Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Sometimes I think we go through our lives trying to impress an invisible audience called “everyone.”

“What will everyone think?”

Invisible would be bad enough, but I think “everyone” might also be imaginary. Emil Cioran was probably right when he said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”

“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”

We buy cars, clothes, furniture and art to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.

Is it possible that everyone isn’t watching? Is there a chance that everyone is under the mistaken impression that is it we who are watching them?

It’s funny when you think about it.

And it’s also how I make my living. I’m an ad writer.

When you have a strong attraction to a brand, it’s because that brand stands for something you believe in. You see in that brand a reflection of yourself as you like to believe you are. What authors do you read? Do you subscribe to any magazines? What type of architecture attracts you? Do you listen to music? What kind?

Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.

Does it bother you for me to say these things? Please don’t let it. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about an “else” named Everyone.

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

The hidden mechanisms of explosive ad writing are rarely seen because most people don’t want to believe they need identity reinforcement and affirmation. They are offended by the very suggestion of it. But the truth is that most of us need these things deeply.

I met a man a year ago who paid me to give him advice for a day. We spent that day talking about several companies he owned. At the end of the day he asked if I might be willing to write ads for these companies and I – for a variety of reasons – declined. A few months later I received a long email from him telling me about a troubled company he had acquired that had lost two-thirds of all its customers, a loss of about 20 million dollars in annual revenues. I wrote back and told him that I would write ads for this troubled company, but not for the others.

The first ad I wrote shares a bittersweet, true story from the childhood of the man who hired me. It’s about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old and it’s why he bought the troubled company. Upon receiving the ad, he called six different people and read it to them. Each of them got tears in their eyes.

Not because the story was about him, but because it was about them, too. The story in the ad is about a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure. Even you.

I have every confidence that the ad campaign will recover those lost customers and lift this once-troubled company into a sunlit sky.

To write an explosive explanatory ad, you must choose:

1. How to end.
2. Where to begin.
3. What to leave out.

You must include specific details in your ad or it won’t have credibility: “a year ago… two thirds… 20 million dollars… 10 years old.”

But you must also leave something out of your ad or it won’t trigger curiosity: “…a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure.”

You really want to read that ad now, don’t you?

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.

I’ve met people who say absolute truth does not exist, that all truth is subjective and exists like beauty in the eye of the beholder.

I believe those people are sadly misguided.

Absolute truth absolutely exists. If you don’t believe me, just ask me again because I am absolutely certain.

But we’re not talking about absolute truth today.
We’re talking about his very beautiful sister, personal truth.

Can you share your perceptions with someone else?
Can you cause them to feel a little of what you feel?
Can you make them see in their mind what you see in yours?
Do you have a contagious sort of confidence?
Congratulations. You are an artist, a persuader.

Every artist is a salesman and every salesman is an artist.*

The left hemispheres of our brains are wired for empirical, scientific, objective reality: absolute truth.

The right hemispheres of our brains are sponges thirsty for impressions, symbols, metaphors, connections and patterns. These patterns can be auditory, visual or behavioral.

Auditory patterns are called music.
Visual patterns are called art.
Behavioral patterns are called personality.
The more complex the pattern, the deeper the beauty.

The goal of every artist – no matter their field of art – is to give us a glimpse of personal truth, the beautiful sister of absolute truth.

Personal Truth is also known as Perceptual Reality and like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, she lives in your heart and mind. Jory MacKay calls her “referential meaning.”

Embodied meaning is intrinsic—it’s inherently inside something and doesn’t rely on our emotions or experiences to have meaning. Referential meaning is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words, we create meaning through what we think of when we see it.”

A persuasive message – an advertisement – can be crafted from the absolute truth of facts or the personal truth of values and the self-image we see reflected in them.

I once knew an attorney who put it this way:

When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the truth is on your side, argue the truth. When the law is on your side, argue the law. When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

In other words, when the facts are not on your side, appeal to self image, personal truth, subjective reality: values.

Last week, Indiana Beagle asked for your opinion of six different images of himself. You could give each logo from one to five stars and add comments, if you wished. What strong opinions you have about him! Reading those comments, Indy was delighted. I’ve known Indiana Beagle for many years but I had never before seen him prance.

