This episode was written and produced by Jeanna Isham.

For decades, the jingle was king. But in the last twenty years, jingles have nearly gone extinct. Many brands have now dropped their melodic earworms in favor of spoken word slogans. Today, there’s just one industry where jingles are still as common as ever: insurance. The question is, why? Featuring Jeanna Isham of the Sound in Marketing podcast, audio branding expert Colleen Fahey, and brand manager Sergio Trujillo.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
Brooklyn Burgers by Golden Age Radio
Knock Knock by Sound of Picture
Keep It Movin’ Instrumental by Flyers
Allston Night Owl by Skittle
Sututyroge by Sound of Picture
The Window by Sound of Picture
Primastone by Sound of Picture
Del Verano by Autohacker
Daddy Issues Instrumental by Beleaf

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[clips: American Family Insurance, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide]

Here in America, insurance jingles are everywhere.

[clip: Farmers]

You might be totally sick of them, or you might think they’re actually pretty fun.

[21st Century]

Some of these jingles have been around for over fifty years.

[clip: Nationwide Vintage]

And new ones are still being created today.

[clip: USAA]

Somehow, insurance jingles survived, when other jingles faded away.

[clip: Dr. Pepper 70s]

[Dr Pepper out into music in]

Jeanna: Like many things in advertising, jingles came from the radio.

That's producer and sonic branding expert Jeanna Isham.

In the early 1920s, when commercial radio was first starting out, advertisers were skeptical of this new medium.

For years, the main type of advertising had been print ads in newspapers and magazines. And companies thought, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Jeanna: But a few brands saw an opportunity in this new format, and decided to give it a try.

[music out]

The very first audio commercial came out in 1922. It was an ad for an apartment building in New York called the Hawthorne Court Apartments.

Jeanna: Unfortunately, the original audio is lost, but the ad probably sounded something like this.

[sfx: crackly old radio]

Faux Hawthorne Court Ad: So come live at the dazzling Hawthorne Court apartments, where you'll enjoy state of the art amenities like pilot light stoves, cast iron radiator heating, telephone service, and many more.

Jeanna: Pretty boring, right? It didn't take long for companies to realize how much better ads would be… with music.

[sfx: bar chimes]

Enter Wheaties Cereal. In 1926, Wheaties dropped the mic with this slappin' jingle.

[clip: Wheaties commercial]

I don't know about you, but I could devour a bowl of Wheaties right now.

Jeanna: After that, the jingle just kept getting better. In 1939, Pepsi spiced things up with this jazzy tune.

[clip: Pepsi 1939]

By the 1950s, Americans were watching television. A lot of it. And that gave jingles a whole new world to thrive in.

Jeanna: In 1958, Mr. Clean spruced up our TV screens with this little ditty.

[clip: Mr Clean 1958]

In the swingin’ 60's, Nancy Sinatra gave us this song about RC Cola.

[clip: RC Cola]

Jeanna: By then, the insurance industry was ready for its turn in the spotlight. In the mid sixties, American Family Insurance introduced their iconic melody.

[clip: Early American Family jingle]

With that, the insurance jingle train had left the station. And pretty soon, many other companies hopped on board.

[clip: Metlife, Prudential, Nationwide]

Jeanna: Through the 80's and 90's, the jingles just kept coming.

Eventually, it felt like there was one in almost every commercial.

[Jingle montage]

Jeanna: But then, something strange happened. In the twenty tens, advertisers cut way back on using jingles. Suddenly, many of those melodic earworms were replaced with spoken word slogans.

[clip: Subway, Huggies & KitKat slogans]

But insurance companies were like, “Nah, let’s keep those jingles jinglin'.

[clip: Farmers - We Are Insurance]

But before we can figure out how insurance jingles survived the great jingle massacre, we have to understand why that massacre happened in the first place.

[music in]

Colleen Fahey: The jingle died as commercials got shorter and shorter.

Jeanna: That's Colleen Fahey, co-author of a book called "Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand."

Colleen Fahey: It was great for a 60 second commercial, when you could do verse chorus, verse chorus. It was okay for a 30 second commercial, but not great.

These days, some commercials have gotten really short, thanks to platforms like Spotify and Youtube.

Colleen Fahey: Now that your commercials are 15 seconds and six seconds, and there's so many more mediums, you really can't develop a song the way they used to develop songs.

Jeanna: So if you're a company that wants to keep your ads consistent, you might not invest in making a long, old fashioned jingle. Because it's just not going to fit into these micro ads. You can see that evolution pretty clearly in the State Farm jingle.

