:40:31] | Challenge of editing jingles into the podcast |
| [0:41:05] | Announcement of YouTube channel and video updates |
| [0:41:34] | Invitation to share favorite jingles |
| [0:41:43] | Closing remarks |
| END | End of the transcript |
[TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:00 – (Dean Millson): Brandwidth
0:00:26 – (Sam McEwin): Yes. Welcome back to another episode of the Brandwith Podcast. My name is Sam McEwin. Joining me, as always, is Dean Millson. How are you today, Dean?
0:00:36 – (Dean Millson): I am very well, thanks, mate. Very well. And yourself?
0:00:39 – (Sam McEwin): I’m doing great. I’m doing really good. Good to hear. We’ve sort of oscillated between chatting. Is there any news? Is there anything happening in your world that you’d like to talk about today?
0:00:49 – (Dean Millson): It no, not really. We were talking before about dodging COVID and trying to not get sick, and it feels like we’ve been talking that for two years, so we don’t really have anything else too exciting to share, at least.
0:01:03 – (Sam McEwin): Well, fair enough.
0:01:04 – (Dean Millson): Keeping busy, which is good.
0:01:06 – (Sam McEwin): Busy is good.
0:01:07 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, busy is good. And what about you?
0:01:09 – (Sam McEwin): Busy is good. Much the same. I don’t think there’s any news, but we’ve started a lot of podcasts with talking about recruiting and hiring. We’re going through that again, so that’s fun.
0:01:20 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, we’ve got too.
0:01:23 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah. So I guess that’s great. There must be marketing happening in the world. Both our agencies are growing, which is exciting.
0:01:30 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, that’s good. Someone should listen to that employer branding podcast I heard about.
0:01:35 – (Sam McEwin): That’s a very good point. That’s a very good point. That might have been one or two episodes ago.
0:01:40 – (Dean Millson): I might have to go back and listen to myself, give myself some tips.
0:01:46 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah, well, wherever you get it from, that’s good. But yeah, look, other than that, it’s just onwards and it feels like I don’t know, there was certainly a rush of advertising over the last six months that’s been keeping us really busy and it seems to have maybe slowed a bit, but it never really slows.
0:02:08 – (Dean Millson): You can quite tell. Like in Australia, at least, we’ve got everywhere is kind of interest rates rising and the narrative is from the media, at least, kind of. Who knows what’s going to happen? It’s pretty negative. We weren’t seeing that. But, yeah, things are kind of tapered off a little bit, but then they feel like they’re going to get really busy again. I don’t know.
0:02:34 – (Sam McEwin): That’s an interesting one. I mean, we got pretty deep in the data of what’s going to happen in a recession and advertising in times of recession, when the pandemic started, I don’t think there were too many countries that actually entered a recession.
0:02:49 – (Dean Millson): No, we did, I think, for one, was it a month or something? It wasn’t really a recession.
0:02:55 – (Sam McEwin): Not like an official recession has to be two or something. Two quarters, I think. Two quarters. So interesting whether we need to dust off I’ll tell you, the one thing I would say about that is I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on air before, I couldn’t be more impressed with brands in general, australian brands, global brands, in how they managed that sort of pandemic period. As far as I really did expect to see advertising budgets slashed and all sorts of bad decision making and there was a lot of really smart people talking at the time about, you know, the impacts of that and what will happen and, you know, what happens to brands that choose to advertise through. But I what I saw was some just incredible leadership and yeah, the vast majority of brands, both of the clients that we work with and other brands that I sort of got an insight to that we don’t work with, it just seemed like the general response was very well reasoned, very well researched.
0:03:56 – (Dean Millson): I’m going to talk about here, but the government threw a lot of money. I mean, people kept consuming, you know what I mean?
0:04:01 – (Sam McEwin): Now we have an economy that’s overheating.
0:04:04 – (Dean Millson): We do. That was a big part of it. I think part of that kind of pessimism at the start was what all these businesses are going to go under and then no one’s going to have any money to buy anything. And so everything’s slashed and we’re just kind of holding on for dear life. Whereas everyone, not everyone, most people were kept in a job. There was obviously lots of industries that were hit harder. Well, I shouldn’t say most people, I don’t know, but the general my gut feel we were talking to put in.
0:04:37 – (Sam McEwin): Context, we were talking, this will be the biggest recession since Great Depression. At the start, it certainly wasn’t that. I’m sure there were some people who’ve gone through some hardship.
0:04:45 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, there were. But at the end of the day, people got on with things and were consuming more from home, online and all that sort of stuff. So no, you’re right, we’re in a pretty good place.
