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So there's this song from your youth. Whenever you listen to it, it brings back a whole lot of good memories, and you end up going through the rest of your day with a smile.

What better tune to use to advertise a product?

Advertising is all about appealing to emotion to make a sale, and few things hold more unalloyed positive emotion than a favorite song. It's not surprising that the advertising industry very quickly seized upon the idea of buying the rights to a song and using it in an ad. The basic argument is that the good feelings the viewer has for the song will be transferred at least in part to the product, making a new customer or reinforcing an existing one.

As virtually everyone will tell you, it doesn't always work. But that doesn't keep the agencies from trying again and again.

Repurposed Pop Songs come in several varieties:

• Played straight. Usually the most expensive option. The agency bought the rights to the specific recording that everyone knows. It's used almost untouched except possibly for a bit of editing to make it fit the length of the commercial, or to get right away to the "good bits" (i.e., the part that has relevance to the commercial's pitch).
• Cover version. The agency didn't buy (or couldn't afford) the rights to the actual recording, so instead they acquired the right to use the song itself and did their own version. Sometimes it's made as close to the original as possible; sometimes it's wildly different.
• Product-specific lyrics. An extension of the "Cover Version". The song's lyrics are rewritten to extol the virtues of the product. This can have the biggest backlash if potential customers feel the original song is somehow "cheapened" or "ruined", so this treatment is often reserved for older or more obscure music.

An agency with an especially low budget (or high concept) might also do any of the above with a song from the public domain, up to and including nursery rhymes. This has much the same effect, but with fewer lawyers involved.

A song can also be instantly repurposed if an advertiser buys the rights before it's even released. In such cases the commercial use hits the airwaves at the same time as the original song, or sometimes before, and effectively turns it into a Celebrity Endorsement.

Repurposing a pop song can have a Broken Aesop effect if the message of the song is subtler than you'd get by listening to the loudest parts of the lyrics. For example, there is a movement to make Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" the official state song of New Jersey, despite the fact that it's about how terrible it is to live in New Jersey and how much the songwriter wanted to leave. (See Isnt It Ironic.) Seth Stevenson has written two articles for Slate about this.

Contrast with Top Ten Jingle.

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Examples:

