Jingles are a dirty trick. That’s what David Ogilvy supposedly muttered in the mid-1960s, halfway through a pitch meeting for Maxwell House coffee. He wasn’t wrong. In an industry obsessed with rational persuasion and big-budget spectacle, the five-second melody is a scalpel—sharp enough to slice through clutter when multimillion-dollar campaigns fall flat. But how do […]

In a cramped post-production suite above a nail salon in Midtown Manhattan, I watched last December as a creative director at MassiveMusic quietly grimaced at the first playback of a new insurance campaign spot. The jingle—bright, chirpy, undeniably catchy—wasn’t bad, exactly. But it wasn’t going to win any awards either. “Feels like ,” she muttered. […]

An Earworm at Work: Bunnings Warehouse and Beyond Start with Australia’s retail scene. Bunnings Warehouse, the country’s biggest hardware chain, embedded itself in public consciousness with its relentlessly simple jingle—a chirpy melody paired with the line “Lowest prices are just the beginning.” Launched back in , this tune didn’t just sell hammers; it built what […]

When Silence Is Louder Than Song Ask any creative director at a major ad agency in London or Berlin why their biggest client hasn’t commissioned a jingle in years. The answer isn’t technical. It’s psychological. Post-, marketers started doubting if the era of the mass-market earworm was over. They’d point to YouTube pre-rolls and TikTok […]

The phrase “We Are Farmers, bum-ba-dum-bum-bum-bum-bum” isn’t just an advertising relic – it’s still echoing in the elevator pitches and Slack channels of creative agencies across North America. For all the talk about TikTok virality, algorithmic targeting, or influencer micro-content, there’s a stubborn fact: a jingle can still make or break a brand memory. And […]

Jingles have always been the secret weapon of advertising—the kind that gets under your skin, sometimes for years. But here’s a contradiction worth unpacking: as brands pour more money into influencer campaigns and AI-driven targeting, why are so many creative directors quietly fighting to keep the jingle alive? It’s not nostalgia. It’s a battle for […]

The idea that the advertising jingle would survive past the 2010s felt almost absurd to most industry insiders. By the mid-2010s, with Spotify and YouTube giving users skip buttons and algorithmic targeting making audio hooks seem quaint, jingles had been relegated to kitschy nostalgia. Yet, as unfolds, industry veterans are facing a reality that would […]

It’s easy to declare the advertising jingle dead. The cultural weight of “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” feels distant in a world of TikTok snippets and algorithmically generated playlists. Yet, something strange keeps happening: brands and agencies quietly keep coming back for more. Across Sydney’s creative scene, there are still production houses […]

There’s a war going on outside, and it’s being fought in your ears. Not with heavy artillery or billboards, but with six seconds of melody, wedged between the soundtracks of our scrolling lives. The jingle—dismissed by some as a relic from the days when radio ruled—is more alive than anyone wants to admit. But its […]

It’s early , and somewhere inside a soundproofed suite at Wieden+Kennedy London, a creative director is staring at a whiteboard. On it: half-finished lyrics, a looping melody, and three product names circled in red marker. The team is debating whether to commission an original jingle for their latest campaign—a debate that would have seemed almost […]