0:05:01 – (Sam McEwin): I mean, I think the thing I noticed was just that leadership. So I think if we were about to go into a recession, all sorts of bad things happen in a recession, but I feel really positive about the leadership of businesses and brands and ultimately that does have an impact on jobs and all that, if people at the top of companies are making smart decisions and educated ones. So anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.
0:05:24 – (Dean Millson): We’d have a chat. There you go, there you go. In this time, a little bit of.
0:05:27 – (Sam McEwin): Chitchat or always good. But what we are here to talk about is a topic that I have no idea what it could possibly be.
0:05:35 – (Dean Millson): My turn today, but you’ve done some.
0:05:37 – (Sam McEwin): Level of planning, I believe.
0:05:38 – (Dean Millson): A little bit like every time, like never quite planned enough, but enough to kind of get us started. So for the uninitiated, one of us brings a question without notice, a topic without notice, and to do with the world of marketing and brands and we go from there. So I often say what my topic is and you always ask a question and I like that. So I’ve kind of stolen your kind of vibe here, Sam. And so this could go horribly wrong because I could get the complete wrong answer. I want to kind of segue into my topic, but if I asked you to tell me what the oldest ad you can remember is, well, this might.
0:06:22 – (Sam McEwin): Be a bad time for that because we’ve just started planning for a blog post that we’re going to put here, which is like, our most remembered ads, Australian ads. And so we posted all our favorite old ads. So I sort of have four or five of them.
0:06:40 – (Dean Millson): That’s right.
0:06:41 – (Sam McEwin): Which was the first one that so.
0:06:42 – (Dean Millson): It doesn’t have to be first, but give me what are the ones that come to mind?
0:06:47 – (Sam McEwin): I’ll give you the category because everyone in the office posted like four or five of their favorite ads. It’s a wonderful collection. I’m looking forward to share it. Some of them, but there were three, and two of them are almost identical, which is funny enough. One is the old pick apart ad. I could sing it for you. Do you want me to sing it?
0:07:04 – (Dean Millson): You don’t have to sing it yet. Well, yeah, actually sing it or say the words.
0:07:09 – (Sam McEwin): It goes something along the lines of pick apart, pick apart, pick apart, pick apart. And it’s got that little verse, don’t.
0:07:15 – (Dean Millson): Leave sitting on the shelf. Come to pick apart where everything’s cheap.
0:07:18 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah, all of that. And it explains beautifully. It’s a wonderful but after all these years, I can still sing it mostly. And I don’t know, for some reason that stuck to mind. The next one I came up with was I don’t know, is it Frank and Murray’s Plant Farm?
0:07:40 – (Dean Millson): Oh, yeah.
0:07:42 – (Sam McEwin): Hello. And then the third one, and I’ll let you comment on I don’t know.
0:07:50 – (Dean Millson): What our international listenership is like, but.
0:07:53 – (Sam McEwin): We’Ve got a lot of us listeners, actually, I apologize.
0:07:56 – (Dean Millson): We’ll have to put all the show.
0:07:58 – (Sam McEwin): Notes, check the show notes. But the third one probably also was a local Australian ad, but it was for Kraft Peanut Butter. And there’s a cute little girl who says oily or something. Peanut butter. That’s dry or oily. I like Kraft peanut butter. It’s so easy to spread. And there’s a little character that pops out of the thing and she slams the door on his so perfect.
0:08:24 – (Dean Millson): Well, I’m glad that worked. It worked because the first ad you came to what type of ad is that, Sam?
0:08:31 – (Sam McEwin): Well, it’s a local ad. It has a jingle.
0:08:36 – (Dean Millson): Thank you. What happened to the jingle, Sam? That’s my topic for today, because if I think of all the ads I can remember and we can talk through a bunch more in a moment, not so much my childhood. There’s a couple in there that are still running their jingles today that I can remember straight away. They’re effective. Like, you can sing the Pick Apart ad and I can, too. We won’t sing them all because we may lose the small yeah, it’s more along those lines, to be honest. But you remember, you know, you can remember them 30 years later, 40 years later, what are other ads? Yet they’ve gone.
0:09:24 – (Dean Millson): They’re hardly around anymore. So I guess my first question is why do you think that is? And this is just a conversation because for something that’s seemingly so effective.
0:09:44 – (Sam McEwin): Why do I think it is the real answer? Yeah, I think marketers spend far too long trying to create things that they think looks good and nowhere near enough time trying to think about what is effective for their clients or for their company or whatever it is. And to go further than that, I think there’s a very serious problem in marketing advertising that we’ve forgotten that ads the reason and to then maybe to answer directly.
