By Phoebe Flys.
I’ve had an American carpet cleaner jingle stuck in my head for about three weeks now. This is courtesy of married dancers Cost n’ Mayor, whose shared hobby is choreographing dance routines to TV adverts and jingles. Think the old THX sound effect which deafened everybody in the cinema before a film played, or the anthropomorphic Pixar lamp hopping around. One of these Instagram reels features the pair coming up with a routine to the Stanley Steemer jingle, and my upstairs neighbours now must be very sick of me singing it when I’m cooking, cleaning, brushing my teeth, making tea, the lot (they should be glad that the Evita phase has finished, which had me in a chokehold since attending a recent Rachel Zegler show).
Despite not being quite as performance-worthy, there are some UK jingles which still stick in my head, namely Calgon dishwasher tablets, Just Eat and, despite my attempts to purge it from my mind, Go Compare. However, over the last couple of years, I’ve picked up more and more on a feature of TV ads which might be just as annoying as that moustachioed opera fiasco: the use of 80s pop songs.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love 80s music. It’s quite literally 97% of all the music I listen to, thanks in part to my upbringing and being a corny, cliché-loving sop with a deep-rooted love for saxophone solos. However, every time I hear a strange, pitch-shifted rendition of Spandau Ballet’s Gold or a bizarre parody of Queen’s Flash with some ham-fisted lyrics about floor cleaner, a part of my soul dies. This isn’t me trying to gatekeep an entire decade of music, but is TV advertising so lazy that changing the lyrics to a Queen song to make a CGI dog sing about bleach the best they can do?
It’s very easy to turn into an old man shouting at clouds about this – “back in my day, when pop songs weren’t written by teams of eight songwriters” etc – but it’s obviously not that simple. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, and music is both the most personal and most universal form of emotional expression we have, so by that logic, it makes sense that using songs that people love in advertising would create a positive brand connection. It’s more than just popularity; if that were true, why aren’t we being bombarded with (yet more) Taylor Swift during every ad break?
However, nostalgia as marketing is a double-edged sword. If anything, being constantly bombarded by ads on both TV and the radio which feature the same songs I listen to when I’m commuting, making dinner or dancing only blurs the boundary between my personal association with a song and the intensity with which I’m aware a brand is trying to capitalise on this.
Of course, there are cases when it works brilliantly, the most famous example probably being that Cadbury’s advert. Never met anyone who doesn’t like it. Yes, it’s got a great song in it, but the scene also portrays a situation which your brain registers as totally out of the ordinary, thereby making it more memorable.
The music doesn’t, therefore, have to be the driving factor – I still remember an old Skoda ad where the actors made a car out of cake. Probably my favourite TV ad of all time. The song used in the background is My Favourite Things from the Sound of Music. Did I remember that before I Googled it just now? No, because it’s from 2007 and I was 9, but I remembered the visuals because it was a car made out of cake. That advert could have been set to Paranoid by Black Sabbath and the sole element I would focus on would still be the car made of cake. So yes, using old songs in ads can work, but I reckon Cadbury’s is one good example out of a thousand terrible ones.
My point is, it’s all well and good using a popular song in an advert but exploiting people’s emotional connection to music is equally likely to sour them towards a crappy, shoehorned pun in an autotuned cover of a 40-year-old number one. Case in point: Fiber One chewy bars. Song in question: Total Eclipse of the Heart. Make of it what you will.
Phoebe Flys is a music writer and client manager at Talon Outdoor.