[music out]

Colleen Fahey: The State Farm jingle was written by Barry Manilo over 50 years ago. And they have had a lot of success in keeping this music going.

For those of you who don't know, Barry Manilo is a singer songwriter who was huge in the 70s and 80s.

[clip: Barry Manilo - Mandy]

Jeanna: But before he was melting hearts on stage, Barry was working as a jingle writer. In the 1960s, he composed several jingles that would end up becoming classics.

[clip: Stuck On Band-Aid]

But Barry's jingle masterpiece has to be...

[clip: State Farm - Early]

Jeanna: Barry's original composition had several verses, a bridge, and that sweet sticky chorus. But the commercials typically just used the main line from the chorus.

[clip: State Farm 80s]

More recently, State Farm decided to ditch the singing, but keep the melody playing underneath the slogan.

[clip: State Farm Modern]

Jeanna: Sometimes, they'll leave the slogan out entirely, and just play the melody.

[clip: State Farm Melody]

Other times, they'll even chop off the second half, so it's just the first five notes.

[clip: State Farm 5 Notes]

Jeanna: At this point, the sound is really more of a sonic logo than a full on jingle. Without any lyrics, it's closer to something like Intel...

[Intel audio logo]

But that makes it perfect for this digital age of short ads, and sonic logos that are hyper distilled.

[I'm Lovin It, T-Mobile, Switch into music in]

Jeanna: This transformation just proves how brilliant and flexible Barry's original melody was. And no one's as surprised as he is that it's still around.

Barry Manilow: Nobody expected a commercial to last that long. Same thing with Bandaids.

Jeanna: In an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Barry explained that you don't usually get royalties for composing the music and lyrics for a jingle. To get that, you'd have to actually perform on the recording, or appear in the ad.

Barry Manilow: But as a composer, you just get a flat fee. And for that State Farm Insurance commercial, I got $500. And it's been going for 45 years!

[music out]

Jeanna: Shorter ads can help explain why so many companies ditched the jingle, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.

Well before the internet, there was another advertising trend that spelled trouble for the jingle, which was putting real pop songs in commercials.

Jeanna: For decades, almost every pop tune you heard in a commercial was either a cover, or a totally reworked version with branded lyrics.

For instance, in the late 70s, Sunkist redid The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations with lyrics about bubbly orange jubilation.

[clip: Sunkist - Good Vibrations]

Jeanna: But a decade later, Nike pulled away from the cheesy covers, and decided to pony up for the real thing. In an ad for their new Air sneakers, they played The Beatles song Revolution.

[clip: NIke - Revolution]

Jeanna: The ad features both professional and amateur athletes running, training and generally kicking butt wearing Nike shoes.

It turns out, Nike didn't actually get full permission to use the song, and they ended up getting sued.

Jeanna: Still, the campaign was a hit, and it kicked off a new trend in advertising. Pretty soon, popular music was showing up in more and more commercials.

In the early 90s, Chevy proved how rugged it was with Bob Segar's Like a Rock.

[clip: Chevy - Like a Rock]

Jeanna: Songs by The Black Keys have appeared in commercials for Subaru, Cadillac, AT&T, American Express and Victoria's Secret.

[clip: Victoria's Secret - Girl Is On My Mind]

In the late two thousands, the ASPCA pulled at our heartstrings with the help of Sarah McLachlan. They ran a campaign that featured her song Angel, set to slow motion videos of very sad looking animals.

[clip: ASPCA - Angel]

Jeanna: And the trend continues to this day, with both classic and modern songs showing up in all kinds of commercials. Here's a recent Toyota commercial featuring Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill.

[clip: Toyota - Solsbury Hill]

Now of course, licensing hit songs for commercials is expensive. So why did so many brands start doing it? Part of the pressure came directly from the music industry.

Steve Karmen: Music companies that published all the music hired people to start pushing their songs.

Jeanna: Steve Karmen created lots of famous jingles, including the one for Nationwide, which he wrote in 1969.

[clip: Nationwide Vintage]

Jeanna: Steve also wrote a book called "Who Killed the Jingle." In an interview with CUNY TV, he explained how companies use popular music to entice us.

Steve Karmen: There is thi s belief out there that if you associate your product with a hit song, that then you're, you're hip, you're with it.

[music in]

If a song becomes popular, it’s because a lot of people have positive feelings about it. And if you’re a company, you want to borrow that feeling and attach it to your product.

So, if the song is exciting, the product is exciting. If the song is romantic, then the product is romantic.