0:10:17 – (Sam McEwin): Well, of course jingles work because memory AIDS and songs have always been linked. There’s a reason why we can sing our times tables when they teach kids that these have always been things we’ve known, but at some point they got a little bit daggy. And certainly, I think our childhood, we’re boys of the some point in the 90s, we started with those weird sort of ads where you didn’t even know what the brand was. And I’m thinking of perfume ads and things where it was like weird colors and motifs and slogans, and nobody had any idea what the ad was for.
0:10:59 – (Sam McEwin): And I think maybe we moved through that period, but we never got back to just classic characters, memory AIDS. And the interesting thing about the ad examples that I came up with just then for me, because I did reflect on why were they the ads that came up? Two of them were crappy. Two of them were filmed. I actually pick apart ad. I looked at it. It actually has some production values. They paid someone to at least, but not much.
0:11:27 – (Sam McEwin): There was a good voiceover artist and there was some cutaway shots and these kind of things, but not much. Frank and Mario or hello. Hello. Plant Farm is someone with a camera. You could shoot that on an iPhone today.
0:11:41 – (Dean Millson): Sure, yeah, it was awful.
0:11:44 – (Sam McEwin): Not about the production, but they’re obviously effective. I remember them. Brand recall is, I believe, one of the important metrics supposed to be working for here.
0:11:54 – (Dean Millson): No, we’ll talk about jingles today, but it’s also that the hello, hello one is kind of not a jingle, but it’s like it’s sonic branding, isn’t it? And even like another obscure Australian reference, national Tiles.
0:12:07 – (Sam McEwin): Hello.
0:12:10 – (Dean Millson): It’s an audible thing. But yeah, I tend to I mean, I agree. I think I had a conversation about this around studio at Tamara before coming to talk about it. And the general consensus was they became kind of uncool because they became uncool to marketers. And then someone said, and I think this is true, the people that were good at it in the as it became uncool, they left. And that talent, I think, is actually gone because another side to it is it’s not a typical skill anymore. So I wonder if this is true. It certainly would probably be for us a little bit.
0:12:55 – (Dean Millson): You get a job and you can either come up with the idea yourself in your agency or you have to go out and get someone to write a jingle and it’s an extra outsourced cost. I wonder whether that plays a little bit of a role in it.
0:13:12 – (Sam McEwin): I think there was enough of a gap to that’s why I mentioned that sort of 90s, there was this period in time where it did become really on the nose. And I think that lasted long enough to be a generational gap where if you’re in an agency, you didn’t get the mentorship to write, to think about.
0:13:30 – (Dean Millson): Or to think was the idea. Yeah, Mojo is the big one. Like Steve, my business partner, was around in the 80s when had an agency in Sydney when Mojo were flying and come on, Ozzy, come on. And Lee ought to be congratulated and all those ones. And he just said they just go to the pub and play music to.
0:13:51 – (Sam McEwin): Each other until something stuck. Maybe that’s it. Agencies don’t drink enough anymore.
0:13:55 – (Dean Millson): No, I feel like a twoies. I feel like a twoies. I feel like a twoies or two. So they were actually getting you to not just have one, but have that’s. I think that’s the reason I found kind of in my research for know there was an article in Forbes a few years ago and they kind of hypothesized that the fragmenting of media did it, that you kind of need for a jingle to work. You need that kind of repetition kind of mass media, and then our media was fragmented. However, I don’t know, my gut tells me that isn’t really true.
0:14:42 – (Dean Millson): So you used to run your Pick Apart ad on TV. Now you could run it on TV or you could run it on social media. There was another and the jingle might.
0:14:53 – (Sam McEwin): Not work on Facebook, but if you’re running the TV ad and you’re running it on YouTube or radio, then there’s an accompanying ad that you run on Facebook that would say come to Pick Apart. Yeah, you don’t need the jingle in that for the jingle to be an effective part of your mix.
0:15:12 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, I agree. So I just think it kind of came uncool and then people have stopped, can’t remember how to do them.
0:15:22 – (Sam McEwin): I’ve got a prediction, though.
0:15:23 – (Dean Millson): Yeah.
0:15:24 – (Sam McEwin): I don’t think we’re the first person to talk about this. And I think there has been a little bit of I have come across and I don’t know whether you want to take this here, but there’s been some different charts that I’ve come across of talking about the most effective elements of an ad. And jingles always score really highly in those as do characters and a few other little things, which I thought was interesting as well. When I saw that one of the first, the Craft ad for me had a little character in there. It was a really good character.
