Jingles

When advertisements rhymed and chimed.

On February 9, viewers of Super Bowl LIX (or as I like to call it, licks) will be treated, or subjected, to advertisements from 50 brands. If you have other plans on Sunday¹, or prefer your commercials football-free, you can watch them all here. I ripped through most of them, and here’s what I noticed: Senescent celebrities, callow TikTok “creators,” appeals to sentiment, and AI pitches. Here’s what was missing: jingles.

Yes, the Super Bowl commercials feature lavish music and scripted jokes. But jingles — catchy bits of verse set to infectious melodies — have all but disappeared from adland. A lone jingle-meister, State Farm — the insurance company whose tuneful “Like a good neighbor / State Farm is there” has persisted for more than half a century — pulled its ads out of this year’s Super Bowl in order to focus on the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires.²

So in tribute to all the jingles of yesteryear, I thought I’d haul out something I published about ad jingles in 2013. I’ve trimmed here and there, revised here and there, added or updated links, and incorporated some visuals. Otherwise, though, little has changed; if anything, my article is more elegiac than ever.

Hum along with me now:

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For about four decades in the 20th century, rhyme ruled American advertising. The period between the 1940s and the 1970s was the golden age of ad jingles and rhyming slogans, of “Oh thank heaven for 7-Eleven,” “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” and “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce/ Special orders don't upset us.” Today, ads rarely incorporate verse — and when they do appear, it’s often awkwardly executed, derivative, or barely recognizable as rhyme. What happened?

Here’s a more basic question: Why was rhyme ever popular in ads?

“Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory,” writes the English poet and journalist James Fenton. Along with regular rhythm, rhyme also leads to “enhanced aesthetic appreciation,” according to a study published in 2013. The first utterances we hear (and speak) as infants are likely to be rhymes; later we use rhyme for learning (“A pint’s a pound/the world around”) and relaxation (song lyrics that don’t rhyme are rare³).

That combination — memorability, pleasure, and familiarity — makes rhyme a happy fit for advertisers, whose goal, of course, is to instill desire. By the late 19th century, advertisers were using poetic verses to sell products in print formats. One of the earliest, notes the University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting, was written by California Gold Rush poet and short-story writer Bret Harte in 1876 for Sapolio brand soap:

“One Sabbath morn, as heavenward
White Mountain tourists slowly spurred
On every rock, to their dismay,
They read that legend, always
SAPOLIO”

By the turn of the 20th century, commercial verses were being set to music:

Brands looking to advertise their products would commission songwriters to come up with catchy tunes in the popular styles of the period, such as the 1903 waltz “Under the Anheuser Bush”, by Harry von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling, or the 1905 song “In My Merry Oldsmobile”, written by Vincent P. Bryan and Gus Edwards (Taylor 2012, 72-73). While intended to sell, these early examples were complete songs in their own right, with more subtle product references than later jingles would have.

The big shift occurred in the 1920s with the advent of commercial radio, which emphasized hearing over reading; in effect, it took us back to our preliterate roots, when spoken poetry was the primary form of literary expression.

On Christmas Eve 1925, the first ad jingle — “Try Wheaties,” sung a cappella by the Wheaties Quartet — was broadcast on Minneapolis station WCCO.

At the time, strict regulations prohibited direct advertising during prime time — talk about a golden age of radio! — but jingles that mentioned a product’s name without a sales pitch were acceptable. By the 1940s and 1950s the airwaves were filled with rhyming jingles for soda (“Pepsi-Cola hits the spot/Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot”), toothpaste (“You’ll wonder where the yellow went/When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”), and cigarettes (“Winston tastes good/like a cigarette should” — notorious for its “ungrammaticality,” as I explained in a 2010 column).

Verse was literally in the air, and successful radio jingles were carried over to print — and, later, television — advertising.

(Why are they called jingles? “Because they ring a bell in your head,” an ad man once quipped. The verb to jingle comes from Middle English ginglen, onomatopoeia for the light, tinkling sound made by lighter metal objects such as sleigh bells. Since the 1640s the noun jingle has meant “a catchy array of words in prose or verse; it acquired the sense of “a song in an advertisement” around 1930.)

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It didn’t hurt that in midcentury America “popular” and “poetry” were regarded as compatible. Schoolchildren were encouraged to memorize and recite rhyming poems (“The Cremation of Sam McGee,” “Casey at the Bat”). Serious magazines published the sophisticated light verse of Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley. Even kid-focused Mad Magazine published poems, some of which were collected in a 1975 anthology, For Better or Verse.

