The Commercial Jingles Eating Our Brains

[Live in Phoenix]

List a couple of jingles that you "love," i.e. can't seem to dislodge no matter how many years have passed.

While they're the aural empty-calorie equivalent of candy corn, Smarties, and a box of Cracker Jacks, some commercial jingles will likely outlive me, you, and several apocalypses.

What makes this almost a worthwhile musicological study is that, thanks to different exposures by era and geography, many of us might be permanently stricken with entirely different commercial jingles. (A couple of them even became major pop hits.)

I'm not going to bother ranking these, but I'll list a few and put in bold my nomination of... instead of calling it my favorite jingle, how about the ultimate jingle.

Big Red
https://youtu.be/bCxiuuJVT-8

By Mennen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daG-0KkirDI

Huggies (I'm a Big Kid Now)
https://youtu.be/PEM_LWNNouA

Nabisco *ding*
https://youtu.be/0N8SEUkDfFQ

[Hymie]

List a couple of jingles that you "love," i.e. can't seem to dislodge no matter how many years have passed.

Palisades Amusement Park, from the 60s.

This played all the time on the radio too.

[Hymie]

Crazy Eddie

[mileswide]

Big Red
https://youtu.be/bCxiuuJVT-8

If I squint, I can picture John Denver singing this. I don't know if that's an altogether positive thing but you can't deny its catchiness!

For me, the ultimate jingle has to hit one of the two criteria I've not really given any thought to until now:

- you've not actually seen the original commercial but you know all the words. Thanks to my mum singing it to me as a kid more than any nursery rhyme, this applies to "Toblerone, out on its own" https://bit.ly/331BBPL

- you've barely got a clue what the lyrics are but the melody can keep you awake some nights. From my time in Indonesia, we have the song played over the tannoy on a loop in Indomaret supermarkets https://bit.ly/3248ydc (similarly, Spar in Austria used to have 30 seconds of Da Da Da on a loop but mercifully, only at the entrance/exit)

(A couple of them even became major pop hits.)

The obvious is the Coke advert that was reworked by the New Seekers but also by Oasis with Shakermaker. There was I'm Lovin' It, whose 'ba ba ba ba ba' hook Pusha T claimed to have come up with and the Neptunes produced a remix of it as Justin Timberlake's last single of the Justified cycle no less. The Carpenter's debut single originated from a bank ad, even https://bit.ly/2oxq5wN Anyone know of any other jingles-turned-hits? Not trying to catch LiP out, just curious

[Safetycat]

Greatest jingle from New Zealand is this advert for our only theme park:

[Nick]

Oh! Oh! Oh! O’Reillyyyyyyyyyyy! Auto Parts! BWAOH!!!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pT_p4IQ8dD8

[Sweepstakes Ron]

[Cold Butterfly]

Real ones know that this hitted differently when we were younger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caomY5CAjwI

[Safetycat]

Thought of some more. I feel like jingles went out of fashion here in the 2000's, we didn't get many. Lots of skits. But there's a couple of iconic ones still:

Zinger Burger:

Novus Glass (Show Us Your Crack):

[Live in Phoenix]

Accurate. I was really hoping that was only a jingle on my local radio...

[Live in Phoenix]

These abominations are hard to forget. They oddly seem like a parody of commercials, before that was especially a thing. Foo Fighters did an entire music video like them.

Mentos commercials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zivWsrKQSDU

Foo Fighters - Big Me