0:15:53 – (Dean Millson): Well on that. Like characters always. I read a great piece not long ago about characters, and the ones that come to mind are I can’t remember their names. Compare the market, the meerkats and the gorilla for Cadbury. But there was a test that I can’t remember who it was, but I think take the branding off an ad and all your competitors ad and put them together and just realize especially this example used the car industry. Like they’re all driving around a corner.
0:16:24 – (Dean Millson): If you take the branding off, it’s the same ad. However, the jump at the end of the Toyota ad, it’s a character, but it’s not but it’s a distinctive asset that straight away tells you what it is.
0:16:37 – (Sam McEwin): I’ve got an interesting side note about that jump. Can I go there?
0:16:40 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, go.
0:16:41 – (Sam McEwin): So that jump is an.
0:16:45 – (Dean Millson): Well, it.
0:16:46 – (Sam McEwin): Was international, but it was only used internationally for maybe one campaign. And it’s in Australia, I believe this. Correct me if I’m wrong, right? And if I’m wrong about this, but someone was telling me that at least in the States, it was used for sort of one campaign, but they just ventured off on some other way. But in Australia, they stuck with that. And certainly when you watch an ad here in Australia so some of those international listeners that we’ve mentioned before right.
0:17:12 – (Dean Millson): Once again, what do you know what we’re talking about? There’s going to be so many clips here we’re going to have to put into the notes. Yeah, but anyway yeah, no, that’s good to know. I really want to bring the jingle back. Not that I’m going to be able to do that myself.
0:17:30 – (Sam McEwin): Well, this is why my prediction is that it’s coming back. I heard one the other day, the Grout Guys, and I can’t sing this one for you yet. I haven’t heard it enough. But I saw it the TV, and then I heard it on the radio and I thought, they’ve seen the data, that jingles are important.
0:17:48 – (Dean Millson): They’ve brought but the Grout Guys, though, this is what wasn’t particularly necessarily going to go either. But it’s not a sexy it’s a bad thing, is it?
0:17:59 – (Sam McEwin): Except that I just told you what their name was and I was convinced I wasn’t going to remember it and that they stuffed up the jingle and it was really, really bad execution jingle. Now, maybe this is because I’m an ad guy and I paid attention to it because it had a jingle and I was like, oh, wow, you don’t hear that much anymore. So I don’t know, we might need a bigger audience to test this on. I think it’s grab guys.
0:18:25 – (Dean Millson): The other thing I found out so there’s predictions now that I think there’s in the financial review that TikTok is going to bring back jingles and God. Yeah, I know.
0:18:34 – (Sam McEwin): Do you have to give them the credit?
0:18:36 – (Dean Millson): Well, I don’t think that’s the case either. It’s just another someone writing and not wanting to yeah, it’s another article about TikTok. But it was interesting kind of to read through the history of jingles. So they started in the early 1920s, I think it was. I actually don’t have that note there in front of me, so if that’s wrong, we’ll correct it. But it was around about then and they grew in popularity. But then as music, once we got to kind of the they were kind of on the nose a bit by the kind of shift happened in the 80s. So even though we’re kind of talking about all these brands that had great jingles, the theory is that it kind of shifted away from jingles to co opting pop music, getting Michael Jackson and Pepsi and I didn’t realize this. He rewrote the words to Billie Jean for a Pepsi ad, something about two re sung Billie Jean as you’re the wow.
0:19:38 – (Sam McEwin): That would cost some dollars.
0:19:39 – (Dean Millson): It didn’t cost anything. Apparently it was his idea, whereas these days so it would be ridiculous.
0:19:46 – (Sam McEwin): He must have drunk a lot of idea.
0:19:50 – (Dean Millson): He burned his hair and everything and he still wanted to do that. So there’s kind of this shift to music. And that’s one of the other things if you kind of read up on jingles, the relationship between the music industry and advertising as the music industry got closer and culture was more about advertising sorry, culture was more about pop music. And then it’s now morphed into kind of using music and tapping into culture, which is perfectly reasonable if you want to kind of want your brand to tap into culture. I totally get that, but at the expense of the jingle. And that kind of I’ll tell you what.
0:20:31 – (Sam McEwin): I’d love to, and I haven’t seen any data on this, but I’ll tell you what I think even the most effective jingles are, are the ones that are written to classical music. So one of the ones that comes to mind is there’s a Sarah Lee ad and there’s a couple of others. What’s that song? Guantaname?
