According to this Seattle Times article, jingles are over and done with.
Ad jingles are on the wane, overtaken by pleasingly familiar commercial standbys like the Stones’ “Start Me Up,” which Microsoft enlisted to sell Windows. Advertisers say they’re totally out, gone the way of Atari 2600s, indoor smoking and Libyan bellicosity.
Advertisers and pop culture historians blame — or is it credit? — cultural and technological changes for the demise of the jingle, which seems to live on only in the bowels of local advertising for bedding warehouses and car dealerships.
A jingle campaign today would be expensive and high risk because jingles require head-banging repetition, says Larry Londre, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. In the past, national advertisers could guarantee jingle saturation by buying time on the big three TV networks, whereas now they would have to include technology’s new media platforms: cable, the Internet, satellite radio.
“You need the old media environment to make it work,” Bob Garfield, editor-at-large for Advertising Age magazine, says.