Each of the six logos had its advocates who proclaimed it to be the obvious only choice, and each of the six had its detractors who said it was a criminal mischaracterization.

Each of you sees Indy differently because each of you brings a different set of values to the party. Indy is merely a trigger. “Referential meaning is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words, we create meaning through what we think of when we see it.”

John Steinbeck said the same thing was true in storytelling.

A story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure.”

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.  

This week, we’re hitting the high notes—literally. Mick, Chris, and Ryan unpack the toe-tapping world of jingles and why they still matter in modern advertising. Are they brand goldmines or sonic fluff?

Tune in to find out.

Episode Highlights

• Music hacks the brain—it’s emotion, memory, and branding in one tidy tune.
• Jingles only work when they’re baked into your brand strategy, not slapped on top.
• Not every brand needs one—some brands sing, others shout. Know the difference.
• Repetition is king—even the best jingle needs airtime to become unforgettable.

A jingle’s not just a jingle. It’s a stealth missile into consumer memory. So if you’re ready to make your brand sing, this episode hits all the right notes.

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Welcome to Advertising in America, the podcast, where we meet entrepreneurs, where they're at in their marketing and bust through their bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots hosted by Wizards, Ryan Chute, and the Royal Torbay twins, where we put the fun in marketing fundamentals. Are you ready to dominate your marketplace?

Are you ready for outrageous advertising? Do you want to become a household name brought to you by Wizard of Ads for Services?

Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

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Ryan: On today's episode of Advertising in America, we explore the art and science of jingles. Should every business have a jingle? What makes for a good jingle? And how should I get a jingle done, If I'm going to get one? And just like a great jingle, if it's annoying, it's likely working. Here's Mick.

Mick: Well, I write jingles for a living, so this could come off as self-serving. And I do make a jingle for nearly every client I have, but perhaps I should sidetrack to what do I mean by a jingle and what others might mean. Back in the 70s, jingles were very popular. 30 or 60 second songs that completely stood alone. Fun fact, We've Only Just Begun was actually written as a wedding-themed TV commercial for the Crocker National Bank in California. They were promoting first mortgages to newly married couples. It was written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, and then, of course, they took the lines about the bank out and they wrote a second verse and gave it to the carpenters and made millions of dollars with it!

Again! But that kind of jingle, the full sing 60-second song, yeah, I don't do that, and that's because the full sing jingle has very limited usefulness. You can't run a full sing jingle for 10 years. When I write a jingle, I sing one very short, memorable line that connects the client's brand to either an important point I'm trying to make or a call to action like the client's web address.

Short, sweet, memorable. And then I structure the song to put that sing in more than one place over the 60 or 32nd music bed. I want to be able to put the sing at the beginning or at the end or just near the end or, but not quite the end. I want options and that's what copywriters always one. And since I'm a copywriter, I write the sort of jingle that a copywriter wants to work with.

I create the campaign and the jingle at the same time so they work together. We never crowbar one into the other. Now, do I write jingles for other partners or clients that I don't write copy for? Yes, but I still work with the copywriter on the shape of the campaign so the jingle can accomplish the goals that we're all trying to achieve.

A jingle is not just a sing, remember, it's also an original music bed, which means that that music will never be heard for another company or brand. Radio stations all have music libraries, and you might hear the same music tracker under your commercial as you might hear for another company one town over. And if you have your own jingle, that music is yours and yours alone. And with my jingles, anyway, you own it forever. 

So, music is the best way to connect an idea to a memory. It's not just a coincidence that we teach children the alphabet the way that we do. Think about it. Do you think children really want to memorize 26 symbols, the building blocks of language? Well, no way. But if you put it to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, now they're going to remember it forever. And if I ask you to recite the alphabet without singing, you can do it, but you'll be singing it in your head, and I'll know that you're doing it when you go H I J K L M N O. You big cheater! You're freaking singing it in your head! 

We remember songs so easily, from years ago, involuntarily. I know every word and every note of Love Shack, and I don't like Love Shack. We're in the message delivery and retention business, and we want our message to be retained, even if the listener doesn't really want to retain it.

