There’s something quietly antagonistic about the modern jingle. For years, creatives in agency corridors rolled their eyes at the mere mention of a catchy musical earworm. Too cheesy. Too retrograde. The stuff of 1980s local car dealership ads and supermarket chains that never quite made it out of VHS territory. Yet here we are: In […]

It’s a Thursday afternoon in late autumn, . In a cramped audio suite on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, an account manager from Clemenger BBDO is arguing with a composer over the word “crunch.” The brief: a new jingle for Arnott’s Shapes. The argument: does “crunch” sound more appetizing sung on the beat or just behind […]

Soundbytes That Outlast Campaigns Ask anyone who grew up in Australia what tune instantly calls to mind hardware superstores and you’ll hear the first bars of Bunnings Warehouse’s iconic jingle—three notes, bass-heavy, unpolished. Created in the early 1990s for less than $1, AUD by an unknown musician, it’s still played daily across radio and television […]

There’s a tension in every advertising agency boardroom that isn’t easily resolved. It’s the persistent ghost of jingles—the catchy tunes that used to define radio breaks and TV commercial slots. But if you ask a -year-old creative director at a mid-tier Sydney agency today about composing a jingle for an insurance brand, you’ll get a […]

There’s a certain magic—annoying or delightful, depending on whom you ask—to hearing those three piano notes and instantly picturing the old McDonald’s arches. Jingles aren’t just catchy tunes; they’re business weapons, designed to sneak into your memory and refuse to leave. Yet, for most people outside the advertising world, how these earworms come together is […]

You think you know jingles. Everybody does—at least until they step into a soundproofed booth at a midtown Manhattan agency and realize the difference between what you hum in the shower and what makes a brand stick for decades. In the world of advertising, a jingle isn’t just a tune. It’s an economic lever, a […]

When Spotify Ads Sound Like (And Work) Take a walk through any European supermarket chain—say, Edeka in Germany—and you’ll overhear familiar melodic phrases piped between announcements. In a recent campaign for their store-brand yogurts (), Edeka’s creative team revived a classic four-note jingle from the early 2000s. The brief was pragmatic: cut through ambient noise […]

The Truth About Jingles Jingles are supposed to be dead. That’s the line I’ve heard at industry panels in New York and, oddly enough, echoed by creative directors in Amsterdam meeting rooms. The musical earworms that once dominated TV and radio ads have been declared passé every few years—yet somehow, they never quite vanish. Instead, […]

It should have died out years ago—at least, that’s what some in the advertising world whispered after the dot-com crash. But like a pop hook that refuses to fade, the jingle has thrived on reinvention. While digital agencies in London rolled their eyes at the mere mention of a sung phone number circa , small-town […]

Somewhere in Manila, a grandmother hums the four-note McDonald’s jingle while stirring her morning coffee. In Berlin, an ad agency debates whether to localize a famously catchy insurance tune or keep the original melody for that universal jolt of recognition. And in suburban Dallas, kids belt out “I’m Lovin’ It” on the playground—kids who barely […]