• The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" used for Sunkist orange soda.
  • And in Australia, used as the advertising jingle for The Good Guys ("come in and see the / good good good / guuuuuys!")
    • The Good Guys apparently proved, if you stick with the same product (or in this case, store) specific lyrics for long enough, it will eventually work.
• Sheryl Crow's "Every Day Is A Winding Road" for the Subaru Impreza.
• Microsoft may as well hold the record for Completely Missing The Point:
  • The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" for Microsoft Windows 95. (Note the Broken Aesop variant here; the next line to the song, not appearing in the commercial itself, is "You make a grown man cry." Another line not used is "I can't compete", which some snarkier types have found quite amusing in light of Microsoft's apparent monopolistic ambitions, coupled with notorious quality control problems (especially in the area of security).
  • Other commercials have used the Beatles' "Getting Better" with another Broken Aesop (the next line is "can't get much worse"),
  • The portion of Mozart's "Requiem" that talks about the souls of the damned.
  • Also, a viral ad for Microsoft's Origami platfrom contained Regina Spektor's "Us", omitting the line "We're living in a den of thieves".
  • Averted when Bad Religion refused to license 21 Century (Digital Boy) because IT WAS ABOUT A KID WHO IS TOO DEPENDENT ON TECHNOLOGY TO PROPERLY FUNCTION AS A HUMAN.
  • They also averted Completely Missing The Point with their recent use of the very awesome Devotchka's How it Ends for Gears of War 2. Averted because not only is the song obscure, but it is very appropriate to the theme of the ad. This troper was very impressed when he heard the opening refrain start playing during the ad, and considers it a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for advertising due to the song being great, appropriate and a very cool band getting some publicity.
• In late Spring 2006, Hampton Inns ran a commercial featuring a rewrite of "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady.
• Shocking Blue's "Venus" for Gilette's Venus razors.
• The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" for the New Volkswagen Beetle commercials.
• Trio's "Da Da Da" for the Volkswagen Golf.
• In 2001, progressive rock fans were surprised to recognize a fragment of Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" used in a Hyundai ad.
• At some point in the 1960s, McDonald's applied product-specific lyrics to the old gospel tune "Down By The Riverside": "McDonald's is your kind of place..."
• In 1984, Elton John released the single "Sad Songs (Say So Much)" and simultaneously licensed it in a product-specific form to hawk Sasson Jeans by way of the Mondegreen "Sasson (Says So Much)". Worse yet, the video for the song and the commercial were all but identical except for length and that one line.
• In 1989, Pepsi-Cola paid $5 million to use Madonna's single "Like A Prayer" in a commercial, but the soft drink company chickened out after protests by religious groups in the wake of the song's video release.
• Glad advertised its plastic wrap for a couple of years using Duke Ellington Billy Strayhorn's "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" rewritten to "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Cling)".
• More recently (2007), Grolsch beer has licensed "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" for use in its ads for a lager sold in beugel bottles that have a swing-top cap.
• A non-commercial version of the Broken Aesop effect can be found in the "Kidz Bop" CDs. These take songs that are popular on the radio and re-record them with children doing the lyrics; presumably because some studio executive feared that Avril Lavigne may have been too hard-edged for children on her own. However, the actual content of said lyrics is almost entirely unchanged, resulting in songs about sex, drugs, suicide, and misogyny (among other things) being marketed toward kids. Chris Rywalt has pointed this out.
• The Dandy Warhol's song Bohemian Like You was used for a Pontiac car commercial. The first line makes sense, "you got a great car", but fans of the group were singing the next line, "yeh, what's wrong with it today".
• For years, Chevrolet used Bob Seger's "Like A Rock" for its line of trucks. It recently switched to John Mellencamp's "Our Country" (despite Mellencamp's criticism of Seger for "selling out"). And, after years of it seeming a natural fit, Chevy has picked up "American Pie" — or part of the chorus, at least — for its car ads.
• A current set of Wendy's commercials use the Violent Femmes song "Blister in the Sun". That's right. They are selling hamburgers with a song about masturbation. Hungry?
  • Remember, "Do What Tastes Right!"
• A positively painful Broken Aesop from years ago: "The City of New Orleans", about the death of the railroad industry, being used as a car commercial.
  • As a railroad fan, this troper doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
• "Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop is a rather harsh, cynical song about drug abuse and selling ones' soul to the music industry. So naturally, it's been used as a jingle by everything from cruise lines to banks. Do the advertisers even listen to these songs before using them?