Involuntary recall is what we're after, and that's where music comes in. Allows us to slip past the gatekeeper, and that's why you can remember a jingle from a business in your hometown when you were a child. It's locked in forever. Only music can do that. The client pays for the first few times you hear it, but every time you sing it to yourself, costs my client nothing. So yeah, everybody needs a jingle.

Ryan: Mick, you may hate Love Shack, but you clearly love snacks. I just need to say it. I have never met anyone on this planet, that knows more about the art and science of jingles than you, man. Getting a jingle done by you is like getting Ridley Scott to direct a television ad. Chris, it's time to put your little brother in his place. 

Chris: I like a good jingle as much as the next guy. Mick will tell you all the scientific brain game ways that they work on you. They stick in your memory, they become part of the cultural zeitgeist, and he's not wrong per se. But I will reject any statement that says, here's a hard and fast rule about what you should do to succeed. And that includes jingles. 

There is no system. There are no formulas. There's no trick to it. There are no shortcuts. Building a brand involves doing what's best for that specific brand at that specific time. Figuring that out is hard. It takes time. It takes talent. And then it takes more time. You know who makes a great case for all the ways jingles work on consumers? Jingle writers. 

The same way the guy who sells you billboards will tell you all the things that are great about out-of-home advertising. And the same way the sales guy from the radio station will tell you how high their ratings are and how many people listen to the station and every day when they drive to work. It's one of the traps that I reference all the time. If all you sell is hammers. All your problems start to look like a nail. Ask a jeweller how to fix things up with your girlfriend. Do you think he's gonna suggest taking her out for a nice dinner? Or do you think he's gonna suggest a lovely pair of diamond earrings that we just happened to have on sale this month?

Are they wrong? No! I agree with plenty of that stuff. But anytime someone tells you they've got a system, and if you just follow their system, you'll succeed no matter what, I start to wonder if you might actually be full of crap. There are plenty of brands that I have written jingles for, or co-written, or commissioned, and they have taken all kinds of different forms, and they have always really helped. But I also have plenty of customers where a jingle was the wrong way to go, so I didn't. It's not the only tool in the bag, and it's not necessarily one you should use every time. So, should every brand have a jingle? No. 

Ryan: Apparently those damn jingle writers don't want their money to jingle, jingle, but fold. Do you think Big Jingle are just using advertising to sell more jingles? A conspiracy worth consideration, but first a word from our sponsor.

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Hey, listeners. Wizard Ryan Chute here. Want a personalized strategy that instantly 4X the effectiveness of your marketing dollars? Schedule a free call with me at wizardofads.services. We'll chat about your goals and how you can quickly dominate your marketplace. I have limited availability though, so don't delay.

Well, I guess you could delay a bit, but not too much. That'd be like an over-delay. So maybe you just skip the delay part entirely and book a call just as soon as you're ready to start making money. You certainly don't to delay that, right? And now, pitter-patter.

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Ryan: So what makes a good jingle? 

Mick: Well, I mean, I can only speak from the ones that I do and I kind of have my own way of doing it. It just occurred to me while, while we were having this conversation that the last full sing jingle that I could think of is one that you wrote actually, which is the one, the one for Coors Light, the one that James Taylor sang,  which actually was a full sing.

Chris: Well, that was in the 80s so. No, the 90s. 

Mick: But, you know, that's, that's also on a very, very different level. And in that world, you don't run something longer than six months anyway. The sort of clients that we're working with are generally, you know, owner-operated businesses and when they're investing in a jingle and I use the word investing cause they're frigging expensive.

This is not something you're just going to use for six months and then toss it away. It costs too much to do that. So, you know, I kind of have my own system, where I don't do the full sing because you need to leave room for the campaign to get in there. So I want to have that option of having that sing part be at the beginning, at the end, you know, almost at the end other places so that you can write around that and make and make some sense of it. Another thing I also want to be really clear about. You know, at the Wizard of Ads organization, there's lots of other guys who write jingles. I know, I know Adam Donmoyer writes jingles. I know Jack Heald writes jingles. There's probably other people who write jingles that I'm, I don't, that are not coming to mind right now. But, you know, what the heck, I'm here. So, I can, I can tell you how I do it, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. 

