Comes from the days of radio. When all advertising had to be audio, a good way to get people to remember your product was to have a catchy short tune associated with it, often mentioning the product or company's name. This is even common with phone numbers for their services.
While not quite as common as they used to be, jingles work, so they will probably be around as long as we have commercials. They can even become quite popular and be released as a single. Some well-known jingles have been around literally for decades, periodically having their instrumentation and vocals updated to sound more modern.
Sometime an agency will expend money rather than talent and use an existing song.
Examples:
Advertising- Commodore 64 had a couple.
- The distinctive song used in the United States to advertise Mister Clean cleaning products has been around for about half a century, having been written in 1958.
- "Chock Full o' Nuts is a heavenly coffee..."
- This particular jingle dates back all the way to the heyday of radio; as of late Spring 2007, they were running a contest for customer-created "modernizations".
- Oscar Mayer has two: "I Wish I Was an Oscar Mayer Wiener" and "My Bologna Has a First Name."
- One of the longest-running jingles on British TV was for Fairy Liquid, a washing-up detergent, first heard in the late 1950s and used for well over three decades.
- R. White's Lemonade ran a single commercial, featuring the Secret Lemonade Drinker song, for almost 20 years.
- The very first commercial jingle was General Mills' "Have You Tried Wheaties?" in 1926.
- Another Dr. Pepper jingle: "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" This was famous enough to be parodied by SCTV and Remington Steele, Ask a Ninja, and VeggieTales in one of their "Silly Songs".
- Hitachi's "Hitachi No Ki"
(which is still used today, Japan only).
- "We love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet..."
- Transformers: Generation 1 had a ton of different jingles done up for its toy commercials, tying into the product being advertised. Most of these were simply modified versions of the theme songs of the corresponding cartoon with different lyrics. But would eventually delve off into their own thing starting in 1987. The same applies to its sister line G.I. Joe.
Alternate Reality Games
- Omega Mart: "O-O-Oh-Omega Mart, you have no idea what's in-store for you!" is sung from time to time while you are inside. The last line is quite literal, as you are inside an Eldritch Location.
Audio Plays
- Stan Freberg took this to a logical extreme with Omaha!, a parody of Oklahoma! for Butter-Nut Coffee, that ended up turning into a six minute mini-musical released as a novelty record.
Comic Books
- The Tintin adventure Land of Black Gold has "Boum!" by Charles Trenet repurposed as a jingle for a breakdown assistance company, with lyrics about what to do when your car goes boom. Thompson and Thomson start singing along to it, and then their car mysteriously explodes.
Fan Works
- Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: Calvin quotes the famous McDonald's jingle at one point in "Eggs for Calvin!".
Films — Live-Action
- In A Face in the Crowd, Lonesome Rhodes creates a jingle for Vitajex. Its first verse runs:
Oh, Vitajex whatcha doin' to me!
Oh, Vitajex whatcha doin' to me!
You fill me full of oomph and ecstasy.
Literature
- The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel) has the Mrs. Carillon's Pomato Soup jingle, set to the tune of "On Wisconsin." Leon/Noel hates the jingle so much that the tune causes him to have a fatal accident.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "The Land That Time Forgot". Kinga Forrester and Max introduce the Mesozoic Ranch Dino BBQ sauce and various dishes and after each little bit, a jingle starts to play. However, when Max remembers he left the Alliosarus cage unlocked and it got out, the jingle gains a mind of its own and mocks the two.
Jingle: Never should have tampered in God's domain! Moon 14!
Kinga: Yeah, yeah. We're in serious danger. We don't need a jingle right now.
Jingle: Jingle's self-aware now and saying what he wants to! Movie Sign!
Musicians
- Anna Russell's "A Practical Banana Promotion" included not only "Eta Banana," a parody of the Chiquita jingle, but also "Alas, What Should I Do," which sounds like just a rather mushy ballad when played the first time, but with subliminal advertising supposedly included. The song is repeated to reveal many contemporary (1950s) commercial jingles and slogans.
- An early part of Barry Manilow's career was helping major corporations sell you stuff. He even incorporated them into a medley for his '70s stage show and Barry Manilow Live album.
- "Join the Pepsi people, feelin' free"
- "The original soft drink, Dr. Pepper"
- "I am stuck on Band-Aid"
- "Grab a barrel of fun (Kentucky Fried Chicken)"
- "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there". Apparently, singing the jingle in State Farm commercials can make State Farm representatives materialize into the area.
- "You deserve a break today (at McDonald's)" Barry Manilow did not actually write this jingle, but it was popular enough for him to include it in the aforementioned medley, thus causing the confusion regarding his authorship.
