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Dan Cullen-Shute: people love a jingle, so why don’t we in adland?

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By Dan Cullen-Shute, Worldwide CEO

July 2, 2021 | 7 min read

Creature founder Dan Cullen-Shute’s first in a monthly column series asks: ‘Why do we keep making ads for the wrong people?’ And, more importantly, if we know people bloody love a jingle, why don’t we make more of them?

Moonpig

Moonpig’s return of the jingle has been welcomed by Dan

I was at the cinema the other day, watching a terrible film with Chris Rock in it, when I overheard a really interesting conversation between two feisty gen Z types in the row behind me.

“I really loved that ad for gen-Z fave Brand X. I thought it was fearless and, more importantly, ferocious,” said one young member of that brand’s core demographic.

“Me too!” said his similarly-backgrounded and thus easily-bracketed chum. “Only I thought it was more visionary and brutal than fearless and ferocious. It was definitely brave, though: and if there’s one thing that really drives my purchase decisions, it’s bravery in comms.”

I’m sure they talked more, but they were on skateboards, and quickly left this ageing Xennial for dead.

Except, of course, they didn’t, because none of that ever happened, as should have been obvious from the moment I mentioned a terrible Chris Rock film. As if Chris Rock has ever made a bad film.

So, no. These people didn’t exist. I made them up to ask a fairly fundamental question about the advertising industry, and who we’re making ads for. Because more and more it feels like we’re making them for ourselves, rather than for real people.

And at the risk of sounding like a starch-collared traditionalist, I think what real people think is probably quite important when it comes to working out whether we’re all actually any good at our jobs. Sure, pencils are great, but ultimately if real people don’t think or behave differently as a result of the stuff we’re pumping out into the world, we don’t really get to call this a job, or an industry.

And amazingly – and somewhat serendipitously – the lovely people at The Drum have allowed me to write a monthly thing on just that. The ads (or bits of ads) that we don’t talk about enough. That don’t necessarily make it on to awards shortlists, but lodge themselves firmly in the hearts (and minds) of the people we hope will buy things (or sign up to things, or stop/start doing things) because of them.

The people that, if they’re honest, would probably feel a pretty strong affinity with my five-year-old, Stan, who once screamed ‘Daddy! Stop making adverts!’ at me from the living room because they were getting in the way of Paw Patrol, and making his life distinctively worse; but people who will still always have a favorite ad and, more often than not, it will be Carling Black Label.

These are the people who matter. The people who will – or won’t – actually buy the stuff we’re being paid to advertise. The people who will – or won’t – change their behavior the way we’re hoping they will. They don’t sit on awards juries, they can’t give you a pay rise, and they’re probably not going to stop going to McDonald’s, no matter how many Lions the putrid patty picks up (update: it was loads).

Truth is, they don’t really like ads. Because real people, as a general rule, don’t really like ads.

I tell you what they do love, though: they bloody love jingles.

And jingles work. A study from consumer neuroscience research company Neuro-Insight tells us that ads that make active use of music are 14% more efficient. There are studies that show that ad-audio can be almost 70% more memorable than the visuals. Jake Sanders, at the Audio Content Lab, wrote a brilliantly forensic piece on the art and science of the jingle: if you ever need convincing of their value, that’s a good place to start.

But here’s the thing. You don’t need convincing. You already know.

You love drinking lemonade, secretly. You know that Autoglass both repairs and replaces. You know what to do if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit. You knew about Vitalite before you knew about Desmond Dekker. You’ve shaken, you’ve vac’d, and you’ve welcomed the return of the freshness. You know you can’t get better than a certain type of fitter. If you were in Oxfordshire in the late 90s, you know you need to call 0800 221155 for Coldseal Windows, even if you never actually needed any windows in Oxfordshire in the late 90s. You know that two fingers of fudge is precisely twice as much as is needed to give your kids a treat. And one last time for the ‘savage’ crew at the back, with apologies to His Royal Mouldiness, when it comes to burgers, the vast majority of you are well and truly lovin’ it.

But for some reason, we don’t like making them. We’d grown up with them, and then once we were in charge we stopped making them. We were Charlie Bucket, and we’d closed down the chocolate waterfall and installed a massive lettuce field. Maybe they weren’t cool enough. Maybe our eternal, raging insecurity had driven us to a place where advertising needed to be more complicated than making incredibly catchy things that people really liked and that stuck in their heads. Fuck, we rebranded them as ‘sonic mnemonics’ so we didn’t feel silly talking about them, and it still wasn’t enough to make them cool enough to make. They weren’t fierce enough. They weren’t fearless enough. They just weren’t brave enough.

Fortunately, though, there are signs that the tide may be turning. When we pitched for Moonpig, ‘you don’t have to keep the jingle’ was on the brief, and of course we kept the jingle, because we’re not idiots. Kolbusz and crew have just done brilliant jingley stuff with Diet Coke. McDonald’s invested a ton of media cash in lodging a jingle in all of our heads. Gio Compario won’t go-io away. We buy any car bum bum. And I tell you what, I really am sodding loving it.

Because I want to make work that real people can’t help but care about, and I want to make ads that sell stuff. And if that means we get to write a catchy little song as part of the creative process, then, as those skateboarding Zers might have said had they existed, I am very much here for this content.

Dan Cullen-Shute is chief executive and founder of Creature of London. He tweets at @creature_dan

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