Hello, and welcome to the Rinse for another week. This week’s dispatch was based on a conversation that I had while talking about the Tour de France with my father-in-law. If you did not watch the Tour, Slovenian Tadej Pogačar put a beating on the field, winning his fifth yellow jersey. To give you an idea of how dominant he was, he started one climb three minutes behind the leading riders. He caught them and took the stage. I won’t embed it here, but here is a link to some highlights.
Anyway, in this talk, he asked me if I had seen the following ad:
I had not, but he told me that this ad has a banger of a jingle. Upon actually seeing it, he’s not wrong. This jingle is rather good. It’s got a good groove, and it’s catchy. While it doesn’t quite stick for me, I have to give it some props. Given that I’m constantly thinking about things that I can write about for this blog that don’t send me into deep music arcana, I started thinking about the jingle as a musical form.
Jingles are a shockingly hard piece of music to write. To start, you need it to be catchy. If it’s not catchy, how are you going to get people to remember it when they are at the store? Short answer: you’re not. This generally means that it needs to be simple and easily repeatable. Many people take this tack, and their jingles still suck. Why is that, they have no artistry. Having some random lady or dude artlessly sing your phone number or a slogan that is at best punny isn’t going to cut the mustard. So, how do you find the balance between the two?
I can’t answer that question because I’m not in advertising—I still like having a spirit. That said, I have a few examples of ads that manage to be sticky while still displaying a modicum of artistry. This is not going to be a hard ranking, and I’m not going to get super deep because that requires a deep discussion of advertising and psychology that I don’t want to have here.
That said, the ads that I chose satisfy a couple of basic criteria. One, they are catchy. Two, they might have prompted my purchase of their product at some point in time. As much as I like to believe I am not, I have bought sticks of Old Spice because I was looking for anti-perspirant and the whistling jingle blew into my head. So, with those as my basic criteria, I’ll give you a few jingles that will bang around in your head for a while (probably again because they are kind of old).
Mentos
An absolute banger of a jingle. It’s fun, catchy, and has a shocking new wave musicality. Can a mint make everything fully fresh? Don’t you want to find out if it can? I didn’t, but many other people, inlcuding my wife, did. Regardless, this jingle retains a permanent spot in my head. Plus, the ads are quite fun. Please kill me now: I just called an ad fun. Moving on.
Pepto Bismol
Is this a musical jingle? Sort of. It has a nice rhythm that buries into your subconscious. Has this jingle reminded me on several occasions that I can use Pepto Bismol to help me? It sure has. I sometimes wonder if the people in these ads regret being in them, knowing that them singing the word diarrhea will live until our planet’s eventual demise either by our own hands or the forces of the universe.
Folgers
A jingle that we all know and love, even if we’ve never consciously drank a cup of Folgers coffee in our lives. I know I have because they use it at my car dealership. It is a perfectly adequate cup of coffee. If you were to look up “mid” in a dictionary, you’d see a cup of Folgers. But I’m sure they’ve sold tons of it because of this very jingle. Well played, Folgers. Well played.
Toys “R” US
Aside from featuring rocker Jenny Lewis in this ad, this jingle inspired millions of children across this country to nag their parents to take them to a Toys “R” Us. And, to be fair to Toys “R” Us, they were pretty great as they had so, so many toys in them. It really ruled. I still have some baseball cards that I bought from a Toys “R” Us in Kansas City. Are they for a bunch of mid-tier players and is there a high preponderance of Mike Pagliarulo cards? They sure do, but I got them at Toys “R” Us.
Kit Kat
Why is there a guy balancing a bicycle in this ad? I feel like that would get in the way of eating a Kit Kat. This jingle is painfully simple and extremely catchy. It has a nice rhythm, and you’ll always remember it when you’re staring at a candy aisle somewhere. Be real with yourself: how many times did you choose a Kit Kat because the jingle popped into your head? For myself, it was several.
JG Wentworth
I want to start and say that you should not do business with JG Wentworth. With that noted, if you watched daytime television because you were home sick, unemployed, or a (stoned) college student, you know this jingle through and through. I didn’t learn until an embarrassingly late age what a structured settlement even was. But dammit, if I ever got one and needed cash, I would have called JG Wentworth and been gravely disappointed at the result.