• According to an Urban Legend that circulated in the mid to late 1980s, the re-election campaign for Ronald Reagan had originally wanted John Cougar Mellencamp's 'Pink Houses' as a campaign theme, apparently unaware of the actual meaning of the song. The response from Mellencamp — who is known for his radical politics (some versions of the legend even claim he is a Wobblie) — was supposedly rather colorful. Regardless of how much or how little truth there is to the UL, it reflects the way advertising campaigns often pick theme songs based on the tone and a few well-known lines without considering the actual message of the song as a whole. Another legend reputes that Reagan had also considered using Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" — a song about selling your soul to the Devil.
  • According to another legend, the Reagan campaign wanted to use Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.", despite it having a line that says "Sent me off to Vietnam | To go and kill the yellow man".
• In 2006 Garnier Fructis began using "Diamonds and Guns" by the Transplants in their ads. Because a song with the lyrics "Heroin, heroin, its all gone, Smoked it all up, and now you got none" immediately makes one think "shampoo!"
• Similar to the Reagan examples, the YMCA and U.S. Navy considered using the Village People's "Y.M.C.A." and "In The Navy", respectively, but caught on to the fact that the songs celebrated homosexuality before they actually started using them.
• General Electric's short-lived ad campaign promoting coal usage used "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford, apparently oblivious to the fact that the song is about wage slavery.
• Viagra's rework of Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas" into "Viva Viagra". Elvis Presley and Viagra.
  • "Viva Las Vegas" means "Long Live Las Vegas" (though it likely could be translated further). So "Viva Viagra" means "long live Viagra." Pfizer knows what it's doing.
• A current Pontiac ad campaign uses a cover version of Badfinger's "Come and Get It" - a parody of materialism written for the film The Magic Christian — to sell luxury sports cars.
  • That alone would be bad enough, but this troper's seen the movie, and one of the early episodes has the Eccentric Millionaire protagonist presenting to his car company's board of directors the concept for an absurdly huge luxury car. Its reason for being is essentially to show off how wealthy, powerful, and British its owner is.
• Craig David's "What's Your Flava" — a booty-call referring to the ladies as candy and ice-cream flavors — used to sell Popeye's fried chicken, of all things.
• Didijin and Minelli, two Venezuelan jeans companies, used a lot of covers of popular songs for their TV commercials, with lyrics changed to talk about how good their jeans looked.
• Target is using "Hello Goodbye" in its ads — and they carefully changed the spelling to put on the screen "Hello Goodbuy."
  • Only the chorus and the "hey la"s. Any more, and we would still get hints of what this song is really about: the failure to connect. Target isn't trying to be touchy-feely, but you can only go so far...
• There are the infamous Nike ads using "Revolution."
• And there are the "All You Need Is Luvs" ads, which ought to be infamous Killed With Fire.
• This.
• The Buzzcocks' "What Do I Get?" was, weirdly enough, used in a Toyota SUV commercial. By reducing the song to its chorus of "what do I get/oh oh, what do I get" (the answer presumably being extra cup holders and plenty of cargo space), it omitted the song's whole unrequited-love theme, not to mention the fatalistic closing lyrics:
  What do I get
  Nothing that's nice
  What do I get
  nothing at all at all at all at all at all at all at all
  'cos I don't get you.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" being used to sell Wrangler jeans. They only used the first two lyrics (about waving the flag, being red white and blue), ignoring the rest of the song, which is about how politicians got their children out of Vietnam. Intentional in this case; Saul Zaentz, the producer who owns most of CCR's catalogue and who has been engaged in a feud with John Fogarty for some years (he once sued Fogarty for plagiarizing himself, in that his solo songs sounded too much like Credence tunes,) sold the song to Wrangler to get Fogarty's goat.
• The NFL advertised the competitive nature of their sport by using Edwin Starr's "War" to promote the league. However, they were careful about it in that they simply repeated the "War" portion of the song while stopping short of the "What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" portion.
• A recent cell phone commercial has Meatloaf singing Paradise by the Dashboard Light with different, cell-phone related, lyrics. This on its own is peculiar, considering the Anti Love Song nature of the song itself. The fact that he's singing it to his son...
• Most shocking example, for this troper: Hearing the hook for Of Montreal's "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)" rewritten for an Outback Steakhouse commercial ("Let's get Outback tonight"). Convincingly, too — it made it sound like their quirky indie hit had always been a commercial jingle.
  • You mean, that song isn't called "Let's Go Outback Tonight"?
• In this strip from Dinosaur Comics, T-rex opines on product-specific lyrics.
• In a weird example, Venezuelan folk singer and composer Simón Díaz (the old man who composed Caballo Viejo) is openly opposed to the use of his famous songs (not even in covers) in commercials. Instead, he offers to compose and sing songs specially suited for the campaign or the product. Not your typical jingle, I can assure you.
• They Might Be Giants sort of took this route when they produced several short jingles for Dunkin Donuts. This troper doesn't recall if they ever actually mentioned what was being advertised (the announcer - John Goodman - would fill that in after the little song). But the songs were pretty funny, so it at least fit their style.