Chris: It's interesting that you referenced the Coors Light thing too. I think where jingles got, you know, there's that, there's that love-hate relationship with jingles, or that sort of tendency for people to crap on jingles as a sort of cheesy way that advertising used to be done. That's an interesting reference, you know, beer commercials went through this phase in the 80s and 90s where they were basically just kind of montages with a piece of music behind them. And in fact, the way we used to make them is we used to go through director's reels and just pull interesting clips and put it together and say, yeah, you put the sing over that and there's your commercial. Um, and it was kind of, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. It worked for a while, but that whole approach to advertising is, as you say, different from what we do.

We come up with a campaignable idea that we can expand from commercial to commercial. And so you need the jingle to play a different role as opposed to, you know, just being a soundtrack to a montage.

Mick: Well, well, there's also another sort of artistic way of looking at it. You know, sometimes people will say to me, you know, you've always liked jingles. You've always been in, and I, and I'll be like, no, I think jingles were terrible. Kind of all of 'em. That's kind of why I got into it. I remember something I heard Pen Gillette talking about, Pen Gillette from Pen and Teller, and people very often ask him, you know, did you always want to be a magician? You must have admired magicians your whole life and he's like, no, I didn't like magicians at all. I didn't like what they did. I didn't like what they pretended to do. I didn't like Kreskin who pretended that that he was actually really able to read people's minds and didn't acknowledge that he was doing magic tricks. And so he specifically went into magic because he wanted to do he wanted to do it right,

Chris: Do a better job.

Mick: Like if you really like the Rolling Stones and you want to write Rolling Stones music, well, don't do that. The Rolling Stones are still alive, depending on when you're watching this. you know, if you find something that you don't like and then do it properly. So that's why I got into jingles as I found them cheesy. I found them repetitive. I found them annoying. And most of them were garbage, by the way, most of all art is garbage. Most paintings are garbage. Most music is garbage. Most TV shows are garbage. Most movies are garbage. Most of everything is garbage. So just there's, there's no good response to say, well, most jingles are shit. Well, of course they are. Most of everything is shit. I specifically said, that I want to make a jingle that, that is not that, and that serves the client for an entire campaign and has the flexibility to be able to even move from one campaign to another. So that meant that the structure of the music had to be different and that's how I created the system around which I build a jingle. Doesn't mean it's the only way to do it.

Ryan: That's fascinating. You know, as I was researching the sciencie bits and pieces of this, and things that you already know about this in such a nuts and bolts kind of way, that there was things like ear cons that come up. Ear cons are those little tiny pings and dings that we hear on slot machines, and on our phones and the little bells that we hear, but it's also those little markers that we have showing up, those distinctive sounds that reoccur in advertising that are done at a high repetition. Those are very distinctive ways of anchoring into our brain and holding, an anchor in our literal brain to actually go back to and pattern recognize for the power of the auditory message is five times that of the auditory message of the visual. So one of the things that as you get into deep weeds of, of marketing and psychological science of consumer behavior and, and effects that it has on people, persuasion, there's the thing called the audio logo. The audio logo is literally five times more powerful than the actual logos that you see on side of buildings and trucks. And a lot of people, I have no idea that it even exists. Like we've all heard of earworms, but no one's heard of an eyeworm. 

Chris: It's funny, I worked in Japan in the 90s and it struck me there because we weren't doing it in the West at the time. They called it a sound signature, which is that little thing that just goes at the end of the spot and it is the very same way that you would super the Nike swoosh at the end of your Nike spot. It's that little audio thing and they would do with all their brands. Just a little thing at the end. The only one in the West that was doing it was Bimedic. But everyone else would have a jingle. They would sing a couple of lines or they would sing, do a full sing. They would do kinds of things.

Mick: Intel started doing that. 

Chris: It's interesting that we've started to do it. Intel does it now. Frankly, that's, you know, here's McDonald's that used to sing, all of you deserve a break today. And now it's just da-da da da daaaaaa. It's just that little sound signature. But it is a, it buttons it all up at the end and it, and it is that sort of permanent logo attribution of everything. If you just like everything you, you saw in the last 28 seconds, you attach it to that brand.