0:20:59 – (Dean Millson): Munch on, mancheros.
0:21:01 – (Sam McEwin): Munch on, mancheros. But there’s also that one. Ton Romeo. So there’s something about a tune that you already know. And honestly, I can’t hear that song now without see, I think One Ton Romeo, but you got the munch on my chest, which might be the risk of this strategy. But yeah, I mean, that Sarah Lee. I will never hear that tune and not think Sarah Lee. And you hear that tune on hold music and all sorts of things. So something about linking that’s interesting.
0:21:33 – (Dean Millson): Well, I’ve got a bunch of people.
0:21:35 – (Sam McEwin): Talk through you got your favorites.
0:21:37 – (Dean Millson): Well, yeah, I’ve just got a list and I was going to bring them up, not sing them or say them, but then talk about because there’s no hard and fast formula either, which I think is kind of cool. I think if you boil down to what makes a jingle great, it’s that you can say something really boring in a really fun way. And at the end of the day, that’s like so I keep coming back to with Troy, one of my colleagues at demarca.
0:22:08 – (Dean Millson): Install a ream always. And for the hottest of hot hot water you’ve ever seen, ream comes on steady, hot and strong and just keeps on. It just tells you so it’s got good pressure and it doesn’t. And install one. And it’s the most basic down to earth message.
0:22:28 – (Sam McEwin): And the hottest of hot hot water also says we’re the best, without saying you’re the best. We all know everybody immediately doesn’t.
0:22:35 – (Dean Millson): And so it’s not creative in its kind of positioning. It just tells you what it wants. I can’t remember it now. There’s another ream one, whereas it’s something about when your hot water packs it up. There was another version we were talking about, I wish I could remember it now, but then it was talking about the use case. So like when your hot water packs it up, think install a ream. So the next thing, if my hot water ever packs up, then there’s that moment you want the category entry point. Category entry point.
0:23:05 – (Sam McEwin): That’s it.
0:23:10 – (Dean Millson): You’re able to do those things. And the other one, if you had a food product and you just wanted to list the ingredients on an ad, that sounds pretty awesome. But when you say to all beef patties, special sauce, letters, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun and you turn it into a game like McDonald’s did, where if you could say it under 30 seconds, you got a free Coke or something, all of a sudden, now everyone’s seeing that I know the ingredients of a Big Mac. I don’t even eat them 25 years later and all they just listed the ingredients.
0:23:55 – (Sam McEwin): That’s what it is for me. And that’s why bringing it back to effectiveness. And that may be also if we want to really psychoanalyze this, this might also be the death of the brief, or there’s been a lot of literature. I think Mark Ritzen may have just written something about this as well. But that dying skill of being able to write a really good brief and I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t around when briefs were written in the maybe there were not good briefs back then, but I always felt that golden age of advertising clients had some audience data.
0:24:29 – (Sam McEwin): There were really good briefs written. We knew what we were trying to achieve. I’m sure there would have been a good brief there to say, hey, we want people to know the ingredients, or we need to raise the awareness of our products, four best features, and they’ve put that into a jingle or something along those lines.
0:24:49 – (Dean Millson): I mean, the ream one is a classic. What is the problem? What is problem you’re trying to solve? And what do you want people to do? What do you want them do? Install a ream. Okay, so think about if that was debrief. And I’m sure you could sit there and go, we’re going to do this and do that, and get them to this touch point, that touch point and funnel them through here. And just instead of just seeing them install a ring now, they still use that. That was on the radio on Sen, really, yesterday.
0:25:18 – (Dean Millson): There’s an asset they continue to run with and they still run it. They absolutely do.
0:25:24 – (Sam McEwin): There’s another one, maybe it was ream. There was one I heard recently that still used the music like the jingles dropped off, but the music that goes along with it and then the chorus comes in at the end or something. I can’t saw it the other day, I thought, oh wow, that’s a really good I can’t remember the brand. It’ll come to me.
0:25:44 – (Dean Millson): It’s just so simple. The ones that came to mind for me do you remember decoray?
0:25:53 – (Sam McEwin): Yes. There’s another shower one.
0:25:56 – (Dean Millson): Decorate. Yeah, but and I think that actually.
0:25:58 – (Sam McEwin): Is I can’t this is why I think when the songs actually exist, that tune exists and you can get the tune.
0:26:07 – (Dean Millson): I’m trying to think what the song is now.
0:26:09 – (Sam McEwin): I wouldn’t think of the song decoray. I really love see, I can’t remember the original song. No.