- McDonalds' current jingle: "Buh-dah-buh-bah-bah, I'm lovin' it!" Taken from a Justin Timberlake song.
- More than a few musicians have made a living doing jingles either as a jumping-off point or as a career onto itself - Barry Manilow (as noted above) and Paul Anka regularly wrote commercial jingles between their biggest hits; Richard Marx started out doing jingles for Peter Pan brand peanut butter when he was a child, and Survivor's second lead singer Jimi Jamison cut radio jingles for Memphis-based jingle company Pepper-Tanner between 1979 and 1983 before joining the band.
Radio
- Most countdown shows, including American Top 40, its sister show American Country Countdown, and Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40, use jingles identifying the show for seguing into and from commercials. AT40 and ACC have additional jingles to identify which position a song is on that particular week's show.
- The sponsors of Our Miss Brooks had some pretty catchy ones:
- "Brush your teeth with Colgate/Colgate dental cream/It cleans your breath (what a toothpaste)/While it cleans your teeth."
- "Dream girl, dream girl/Beautiful Luster Cream girl/You owe your crowning glory to/A Luster Cream shampoo." (This one was set to the tune of "Toyland" from Babes in Toyland.)
- Taken to an extreme by radio jingle company JAM Creative Productions with the aptly named "The JAM Song", highlighting many of the radio stations and shows (including American Top 40, the BBC, and VH1) sung for circa 1985, ending with a jingle for the fictional "Zorp Furble, Andromeda". Ironically, this song would also be used as jingle in and of itself on Sirius XM's 60s channel.
- JAM, along with RCA Records, would turn the opening bridge to Starship's "We Built This City" into a makeshift jingle for several radio stations, many of them already featuring jingles and IDs by the former. While this exhibits the skill of the jingle singers being able to match the vocal tone of the song near flawlessly; it also goes to show just how corporate the song itself ended up being labeled as down the line as people thought Starship themselves did these intros, and not the jingle company.
- Radio station jingles tend to date quickly as a result of general changes in musical trends. But they can also be evocative of places and times (as can be heard on oldies stations, with several such as Sirius's dedicated decade channels using period accurate packages for authenticity). BBC Radio Two's retrospective shows presented by forty-year veterans like Johnny Walker and Tony Blackburn are an opportunity to dust down and revive equally old jingles. On one level they sound ridiculously cheesy and 1960's/1970's, but for people who were around to hear them first time out, they are surprisingly evocative. In fact, one of the selling points for Radio 1's 50th anniversary was the use of many of their JAM-commissioned 1980s and early 1990s jingles played throughout, with an added "Vintage" shout at the end of them except for one jingle, which was actually resung to include it.
Theater
- The Pajama Game has the cast sing a jingle for Sleep-Tite pajamas.
Theme Parks
- MarineLand in Niagara Falls, Canada might be the only theme park to have a jingle, but they started using it in the early 90's and are still using it in some capacity in the 2010's. It usually has the same tune, with slightly different lyrics depending on what attraction they're advertising, but the "chorus" is always "Everyone loves MarineLand!" In the 90's, this catchy as-all-heck jingle combined with its status as a Repeating Ad in northeast Canada and the US means most Millennials who lived in that area could probably finish the entire jingle if you went "There's a place I know in Ontario..."
Western Animation
- In the Arthur Christmas Special Arthur's Perfect Christmas, D.W. Read really wants the toy Tina the Talking Tabby, a talking plush cat toy, having repeatedly heard its advertising jingle. Arthur, however, hates hearing said jingle, saying that it gives him a headache. The jingle goes as follows: "What's always at your feet and is really, really sweet? It's Tina the Talking Tabby! Just scratch behind her ears and this is what you'll hear: "I'm Tina the Talking Tabby!" Oh, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina the Talking Tabby..." Later, Arthur traverses a toy store at the mall and is forced to endure the chorus of "Oh, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina the Talking Tabby..." seven-and-a-half times before finally escaping.
- Family Guy would parody the practice of radio jingles in "Mother Tucker", by having Dumbass DJs Weenie and the Butt, and later on Brian and Stewie when they host their own raido show on the same station, abuse them to no end.
- The Magic School Bus: In "Goes Cellular", Ms. Frizzle struggles to remember the words to a jingle about a snack called Seaweedies at first.
- Metalocalypse's first episode features the band Dethklok performing a concert consisting of a single death metal coffee jingle.
- 1961 Looney Tunes cartoon "Nelly's Folly" has a parody. Nelly the singing giraffe's first gig in America involves recording a jingle for indigestion medicine to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".
- Phineas and Ferb with Doofensmirtz Evil Incorporated!
- The Simpsons has the "Canyonero" jingle, sung by Hank Williams, Jr.
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