Jeanna: And that strategy can be really effective. According to a Nielsen study, popular songs can increase a viewer's attention, emotion and memory of a commercial by twenty percent.

With all of this in mind, it's no wonder why brands started choosing pop songs over branded jingles.

Jeanna: In Who Killed the Jingle, Steve writes and I quote, “Jingles sounded old-fashioned to a younger audience, and the young audience is what the advertisers want. A jingle wasn’t subtle. It tried too hard—the opposite of cool."

[music out]

But using pop songs in commercials can backfire. Because sometimes, those positive feelings end up going to the artist, rather than the brand.

Jeanna: So if you see a credit card commercial with a Katy Perry song in it, your first thought might not be, "I should sign up for that credit card." It might be, "Katie’s the best! I should check out her new album."

[clip: CitiBank - Roar]

Another issue is that people bring their own associations to the music. So If someone has negative feelings about a song, this strategy doesn’t work at all.

Jeanna: For instance, maybe you're not crazy about My Milkshake, by Kelis. Or maybe you do like it, but you don’t think the undertone is a great fit for a paper towel commercial.

[clip: Bounty - My Milkshake]

Jeanna: Or maybe you think the lyrics to Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones have aged really poorly. If so, you probably wouldn't be very impressed with this Pepsi commercial, where the song is sung by a squeaky, soda-loving fly.

[clip: Pepsi - Brown Sugar]

Colleen Fahey: Popular music is something that many people use, but we've seen research that shows that branded music is much more effective in drawing attention.

[music in]

One benefit of original branded music is that the brand owns the music rights forever. But pop songs can usually only be licensed for a few years.

Colleen Fahey: Then they move on to someone else's licensed music that happens to be popular and they don't build equity.

Jeanna: When you buy a house or invest in the stock market, you're building equity. Ideally, those investments will increase in value over time. The same is true for building a brand. You want people's memories and feelings about your brand to strengthen as the years go by.

Colleen Fahey: The most important thing about your sonic brand is it's building a very important type of equity that will be there forever.

A jingle that lasts years or even decades is a great way to do that. When I'm in my seventies, I probably won't remember which pop song Apple used in their commercials thirty years ago. But I can almost guarantee that I'll remember the KitKat jingle, even if I haven't heard it in decades.

[music out into Kitkat melody as memory]

Jeanna: But that doesn't mean there's no room for famous musicians in ad campaigns. Instead of just throwing a hit song onto their commercials, some companies pay celebrities to speak or sing their jingles.

That way, the message stays focused on the brand, while the company still gets some of that celebrity star power.

Jeanna: Nationwide is especially good at this. Recently, they ran a campaign where each commercial featured a new branded song, sung by a different performer.

But all of these songs ended in Steve Karmen's iconic melody. Here’s a version by singer songwriter Tori Kelly.

[clip: Nationwide - Tori Kelly]

Jeanna: Another version featured Leslie Odom Jr., who played Aaron Burr in Hamilton.

[clip: Nationwide - Leslie Odom Jr.]

Here’s a third version by Jill Scott.

[clip: Nationwide - Jill Scott]

Jeanna: While a fourth version featured Gabriella Wilson, also known as HER.

[clip: Nationwide - H.E.R.]

Statefarm did something similar, but instead of a new song, it ended up being a return to the original.

Jeanna: Around twenty ten, Statefarm commissioned Weezer to sing their jingle. The band asked if there were any recordings of the song that hadn't been cut down for a commercial. But all Statefarm could find was Barry Manilo's original sheet music and lyrics. It seemed like no one had ever actually recorded the entire thing. So Weezer went into the studio, and recorded the full 3 minute song.

Here’s a clip:

[clip: Weezer - Like a Good Neighbor]

[music in]

Statefarm and Nationwide have been using the same jingles for over half a century. They have a lot of brand recognition. And for any up and coming insurance companies, it’s a tough act to follow. If they want to compete with these jingle juggernauts, they have to make something that’s super catchy, and flexible enough to last for years.

That's coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

For over fifty years, most commercials were between thirty and sixty seconds long. This made them a natural fit for extended jingles with full verses, and a catchy chorus.

Jeanna: But as ads went digital, they got shorter and shorter.

[music out]

At the same time, many companies dropped their melodic jingles in favor of spoken word slogans. So something like this...

[clip: Bounty jingle]

Turned into…

[clip: Bounty slogan]

Jeanna: Some brands leaned into popular music, like this Gatorade commercial featuring Welcome to the Jungle.