0:26:16 – (Dean Millson): And I used to I’m just kidding. So decorate. That was a big one. The other one, which is a bit random, but is Sakatar. Sakata, right, that’s a good one. And I didn’t realize this. So Troy and I’m bringing Troy into the conversation and I won’t take credit for this insight, but it was a total new category, rice crackers in the mid ninety s new. So rather than kind of to explain this new category and what it is, and they just have this catchy song.
0:26:53 – (Dean Millson): And I remember they used to play at Heaps at the MCG half time, quarter time on the sound system at the G, which made me think I haven’t heard any ads at the footy like that for a long time, which is maybe another conversation, but I can shut my eyes and remember it just ringing out around the MCG. And that’s just a brand name, so I can’t remember what else kind of went with it. But that was a new category.
0:27:22 – (Dean Millson): What the hell is this? I think it had the rice cracker bouncing on the words like a karaoke Sarkata. So it was like there’s a rice cracker, there’s the name. That’s all you need to know. When you’re in the supermarket next time and you see it, you’ll remember the song you just heard. So that’s an interesting one. So that’s that totally new category, Chicken Tonight. So Chicken Tonight is a brand of ready what do you call that category? Sauce to chuck on chicken to make a it’s a ready meal, kind of, isn’t it?
0:28:01 – (Dean Millson): So the brand name is Chicken tonight. The jingle is. I feel like chicken. So you know it’s going to get in your head when you’re ready for dinner and maybe you want chicken tonight. So just the most basic, basic, basic cotties cordial. My dad that was a classic. Yeah. And that was a massive production initially, and we’ll put the original ad into and it would have been longer than 30 seconds, I feel like. That first one, it was like the kid was kind of slowly kind of moving through somewhere. Was it the orchard or the street? And then all the kids would kind.
0:28:41 – (Sam McEwin): Of that’s right.
0:28:44 – (Dean Millson): That first one. But then I was in looking around, they used it for ages, and once they’d got, like you said before, the jingle is gone, but the music still there. They were doing ads, I reckon, ten years later, where the tune was in the background, but there was no Joe Moore jingle. But you were singing it back at the same time. So that’s an obviously memorable one. Like I mentioned the mojo ones. I feel like a two E’s.
0:29:15 – (Dean Millson): I feel like a two e’s or two and come on, Ozzy. Come on. Which they created to promote World Series cricket in the it’s a whole song. I don’t remember any of the other words, but it’s a whole and I think they even changed the song every year to have the new players in. And then they also did Meadow Lee. You Ought to be congratulated. Which some people hate.
0:29:36 – (Sam McEwin): But that was another great one.
0:29:37 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, it’s a great did they do.
0:29:40 – (Sam McEwin): Come and have a beer with Duncan? Or is that before their time?
0:29:43 – (Dean Millson): It’s a song.
0:29:44 – (Sam McEwin): Is that a song? Is that a real song?
0:29:46 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, that’s a real song. Slim Dusty. So there you go, you’ve Gone, the Offset love to have a beer with a real it’s a Slim Dusty song before Duncan’s. So the brand, I think, has named themselves after the other.
0:30:00 – (Sam McEwin): Well, that’s really committed to a jingle, isn’t it?
0:30:03 – (Dean Millson): That’s very true. That’s very true. So meadow Lee. Another one I’ve came up across when I was looking and I forgot was banana boat. They did it to Manamana Banana Boat, and so I couldn’t remember it. So it’s not one of the better ones, but quite interesting. Happy little Vegemites. Very famous in Australia. That was probably 60 maybe.
0:30:30 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah. That spanned a few generations.
0:30:34 – (Dean Millson): I think there’s been different versions of Vegemite used jingles for a long another one. It just goes on and on. There was another one they’ve used that quite a lot, Vegemite. We talked about one last week or last week last episode of the episode before Slip Slop Slap. So think. About coming back to what we were saying. What do you want them to do? Slip, slop, slap. Not slip slop slap, right?
0:31:05 – (Sam McEwin): Exactly. It just ruined the jingle. But this is why that they’re Memory Eight. It’s classic human psychology.
0:31:12 – (Dean Millson): It’s the behavior you want. Feel like chicken tonight. Slip, slop, slap. So that’s a certain genre. Genre, isn’t it? I mean, install a ream. Pick Apart was telling you what to do.
0:31:26 – (Sam McEwin): So have we become too cool, though? Are there some brands now that are just too cool to be able to run these ads? I think we should. I think these are effective. So isn’t that what we’re doing? We’re doing effective ads. Should Nike have a jingle now?