Meow Mix
It’s only one word, yet it has been referenced time and again. It also hasn’t lost its potency. If you watched that ad, the muscle memory kicked in for you. I’m too used to it now, but when I started working at my job, I could hear this jingle lurking in the shadows of my brain while I was feeding a cat Meow Mix.
Band-Aid
Yep, Band-Aid’s jingle is very effective because it is extremely sticky. (I’m booing myself, don’t worry.) Furthermore, it’s from that time in advertising when things were not about vibes but efficacy. To this day, Band-Aids are stronger than the generics you get at the drugstore. But, you know, things are hard now, and you can’t always pay the premium, so you buy the cheaper one. Once you’ve put on your fifth band-aid of the day, you really wished you had paid the premium. As a side note, if you watch the video, you’ll get to see a young, shirtless John Travolta.
Chili’s
I can’t imagine how many ribs Chili’s sold because of this song. It’s super catchy, and the repetition really drives the idea home hard. Ironically, as someone who went to Chili’s a lot in the 1990s and early 2000s, never ate the things. Something always struck me as wrong about eating ribs at Chili’s. Go figure.
Hot Pockets
This jingle worked way too well on me. It’s super catchy, and it was on a lot. As a result, I thought about Hot Pockets a lot. There were points well into my 20s where if I was up in the air about what I wanted to eat at that time, I would have contemplated buying—and actually did buy—Hot Pockets because of this song. There was some poor person at a HyVee in Iowa City watching me sing the Hot Pockets jingle to myself as I decided between buying a regular Hot Pocket or a Croissant Pocket. I have exposed a lot about my lifestyle with that sentence.
The Clapper
Clap On! Clap Off! The Clapper! Absolutely rules as a jingle. I wanted one of these so badly when I was a kid and teen, but I’m pretty sure I watched a segment on NBC 4 in DC where consumer reporter Liz Crenshaw (shout out to an actual great) tested one of these and said it sort of worked but not really. Also, you should not be surprised that I, as a young person, (a) watched the local news on a daily basis (usually multiple times a day) and (b) took deep interest in the consumer segments.
I’m going to end my nostalgia trip into jingles here, but I want to close with some absolutely crazy ads that I found during my research. The first is for Weather Tite Windows:
So, let’s start with the obvious: Mike’s shirt does not fit. Like not even close. For some reason, his vibe reminds me of Tim Robinson in the Corncob TV skit from I Think You Should Leave. I don’t know why; I just have that feeling. Anyway, as you get into this ad, he flexes his muscles? I couldn’t see the gun show because it’s beneath too much fabric. Also, he likes cookies and wants his customers to bring them to him? He ends his ad eating a cookie. I saw it the first time and thought I was hallucinating. I wasn’t.
The next ad is this one for Nestle’s Sweet Dreams:
The first time I watched this ad and felt confused. Is this supposed to be horny? There’s a lady with a billowing dress. The guy has so much jaw on display. They caress each other. It seems like it’s supposed to be sexual. On second watch, I think it might just be trying to attract the attention of coked-out yuppies in the 1980s. On another watch, my second take is correct. There’s figure skating, the attractive people, and everything is white and reminiscent of snow a/k/a cocaine. The smooth new age jingle actually kind of hits. That said, I have no interest in this defunct candy bar.
Alright, hopefully you had some fun learning about my consumption and revisiting some old jingles. Next week is the Spins, and the week after that I’m going to talk about a band that released quality music since 1980: The Church. I listened to Heyday while I was driving to work and realized that it is a band I think many people reading this could get interested in.
As always, if you enjoyed this, tell a friend or post it somewhere for others to read. Take care of yourselves and each other. And pet a cat or dog if they are OK with it. And as a last note, never forget that Pusha T wrote “I’m Lovin’ It” for McDonald’s. He doesn’t have publishing rights on that. He does, however, have publishing rights on the beat that comes on at the end of every Arby’s commercial.
