Sing a song of adverts

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday April 22, 2011

Can a song glue your product to the customer's heart? Is it time to get a jingle?

Like everything in advertising, jingles are a fashion item. In the seventies and eighties you would automatically get a jingle written for your new commercial. By the nineties and noughties they had gone out of fashion and any music used would be a recently past hit song.

Now they have started to come back, though their supporters prefer to call them "short songs". But we are still not at the levels of the past.

"They've made a little bit of a comeback," said Mike Brady, "but still nothing like they used to be." Mike should know. In his time he wrote some of the best of them - I'm lucky I'm with AAMI is still being used, and Up there Cazaly resurfaces every footy season.

"They're particularly prevalent on radio," he continued, "A young man at the footy last night recognised me and started singing every jingle he knew - from Taylors Tree and Stump Removal to Call Call Carpet Call."
This is their secret. Mnemonics - their ability to stick in your mind. Paul Kancachian of Image on Line calls it "sonic branding". His company works mainly through the internet and produces a steady flow of jingles, again especially for radio - and in their case, a lot of regional radio.

"I believe they are coming back," he said. "You don't need to be in the room but as soon as the Bunnings commercial plays on TV, you see the commercial in your mind."

Composer Keith Moore blames the decline in Australian jingles on the loosening of advertising quotas. "There was nothing stopping overseas tracks being run here, but the Americans made sure their musicians stayed protected." He hasn't written a jingle in five years, now concentrating on film and TV music.

Both he and Brady point to lazy advertising creatives who just hunt out music tracks and buy up the rights, "Do you know how much they pay for these tracks? Hundreds of thousands but they don't own the song," says a frustrated Brady.

Warming to a favourite topic, he declared, "I still passionately believe that a product in a song will be remembered for decades." He then rattled off You can't beat a Sao for a snack, You ought to be congratulated, Aeroplane Jelly - as having stuck long after the campaigns finished.

He might have added some of his own like The Pride of the Fleet Will Be You and Hard Yakka. "It's an effective way to embed a product in someone's mind."

Journalist Paul Ryan once spent a boozy session with a handful of friends and picked the top ten Australian TV commercials of all times. Six of them were jingles, like the original VB ad ("Matter of fact I've got it now"), Slip Slop Slap, I like Aeroplane Jelly, Louie the Fly, Vegemite, and Life. Be In It.

You've got to admit, these definitely win the going of "sonic branding". But how much do these commercials cost to make?

All made the point that it depends on how grand the track is. If you want the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra it will cost more than one man on a synthesiser, but they start around $10,000.

Which raises a question that has been nagging my mind for the past few weeks. What on earth does La Mer (the sea) have to do with Adelaide wineries? It's a beautiful song but does it really say "Adelaide"?

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

The times ain't changin'

Melbourne Herald Sun, April 15, 2011

For years now Bob Dylan has not been shy to point out that he never set out to lead any protest movements or become the voice of his generation. He was just a rock 'n' roll singer who drifted into folk and politics because that was where the action was at the time.

The fact that little Robert Zimmerman just happened to write some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century was a by-product of his quest.

This has been happening as long as history. Shakespeare was an actor who wrote plays so that he could get work. He could knock them out and produce them in a few months, making sure he always got a part.

More recently there was another penniless actor, who wrote a script and refused to let anyone else play the lead role. That's how Sylvester Stallone got into the big time with Rocky.

The point is, as Rocky would say, as a working stiff no-one's going to do you any favours. If you want a project to succeed you have to do it yourself.

Business, like so much of our lives, is a mixture of ability, hard work, a sense of direction - and especially good luck.

The luck of meeting the right person at the right time; of being in the right place when an important decision is about to be made; of being touched by the fairy godmother and having the sense to realise it.

That can be the way to riches, like Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. They both worked at Stanford University, California.

Starry-eyed newlyweds, he devised a way to connect the computers in his Computer Science lab with her Business School network. To do it he created a device that controlled the routes taken by packets of data. And the router was born.

A couple of years later the couple left to start their own company, Cisco. Which at last count was worth $40 billion. The Bosacks aren't there any more and there are disputes about the history, but I like the idea that a man invented a multi-billion dollar industry so he could tell his wife what time he'd be home for dinner.

The Nobel Prize is the world's greatest award, but it exists because of a split second when the pendulum of fate could have delivered riches - or death.

Alfred Nobel was a Norwegian chemist trying to find a way to stabilise the notoriously dangerous explosive chemical, nitroglycerine. One day a flask of it was knocked off his bench. Which should have blown him to smithereens. But when it didn't, he searched to find out why.

It turned out that sawdust on the laboratory floor absorbed the chemical and pacified it. After numerous experiments with other agents, dynamite was born and Nobel became one of the richest men of the 19th century.

Fortune's kiss still pecks at random. Less than a decade ago at San Diego, a graduate student called Jamie Link was working on a piece of silicon when it disintegrated into dust. But then she investigated the properties of this dust and found that it could still work as sensors.

Her team at the university, led by Professor Michael Sailor, have developed these into chemical detectors that can warn of hazardous chemicals such as a biological attack, or be injected into the body to detect particular genes or bacteria.

It's an invention where science has not even started to count its possible uses. But around the world thousands of labs are working on it. Before long a whole new industry could be born doing - what we can't even begin to imagine.

So don't be scared of accidents or disasters - take a close look to see if there could be the kiss of fortune behind them.


ray@ebeatty.com