0:31:48 – (Dean Millson): Yeah. I wonder whether the idea of them and maybe they don’t test well. That might be the other thing. I’m sure they don’t, but then that’s not the point.
0:32:01 – (Sam McEwin): My grout guys. I was like, that’s a terrible jingle. They’ve stuffed that up. It’s not memorable. It’s not catchy in any way. And here I am. Grout. Guys. I hope there is a Grout guys. I have at least remembered something if I’m exposed to that. I’ve heard that twice now, and I know it’s about grout at least. And there’s some people that you can call to fix the grout in your shower. So it’s transmitted something of a message.
0:32:25 – (Sam McEwin): A few more times, I might be like, oh, they’re actually called whatever their name is. But it’s doing its job. Even when it’s potentially poorly executed. I’m sure they test terribly. I’m sure everyone would have said, oh my God, that is the worst ad pick apart.
0:32:43 – (Dean Millson): I wonder when we post this episode, we should ask those at agencies bigger than our that are kind of doing stuff more like this, whether that’s the case. Because I could kind of see that might be what also be going on.
0:33:01 – (Sam McEwin): And we have become so data focused now, right? It has to be focus groups. It has to be show us the data. And then the other one, which makes it sort of entrenched, I guess, is that is there anyone else in our category who this has been successful know no one else is doing a jingle. You know, we won’t either. Which I think is another real issue at the moment.
0:33:26 – (Dean Millson): Thinking through these decor was a new brand. It’s a great way, isn’t it, to kind of get impact off the mark. New brand in a really saturated category. Shampoos in the what was that?
0:33:45 – (Sam McEwin): Late 80s, maybe something like that?
0:33:48 – (Dean Millson): Sakatar. Same thing. Like a new brand. New category, but a new brand. Banada boat. There you go. Like new brands in a category that’s quite saturated. So there’s probably a bit of a theme there if you looking through my list here of a type of brand that it kind of works well.
0:34:14 – (Sam McEwin): I think if you roll in the other ones, like Pick Apart, well, it’s a small brand.
0:34:18 – (Dean Millson): Yeah.
0:34:21 – (Sam McEwin): It’S a new entrant or a small brand or the local brands are the ones that have nothing to lose, maybe, and they’re happy to do these kinds of things.
0:34:30 – (Dean Millson): There’s another one, the one I remember if I asked you the address of Eric Planinsek, would you know it?
0:34:39 – (Sam McEwin): I don’t even know what you’re talking about. But I tell you what, I can tell you what the phone number for Pizza Hut is, and I haven’t ordered a pizza in 15 years.
0:34:46 – (Dean Millson): What is it? I’m trying to remember.
0:34:47 – (Sam McEwin): One three, double one, double six. One three, double one, double six.
0:34:50 – (Dean Millson): So the Eric Planninsek one is clearly quite obscure. It might have been the best jingle, but they were at 230 Brunswick Street, actually. Yes.
0:34:58 – (Sam McEwin): Okay, I do know.
0:34:59 – (Dean Millson): 32 30 Brunswick Street. 230 Brunswick.
0:35:03 – (Sam McEwin): See that’s bass level stuff.
0:35:04 – (Dean Millson): Remember Eric? Remember Eric? Planninsek So I have just kind of sung badly on a podcast, but it’s like, remember Eric Planninsek, 230 Brunswick Street. And if you Google it, and it’ll certainly be in the show notes, there was just different versions of that. It just had this beat. It was on TV. It was clearly different to other ads. And I don’t know, I mean, from memory, the fashion was maybe a bit fashionable, and so it probably suited them.
0:35:39 – (Dean Millson): But that one always it’s just the address and the name and it tells you to remember it.
0:35:43 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah.
0:35:46 – (Dean Millson): It’s so simple.
0:35:48 – (Sam McEwin): So simple.
0:35:49 – (Dean Millson): So I don’t really have a point to finish off with this. I just really wanted to talk about jingles because as a reminder to we got a project the Moment, which we’re kind of trying to think of maybe think of a jingle for it. Just don’t discard the jingle. Don’t discard the jingle. Because it works. It works.
0:36:15 – (Sam McEwin): Absolutely does. Come on. In fact, we’re going to talk in one of our future episodes about attention, time and these kind of things. I shouldn’t tell you that now, but.
0:36:30 – (Dean Millson): Anyway, maybe to finish up, I’ll just.
0:36:33 – (Sam McEwin): Have a but for something to last 15 years, for something to last, to be able to recite something, to be.
