It’s 7: am in a cramped Sydney kitchen. Someone flicks on the radio, and within two seconds—before the lyrics even start—everyone knows it’s the Qantas ad. That five-note signature has burrowed into Australian mornings for decades. This is not magic; it’s calculated, relentless musical engineering. The Anatomy of an Earworm Jingles have always been more […]

It’s a strange thing to walk into the offices of a leading advertising agency in Berlin and hear a creative director admit, “Nobody really wants to make the next ‘I’m Lovin’ It.’ They want something people will hum on TikTok instead.” That’s not nostalgia—it’s the new reality for jingles, those once-ubiquitous thirty-second hooks that wormed […]

Nobody admits it openly, but the truth is that jingles are not dead—they’re just hiding in plain sight. Sure, the golden era of catchy radio earworms (“I’m stuck on Band-Aid!”) belongs to the Mad Men mythology of mid-century America. But behind the scenes in , brands and agencies are wrestling with a much stranger evolution: […]

No one warned me that the earworm would still be playing in my head as I left the studio. There’s a strange power to those -second musical slices—enough, apparently, that even professional audio engineers at London’s Factory Studios keep referencing the Intel “bong” or McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” melody when briefing composers for new campaigns. […]

Somewhere in a Berlin sound studio in late , an audio engineer named Lutz scrolls through a playlist of old McDonald’s and Haribo jingles. He’s not feeling sentimental—he’s reverse-engineering the hooks for a new campaign targeting Gen Z. For years, market analysts claimed jingles were dead, relics of radio breaks and TV dinners. But watch […]

Nostalgia Isn’t Always Accidental In , McDonald’s launched its “It’s a Good Time for the Great Taste of McDonald’s” jingle with such relentless frequency that it became a punchline in late-night comedy skits. Yet, by early , internal tracking at Leo Burnett (the agency behind it) showed unaided recall rates among US consumers had climbed […]

Skepticism is healthy in marketing. Especially when it comes to jingles—those short, sing-song bursts that stick in your head like gum under a school desk. Are they really worth the investment, or just a relic of mid-century advertising? Yet, peel back the curtain on actual campaigns, and jingles reveal themselves as both risk and reward. […]

The Jingle Isn’t Dead—It’s Just Hiding In the so-called golden age of Madison Avenue—the 1950s to early 1980s—jingles were king. Think “Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz” (Alka-Seltzer, ) or “Have a Break, Have a KitKat” (early ’80s UK campaigns). But if you ask creatives at agencies like BBDO New York or Clemenger BBDO Melbourne today, many […]

It’s 7: a.m. on a rainy Thursday in Melbourne. The radio alarm clicks on, and somewhere between the traffic report and weather update, it happens: That insidiously catchy tune for Chemist Warehouse slides into your brain. You haven’t set foot in one of their stores for months, but you’re humming along to “Chemist Warehouse—lowest prices […]

There’s a strange nostalgia in hearing the old McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle or the classic Intel Inside chime. For decades, these sonic cues were as stable as the brands themselves. Yet walk into a contemporary ad agency in Sydney or Berlin and you’ll hear a different tune—literally and metaphorically. Jingles aren’t dead, but they’re […]