![]() One of advertising’s most powerful tools has fallen by the wayside Jingles have fallen out of favor lately. You don’t hear them very much any more. This is wrong. It’s more than wrong. It’s egregious. In this article, we’re going to show you why jingles are one of the most powerful tools in the advertiser’s kit—and how you can take advantage, to grow your business. Even in today’s “non-jingle” world. One-hit wonders What is a jingle? It’s a short tune, usually with lyrics, employed to make a brand or campaign memorable. Ideally, it’s catchy: an “ear worm” that you can’t get out of your head. We’re not composers, but we’ve worked with lots of talented jingle artists over the years. And we mean talented. In many ways, jingles are even harder to write than hit songs. Since they’re inherently short, there’s no time to build. You need to launch in fast, establish the hook, dig in, repeat if possible, and leave your audience breathless and moved. That’s a tall order for something that may only run, say, ten seconds, and get produced on a less-than-lavish budget. Jingles used to be everywhere. See if you’re old enough to recall some of these classics, based on the hints below:
Admit it. You’re already singing some of those tunes in your head right now. Aren’t you? As we’d mentioned above, writing jingles takes real musical chops. It’s little surprise, then, that some of the most storied songwriters have cut their teeth in the jingle world. Barry Manilow, for example, penned “I’m stuck on Band-Aid” and the “Like a Good Neighbor” jingle for State Farm. Rumor has it that he was paid a flat fee of $500 for that composition. If Mozart were alive today, he’d have gotten his start writing jingles. Guaranteed. Why they work It’s simply astonishing to us that jingles have fallen by the wayside. The so-called creatives helming major agencies these days are anything but. What, after all, is more creative than music? More importantly, from a business standpoint, what can possibly make a more visceral connection to your audience? Telling you that jingles don’t work is like telling a baker that her shop’s aroma doesn’t bring in passers-by. Music is hard-wired within us. It’s with us before we’re born: we each carry our own internal metronome—our heartbeat—all our lives. And a tune with a hook? It’s irresistible. There’s an old truism from the ad world which needs more attention these days: “No one hums the announcer.” Make jingles work for you It’s been said that jingles are “less relevant” these days, because we live in a world of small-screen instant gratification. That’s a lame excuse. If anything, we’re even more open to jingles and their magic, given their minimal bandwidth requirements, and the ubiquity of Facebook videos, websites, satellite radio, and more. AM and FM “terrestrial” radio are still with us, but they’re no longer the only games in down. And while the need for talented composers and singers can never be replaced by computer, the digital tools available to composers these days have truly leveled the playing field for the budget-constrained. So how do you make a jingle work for you? First, you’ve got to have a good foundation upon which to build: a solid grasp of your target audience (do they prefer classical or rap?) and a strategy to reach them. Then reach out—search online, get suggestions from professional groups and web forums—to actual jingle artists, and get the ball rolling. Not all jingles are “jingles.” Think of it: There are jingle elements you can leverage in other applications. A good tagline has a rhythm—and even rhyme—to it (“Amazon: And you’re done.”) A rhyming phone number is easier for your prospects to remember. Incidentally, we’ve produced, on the ad agency side, dozens of jingles over the years, working with ingenious composers, musicians from chart-topping rock groups who sometimes moonlight for their producer friends, and gifted singers who have breathed life into our lyrics. We’re grateful for the experience. Need help getting your mind around that jingle project? Need lyrics written? Have a new jingle you’d like to share with us? Contact us today. This is a topic we’re—excuse the pun—well-versed in.
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![]() It seems anatomically impossible, yet you do it every day The clichés abound: There aren’t enough hours in the day. If only you could clone yourself. A stitch in time saves nine. Okay, scratch that last one. (And what the heck is “nine,” anyway?) Here’s the point: We all need to work as smartly, and efficiently, as possible, in order to get as much done each day, week, minute, as possible. Time is the great equalizer. Someone can have a bigger budget than you, but they can’t have any more time. (In the same way, creativity is the great equalizer, too, in that it’s not budget-dependent. Read more about that in our ode to radio post.) You could argue that a bigger player can hire more people than you, and thus multiply head-count, and thus person-hours. That’s true. But unless each one of those new hires is working at peak efficiency, that’s known as waste. Tried and true Before we get to our provocative “three-handed” topic, let’s consider all of the other tricks you have at your disposal for maximizing time. There are:
The third hand Here’s the best thing about the “three-handed approach” which we’d teased you about since the top of this article: We don’t need to teach it to you. Because you already know it! Yup. Odds are you’ve already employed it a half dozen times today before you read this article. You’ll use it another 20 times before you go to bed tonight. The only thing is, you haven’t realized that you’ve been using it. What’s more, you didn’t think to apply it to boosting your business productivity. We’ve long been fans of low-tech, counterintuitive techniques to boost productivity, and this one ranks near the top of that list. Enough teasing already. Here’s what it is. Quick: You’re carrying your laptop and a cup of coffee to your office. When you get there, the office door is closed. What do you do? Notably, you don’t even think about it. In less time than it takes you to read this sentence, you’ve tucked the laptop under your coffee-carrying arm and secured it tightly against your side, freeing up your other hand to open the office door. Just like that. You didn’t freak. You didn’t cry for help. You didn’t spill your coffee or smash your laptop. You didn’t buy a new table to hold your laptop, or your coffee, while you did this. You didn’t stand there for hours trying to think of a way to surmount this problem. You just did it instinctively, the way you do zillions of physical tasks every day. How many times do you approach your car, or the front door, or a load of dishes, with more stuff than your two hands can handle? Answer: all the time. And what’s even more interesting is that you instinctively solve these problems before the time comes. If you see that that office door is closed from afar, you’ve already got that laptop tucked under your coffee-carrying arm before you arrive. That’s, actually, pretty amazing. Even more amazing is that we take it for granted. Now for the leap: How do you apply this to business productivity? It’s simply a matter of thinking ahead, and keeping this “technique” top-of-mind. It’s also a little bit like cooking: If you’re preparing a meal, and one item requires 15 minutes on the stove top, and another requires an hour in the oven, which one do you start first? Obviously, the oven dish, since it takes the longest, and you can have it underway when the time comes to turn to the stove top. It’s the same thing here. You just need to keep that “third hand of the mind” at work as you go through the day, thinking ahead to which tasks equate to the laptop, the coffee, or the doorknob, as they pertain to our little example. You’ll be surprised to see how easily you can apply this innate and highly-developed skill of yours to juggling complex tasks around the office, and even to maximizing the effectiveness of the productivity tools in our bullet-list above. Need help with any of these tasks? Does your third hand still have you yearning for a fourth? Don’t despair. Contact us today and we’ll help you with that consulting or creative challenge. |
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