0:36:37 – (Dean Millson): Able to say what does the gone. There’s no Tuis in Melbourne, and I still think of them as a beer brand.
0:36:45 – (Sam McEwin): There are charts about what’s it called, memory decay, that show, like the ad recall. Within three days of seeing the ad, 20% of people exposed are likely to recall. I’m making this up. These are not the stats, by the way, but whatever it is. And that increases to only 5% after six days. That’s actually pretty close anyway, to the actual data. We measure recall and brand and memory decay and these kinds of things in days, if you’ve been effective enough, and I’m sure there were some big media buys around this, if you’ve been effective for years and people can remember your phone number, can remember your address, can remember the key selling points of your product.
0:37:28 – (Sam McEwin): That is an effective ad every day of the week and that should be winning awards. It’s categoric to me that a jingle. If you want your product or some key attributes remembered, it’s going to be.
0:37:43 – (Dean Millson): And this is how kind of basic is. I’ll finish with a bit of a quote from that AFR article, which I’ll post in the Show Notes as well. But Robert Swanson is a guy who was known as the king of jingles in the he had a formula for a successful jingle, which was one figure out the best way to get the message across in the smallest possible way. So install a ream. What is the message? What do you want them to do?
0:38:13 – (Dean Millson): Put the words together in a simple rhyming pattern. The melody must be simple and memorable, never intricate, so just saka, ta, whatever. If these basics have been accomplished, you can now go ahead and elaborate all you wish in the production of the commercial. So getting that kind of framework down, install a ream or kind of whatever afterwards. You can elaborate in other ways later on or you can do what you want with the production, but you’ve got to get those basics right and they’re so simple and potentially boring. It’s kind of like writing a brief and then singing it in some ways as well.
0:38:49 – (Dean Millson): But I just thought, wow, that’s lasted for that’s 50, 60, 70 years and it’s very first principle type stuff, jingles. Don’t forget about them, love them.
0:39:08 – (Sam McEwin): And if in doubt, sing your brief.
0:39:10 – (Dean Millson): Yeah, maybe that you might start doing that.
0:39:14 – (Sam McEwin): You’ll have to remember how to write one, though.
0:39:16 – (Dean Millson): That’s right.
0:39:17 – (Sam McEwin): That’s a lost art. I love that. Excellent work. I’m going to have a lot of fun. We’ll have to put all of those put them all in the Show Notes.
0:39:28 – (Dean Millson): I wonder whether we can edit it’s worthwhile editing any of them into the podcast.
0:39:31 – (Sam McEwin): We might well before we end. So thank you. That’s an excellent show. The housekeeping that we occasionally remember to do usually involves leaving reviews. Please do that. It does fire the engines that fuel the algorithms that increase the listenership algorithm and the listenership increases our motivation to keep going. Very important. But the other bit of housekeeping is this may or may not, depending on all sorts of technical issues that we may or may not encounter, be the first podcast that we have available as a video format on YouTube.
0:40:10 – (Sam McEwin): Which may give us some opportunities to edit in some of these little I don’t know how we do the jingles, but maybe the overlays can’t wait to.
0:40:18 – (Dean Millson): Get hit with copyright infringement on our first video.
0:40:22 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah, well, monetizing for us. No, we won’t be monetizing that, but that could be a challenge for our humble editor.
0:40:31 – (Dean Millson): Good idea. You, me, another job. You’re pretty quiet at the moment.
0:40:38 – (Sam McEwin): Yeah, I have no time knocking that out.
0:40:41 – (Dean Millson): Okay, well, maybe this will be anyway.
0:40:42 – (Sam McEwin): So keep an eye out for that. Maybe check out for YouTube if you’d love if you feel like the only thing that you’re missing is seeing our faces partially covered by microphones, then check head over to YouTube and you can subscribe there. You can even ring a little bell if you want notification when we update that. And yeah, you may or may not see some great videos there, but we’ll certainly put links to these videos.
0:41:05 – (Sam McEwin): Send us your favorites too. I’d love to hear that’s.
0:41:08 – (Dean Millson): A really, what have we got? Maybe we’ll follow up with a post on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever we are with a bunch because it’s fun. I’ve been holding on to this one for a little while and it’s a rabbit hole. You can go down people that have put together video after video on YouTube of ads and jingles from the years gone by and so it’s a lot of fun.
0:41:34 – (Sam McEwin): Excellent. Well, one to check out and until next time, thanks for tuning in and we look forward to talking to you again soon.
0:41:43 – (Dean Millson): See ya.