Now is the time for jingles
Back in September, I witnessed something that jogged some much-lodged information out of my skull.
Dancing influencers Austin J. and Marideth Batchelor, who go by the name @cost_and_mayor, had taken on the straight-faced and viral phenomenon of “using the first sound [we] hear when [we] open TikTok.” While that could just as easily be the latest single from BTS, it oftentimes is something completely random and hewn from repressed auditory memories—like the old O’Reilly Auto Parts jingle from my childhood. The couple kicked, popped and swerved as a remix of the song played on. The first comment dared the duo to dance to the Empire Today jingle, another old school advertising moment that’s gone the way of the dodo bird.
@cost_and_mayor obliged picking a trap remix of the home improvement advertisement to slide and stomp to.
The sounds used to create the videos are not new, nor were they uploaded by the brands themselves. However, together, they have over 190,000 uses—with videos incorporating the O’Reilly remix going all the way back to TikTok’s halcyon days of 2018, which by TikTok standards might as well be a century ago. That the sound is still in use two years later is a testament to its perfect viral formula—flexibility, familiarity and an inherently senseless nature. Twerking and alternators would not seem to be a likely pairing and yet through the O’Reilly sound use, here are the two together.
Spirit Halloween got its own unauthorized viral moment after musician and content creator Nick Lutsko composed a jingle for the chain in preparation for spooky season. The original tweet has over 10.6K retweets and several news sources, including AV Club, picked up on the song, begging the store to adopt it for following seasons. Unlikely, given that it paints a certain billionaire as a demon, but perhaps that’s on brand for the chain store that sells ghouls, goblins and various other frights.
And yet, if you asked a modern marketer about jingles, they would unilaterally say they’re dead. In fact, The Atlantic even ran a piece in 2016 stating as much, citing a report that describes the dying off of these audio cues.
Original jingles had fallen cataclysmically over the the years, making up 11% of 30-second ads in 1998 and 2% in 2011. (It’s also worth noting that the volume of 30-second ads had also fallen during that time period due to costs and emergent media.)
But in 2020, TikTok is a veritable jingle factory with 50 million daily U.S. users and 2 billion downloads. It’s a platform that runs on the same music-based, ear-worm dependent framework that had voters in 1960 singing, “Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy for me.” Capped at 60 seconds (though many videos run at the shorter 15- or 30-second increments), TikTok videos fit the old-school advertising format in a hyper-digital ecosystem. And while brands have largely relied on pop music’s upper echelon to do the heavy lifting of their ads in recent years (think Lady Gaga over a Honda spot), I’d argue that the era of jingles is back—and brands would be smart to create audio cues that fit and elevate their brand. What’s even better is that this work is pandemic-proof in a way that few ad elements are right now. Hire some musicians remotely (which is great for the creative industry who is struggling with the lack of live events) and let them rip.
A word of caution: the TikTok audience is hostile to being marketed to and anything too manufactured will be deemed sus (suspicious, for those not indoctrinated by Among Us), hijacked and turned into meme fodder. In fact, most of the For You page, TikTok’s hub for content, relies on the ironic implementation of hashtags on videos that could not be further from whatever the brand’s intentions were with their social campaigns. Embrace that this probably will be the lifecycle of whatever you put out. Lean into the fun of it and be willing to wrap your arms around the irony. When you’re in on the joke, you’re not the butt of it.
And at the end of the day a banger is a banger, even if it’s about auto parts.