  • In a more straight use of this trope, commercials for the second Geometry Wars game used a cover version of "Particle Man" to promote it.
• If ever there was a song begging to be used in a cell phone commercial, it's the Who's Goin' Mobile. To this editor's knowledge it has not in fact been used in one yet, but it's only a matter of time. A 2008 ad for Fox's Seattle affiliate uses it to promote a service that sends you news headlines by text message, which is pretty close.
• In 1968, Jim Morrison vetoed a request from Buick, which the other members of the Doors approved of, to use the song "Light My Fire" in a commercial. In a bit of self-parody over the affray, when Robbie Krieger penned the song "Touch Me" later that year, he ended it with the four-note Sting from an Ajax commercial popular at the time, and the final lyrics are Ajax's slogan "Stronger Than Dirt".
• Samsung recently used the song "Signal in the Sky" in an ad for one of their phones. This makes the ad painfully hard to take seriously if you know the song, as it's about The Powerpuff Girls.
• Toyota rewrote Mambo No.5 to describe all the improvements to the new Corolla. Personally think the song's better this way.
• Applebee's once rewrote "Bread and Butter" to feature products it had on special. This was shortly before the chain changed hands...
• Tom Waits, who was notoriously anti-commercial in his early years, was saddled with a combination of the second and third variety of Repurposed Pop Song when a company completely rewrote the lyrics to his song "Step Right Up" (itself a parody of hucksterish commercialism) to sell their product. Waits refused to endorse the (re-written) song, the product, or consent to the use of the melody. So the company hired a convincing sound-a-like to sing the repurposed lyrics. Waits heard the jingle on the radio and spent some time calling everyone he knew in order to refute he had anything to do with it. All this to sell...Cheetos.
  • A later use of a Waits song (in a Levi's ad) was made even more painful because the sound alike hired was Screamin' Jay Hawkins, one of Waits's biggest influences.
• German internet service provider T-Online has set a huge TV commercial campaign to the tune of the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black". The commercials highlight the wonderful advantages of having the world at your fingertips via broadband internet. The song highlights.. a horrible case of severe depression.
• A Pringles commercial which ran up until just a few years ago had a repurposed version of "I Want Candy", replacing "Candy" with "Pringles".
• Repurposed Country of 1 & 3 variety. Alan Jackson rewrote the Mercury Blues about buying, instead, a Ford Truck. Ironies abound.
• Some car company, possibly Kia, uses Walkin' on the Sun to advertise summer sales on some of their models. Because that song is well known for its' relevance to car salesmen.
• Crystal Light single-serving packets used a rather poor remake of "Shake Your Booty," which instead sung "Shake Your Bottle."
• In Australia, Kellogg's Sultana Bran repurposed Heard It On The Grape Vine to It's sultanas from the grape vine/That makes Sultana Bran taste so fine!
• Apparently a hemorrhoid treatment product (troper thinks it's Preparation H) pulled a Too Soon by trying to buy the rights to Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire" shortly after he died. Naturally, no one was amused.
• George Harrison's "Taxman" was used by H&R Block, despite being a virulent anti-tax song.
• Kahlua? Nice stuff, but "Brown Sugar" did not help in selling it, since the song was about white slave owners having sex with black slave women. Classy.
• This troper knows couples who've played "My Happiness" by Powderfinger at their weddings.
• Don't even remember what the commercial was for, but it involved coffee and Rocky The Eye of the Tiger: "He knows that one day he just may beCOOOOOOME - supervisor!"
  • That was a Starbucks double shot of espresso drink. While most product-specific lyrics are poorly done, this one not only didn't mention the product in the song, but it was so hilarious that you couldn't help put enjoy it. At least, this troper believes that that was the intended effect.
• In Australia, "Bend Me, Shake Me" by Amen Corner is used to advertise - of all things - Bega cheese sticks.
• The Six Flags commercials featuring "Mr. Six" used the instrumental (though not the lyrics, since they couldn't get the rights) from "We Like to Party" by the Vengaboys.
• The Hamptons hotels has a new commercial featuring part of "With a Little Help From My Friends" - The line "get high with a little help from my friends" is not included.
• Kids from the 80's remember the song "So Happy Together" less by the Turtles and more by whoever was trying to sell us Golden Grahams.
• Velveeta, advertising specifically their "shells and cheese" recipe repurposed The Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song" into "It's Not the Same Old Side." Their jingles often repurpose other well known tunes.
  • They went a little further than usual, though, by getting a reasonable facsimile of The Four Tops to appear and perform the jingle onscreen.
• This troper recently saw a car ad - no idea what for, she got Distracted By The Shiny - that took the countdown sequence from Space Oddity, which is often taken to be about drugs or how tech isn't what it was promised, to illustrate the thrilling technology involved with starting the car up.

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