[clip: Gatorade - Welcome to the Jungle]

But by and large, insurance companies kept using their trusty ol’ jingles.

Jeanna: That's not to say they didn't change with the times. Some insurance companies started speaking their slogan, while the jingle played in the background.

[clip: American Family Whistle]

While others hired big name celebrities to sing their jingles. For example, Nationwide built a whole campaign around Peyton Manning. In one commercial, he can't get their jingle out of his head.

[clip: Nationwide - Peyton Humming]

Jeanna: In another, Peyton coaches Brad Paisley on how to sing the jingle.

[clip: Nationwide - Peyton & Brad]

By the way Peyton, if you're listening, Steve Karmen would appreciate a call. Here he is again on CUNY TV.

Steve Karmen: Do you know that I have never received a phone call from Peyton Manning saying, "Steve, I love your song. Thanks for writing that great song for me." Nothing! Not a postcard, a letter, a fax, nothing!

Jeanna: So why did insurance companies cling so tightly to their jingles?

[music in]

I don't even know if I would even consciously think about an insurance company, if there wasn't a jingle or some sort of shtick, like Geico.

[clip: GEICO Gecko]

When it comes to insurance, to me, it's very much who's top of mind.

Jeanna: Yeah, you know, when you think about Coca-Cola, they have amazing sonic branding, they have great music, but they also have packaging and they have taste, and there's a touch, the glass, they actually trademarked the shape of it because it fits in your hand. So they have so many more ways that they can become top of mind than just an insurance company that you don't fully understand.

Colleen Fahey: People aren't really sure what happens to their money, where it goes, it's very vague.

Sonic branding needs to be solving a problem. Insurance jingles in general are very much trying to solve the problem of, "This is not a memorable service for anyone." It's something that people make one decision, maybe one out of the course of five to ten years. And that's it. Then you forget about it.

[music out]

Jeanna: Depending on the situation, insurance is either painfully boring, or deadly serious.

Because the whole point of insurance is to help out in bad situations.

Jeanna I think the reason that we don't think about them is because it's associated with negative vibes, negative energy, like, our car just broke down, or our house just caught on fire. It's not happy memories that you think about for insurance. And so by attributing music, which is such a strong, powerful connection, putting a light spin on insurance before you have to deal with insurance. I think they're kind of like beating us to the punch.

Insurance King actually made a jingle about that exact idea.

[The Insurance King into music in]

Jeanna: Most insurance commercials go out of their way to give you a feeling of comfort and support. Think about the slogans. Like a good neighbor, Statefarm is there. Nationwide is on your side. Are you in good hands?

When you watch these ads, you're supposed to forget about co-pays and deductibles and premiums… Instead, you're supposed to feel like choosing this company means they're personally gonna have your back.

Jeanna: One way to do that is through a reassuring jingle. Another is through a warm, friendly mascot... whether it's the Geico gecko, Flo from Progressive, or Jake from Statefarm.

Colleen Fahey: Because this is such a non-tangible service, personalization helps. So bringing a human or even a duck

[clip: Aflac duck]

Colleen Fahey: Into the picture can help it become more concrete and tangible.

[music out]

Most jingles are aimed at a broad, general audience. But occasionally, a jingle is designed to get the attention of a particular group.

Jeanna: USAA is an insurance company that's open to military members and their families. So when they decided to make their own jingle, that was their target audience.

[music in]

Colleen Fahey: The USAA jingle came about by some research that USAA had done.

Jeanna: Colleen is also the US Managing Director for a sonic branding agency called Sixième Son.

Colleen Fahey: They uncovered that their awareness was extremely low in the key growth market of the military people.

Jeanna: So USAA asked Colleen's team to craft a sonic brand that would help them connect with this group.

Sergio Trujillo: I'm not even quite sure we knew a jingle would come from it.

Jeanna: That's Sergio Trujillo, the former Lead Brand Strategy Manager at USAA.

Sergio Trujillo: We just knew that there was an opportunity to utilize audio and music in a more intentional way. During that time, I had seen examples by brands such as Visa…

[clip: Visa Logo]

Sergio Trujillo: …and MasterCard…

[clip: Mastercard logo]

Sergio Trujillo:…and I really turned to those as inspiration.

Jeanna: Their goal was to unify the sound of their advertising, both now and in the future.

Sergio Trujillo: So it was through our discussions with Sixième Son that we really peeled back the onion, and identified the various places where we could build out a cohesive universe of sounds and music.

[music out]

Jeanna: The first thing they had to figure out was what they wanted these sounds to communicate.