In keeping with this democratic trend, companies frequently sponsored jingle and slogan contests. The prizes could be substantial. In her 2001 memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, Terry Ryan recalled that her mother, an indefatigable “contester” who supported her large family by submitting poems and ad copy to advertisers, won a shopping spree at a local supermarket with a verse that began “Wide selections, priced to please her;/Scads of Seabrook’s in their freezer.”

The very popularity of rhyming ads and slogans probably contributed to their demise. By the time Orson Welles intoned “We will sell no wine before its time” — a slant or “imperfect” rhyme — for the Paul Masson brand in the late 1970s, Americans were experiencing verse fatigue. Within a few years, rhyming jingles had all but evaporated. Instead of jingles we began to hear licensed or commissioned pop songs — soundtracks that establish a mood rather than urge a purchase.

Nike’s licensing of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” in 1987, is often cited as a turning point; since then, ads have featured the familiar songs of Johnny Cash (for Choice Hotels), M.C. Hammer (Purell), Robert Palmer (Applebee’s), the Lovin’ Spoonful (Kohl’s), and many other artists. (More examples here.) Commissioned original music is rarer, and it often takes the lazy way out by spoofing a familiar childhood tune: see, for example, Stephin Merritt’s morose reworking of “The Wheels on the Bus,” for Volvo.⁴

Verse has largely disappeared from print advertising, too, along with a lot of the rest of the writing. Visual imagery now dominates ads, and the only words you see may be the company logo. There’s little demand for excellent light verse (only Calvin Trillin comes to mind as an accomplished contemporary practitioner), and very little study outside of graduate programs of verse forms and techniques. When a copywriter ventures an attempt, the results are often discouraging. A 2013 full-page ad for the Ford C-MAX hybrid minivan featured a quatrain that made me wince:

When you’re carrying a lot of weight,
C-MAX has a nice little trait,
you see, C-MAX helps load your freight,
with its foot-activated liftgate.

The commas shouldn’t be there. The sloppy meter forces you to stress the wrong syllable in “C-MAX,” “activated,” and “liftgate.” “You see” is gratuitous, inserted only to pad the rhythm. And juxtaposing “see” and “C” is simply amateurish.

(The prose part of the copy isn't much better: “Say hi to the 5-passenger EPA-estimated 47 city MPG C-MAX HYBRID.” That’s quite the modifier pile-up!)

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We may never see the return of the traditional ad jingle, but we have seen its contemporary counterpart: rap-inflected ad verse. Rap, which has dominated popular music for 40 years, has its own technical conventions, including slant rhyme (“happen” can rhyme with “napkins”) and flexible meter (which can include “unnatural” stress, as in the C-MAX ad’s “liftGATE”). From MC Hammer for Taco Bell (1989) to LL Cool J for Gatorade (2004) and Eminem for Beats for Dre (2013), rap ads combine relentless rhythm, a recognizable celebrity, and striking visuals.

Toyota had a lot of fun with this trend when it created its 2013 spoofy white-suburban-parents rap for the “Swagger Wagon,” which incorporates internal rhyme (“I got the pride in my ride”), slant rhyme (parent/swearin’, sales/skills), hypnotic repetition, and direct address (“No, seriously, honey, where are the kids?”).

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If you really miss old-school rhyme, take comfort in this: the Roto-Rooter jingle — “Call Roto-Rooter, that’s the name/And away go troubles down the drain” — is still playing after 71 years on the airwaves, making it the oldest continuously used ad jingle in history. Old but not “pure”: name/drain is a slant rhyme.

Watch a Roto-Rooter medley:

Bonus tracks:

History of the Super Bowl commercial. A 30-second spot costs $7 million. (The Street)

I Watched All the Super Bowl Commercials. Here Are the Best Ones So Far. (Delish)

It’s Been 40 Years Since “1984,” and I Still Haven’t Bought an Apple Product. (My 2024 story for Medium about the blockbuster commercial that aired just once, during Super Bowl XVIII; gift link)

1. Me? I’m going to Berkeley to see the Twyla Tharp dance company’s 60th-anniversary performance — Twyla Tharp LX, if you like.

2. Fun fact: There are a lot more lyrics to that commercial, and they were all written by Barry Manilow.

3. One classic exception is “Moonlight in Vermont” (1944; written in haiku form!).

4. For Super Bowl LIX, Shaboozey sings “It’s a Wonderful World” in a Nerds candy commercial and Häagen-Dazs borrows Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’,” to name just two game-day commercials with familiar music tracks.