Colleen Fahey: There were several things they wished we would capture. One was this humanity, warmth and camaraderie. Then another bucket was sort of their integrity, and rigor, and another was their authenticity and groundedness.

Jeanna: In one of their brainstorms, someone brought up the idea of a call and response chant, like you might hear at a soccer game.

[sfx: soccer chant]

Colleen Fahey: And the room got so excited, they began to talk about memories they had of their time in the military when they felt like they were doing some horrible job, cleaning the barracks, but they were all chanting together, with this call and response.

[sfx: military chant]

Colleen Fahey: And you could just feel the whole mood of the room lifted, and that told us, "Aha! This is something that harks back to their military experience. And is a good part of their military experience, and a great thing to attach a brand to."

Jeanna: They knew they didn't want the jingle to be too smooth or melodic.

Colleen Fahey: They didn't wanna be polished. They didn't wanna be professional singers, precise musicians. The Creative Director would say, "Put more mud on those boots!" And that gave us a lot of guidance too, because that made us make it sort of real and rugged.

Jeanna: With these ideas in mind, Colleen's team crafted the jingle. Since it's so short, it could easily be called a sonic logo.

[clip: USAA]

Next, they wove that logo into something called the Sonic DNA.

[clip: USAA Sonic DNA in]

Colleen Fahey: So the sonic DNA helps establish the rhythm, the energy, the instrumentation, the melody, and many, many pieces of music will be built out of that. It's kind of like a sonic style guide. And of course, the logo is a motif that runs through it and becomes the ending and then goes off to live its own life.

[USAA Sonic DNA out]

Jeanna: With the sonic style guide in place, they made unique versions for different types of ads.

Colleen Fahey: What we decided to do was create many variations on our own theme so that it could be used for celebrations…

[clip: USAA Celebratory]

Colleen Fahey: It could be used for sports…

[clip: USAA Sports]

Colleen Fahey: It could be jazzy…

[clip: USAA Jazz]

Jeanna: One version was very patriotic…

[clip: USAA Patriotic]

Colleen Fahey: What we tried to do was give them a huge toolkit that they could use to always bring people back into this world of the USAA comradery.

Jeanna: Here are a few examples of that sonic branding at work.

[clip: USAA Commercial Examples]

Jeanna: Like other insurance companies, they sometimes leave out the vocals, and just play the melody beneath their slogan.

[clip: 2 USAA Slogans]

Jeanna: They even use their sonic branding in their on-hold music.

[clip: USAA hold music in]

Sergio Trujillo: So here we are more than, three or four years later, and it's still being used across a variety of different TV commercials, digital radio, terrestrial radio, Pandora, et cetera.

[hold music out into music in]

Jeanna: Clearly, writing a good insurance jingle means checking a lot of boxes. It should be catchy, unique, and reassuring.

It should tell the listener something about the company itself, and what it stands for.

Jeanna: And it should be flexible enough to work in a wide variety of ads.

The upshot is, when it's done well, that jingle can form the basis of an entire sonic brand. It can be a throughline that ties all of a company's advertising together, for years to come.

Jeanna: I wonder if all of a sudden insurance agencies, the next ones that came out, they decided, "You know what? We're not doing this. We're going to skip the silly jingle, and we're gonna focus on just our product." Would they be successful? Would we go, "Well, they don't have a jingle. They don't have a sound, but Nationwide's got a sound. Why don't they have a sound?"

I think nowadays, there's so many different jingles and shticks for insurance, that in order to be successful as an insurance company, if you didn't have a jingle, that would have to be your marketing campaign. It would be like, "We're not spending tons of money on a jingle to get you to notice us. We pass those savings onto you. Here's no jingle."

[music out]

Jeanna: It turns out, several brands have started doing exactly that. For instance, the company NJM put out a commercial about a man who just can't escape the jingle of a fictional insurance brand called Top Insurance.

[clip: NJM Commercial]

Jeanna: Triple A took the “meta jingle commercial” a step further.

[AAA Commercial into music resumes]

Maybe someday insurance jingles will fade away. But for now, it seems like they’re here to stay.

Jeanna: Well, these jingles and the lighthearted tone, it's been going since the sixties. So if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

[music out into music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by Jeanna Isham. And Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter and Brandon Pratt, with original music by Wesley Slover.

Thanks to our guests, Colleen Fahey and Sergio Trujillo. To learn more about these topics, check out Colleen's book Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand. You can also subscribe to Jeanna’s podcast, which is called Sound in Marketing. It's available right here in your podcast player.

I’m Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

[music out]