Mick: Well, and everything that Ryan said was true, but in fact, you're still talking about the left hemisphere of the brain, uh, the, the audio auditory association area has such a capacity for remembering sounds and remembering them for a long time and remembering them with a tremendously great degree of accuracy.

But if you go to Wizard Academy and you take the Magical Worlds course, you'll hear an hour's worth of interesting content about the right hemisphere of the brain. And that's where music lives. Words are on the left and music is on the right. And what's cool about the right hemisphere of the brain is that there is no gatekeeper there. You will hear music, and you will store music, and be able to recall music, simply because the right hemisphere of the brain doesn't edit properly as compared to left hemisphere, and that's why you remember Love Shack. Even though Love Shack is, in my opinion, not a particularly good song. ‍And I like, I like coming up to people and saying, Hey, sing me a, sing me a jingle from your childhood, from whatever town you grew up in, and everyone can do it. Everybody can sing a song about a random, well, in your case, it was a, it was a taxi, 

Ryan: Casino Taxi, they're the fast ones.

Mick: Sing the whole song. Sing. What's a little more, what's the number?

Ryan: 4-2-5 6-6-6-6

Mick: Woo. So every human has built… When's the last time you took a cab? Never. The point is, it's not relevant anymore. You don't actually need this information. It is stuck in your head involuntarily and will probably never leave. And that's simply because of the power of music. 

So it's important not to, when you're building your brand, when you're spending your money to try and your the name of your company into people's heads, to ignore the value of something that can imprint your brand and then attach it to something else, right? It's not just the name of your brand and the phone number. I mean, as ridiculous as it is. Casino Taxi, we're the fast ones. They actually attached, they attached a position to it. I don't know how they're able to get there faster, or even if they do. But the point is, they made you, they made you remember… 

Chris: You have now associated those two ideas together. That idea is attached to that brand in your head.

Mick: And if I just said, you know, Casino Taxis is the fast ones, I think I'd probably go, I'll bet you they're not, and reject that. That’s Broca's area doing that saying, I don't buy it.  But music doesn't attach any judgment to the memory and that's a really powerful thing that if you don't take advantage of that, because it's, I mean, I talk about how jingles cost money and they do, but the value proposition on how much it costs and how well it it allows people to remember who you are, what you stand for and how to get ahold of you. And the fact that you can do all that in one go, pay for it once, run it for 10 years and burn it into the brains of people.

Yeah. It's practically free now. It's a remarkably efficient and cost effective way to do that.

Ryan: Martin Lindstrom in his book, Brandwashing, talks about nostalgia and how powerful a drug nostalgia really is. And when you start to look at those fond memories of all those, of those ads that we heard, those Saturday morning cartoons, those things that were sung into existence and then lived in our brains rent-free for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, man, that is a power that is so hard to tap into effectively. Now, there's a couple of things that have to happen. We have to have frequency and the proper repetition in the marketplace for you to hear it enough for it to anchor in, you have to have captured that melody and or those words that are in it, and we see it all over the place now. I mean, who doesn't know the Netflix to dumb, right? Everyone knows that sound signature.

Mick: Law and Order. That’s their theme. 

Ryan: Seinfeld. We all know the Seinfeld sound. Even if you haven't ever watched Seinfeld, there's a pretty darn good chance that you're going to know that, saxophone, right? So there's a, there's a huge power to that and it drives customer loyalty. Most people don't really appreciate that. Look at McDonald's. I'm loving it. All we'd have to say, let's do a pop quiz. da-da da da daaaaa.. We know what that one is. Nationwide is… 

Chris: On your side. 

Ryan: Give me a break. 

Chris: Give me a Kit.

Ryan: Give me a Kit Kat Bar. That's right. The idea of this whole audio logo is something that the Sonic identifier, as you were, as you were mentioning. These are powerful, powerful things that we're looking to embed. Those are all done astoundingly strategically. There is so much strategy put into this. And just having a jingle for the sake of having a jingle is not what's serving the purpose. You may get lucky. You may find something that hits. But cute and clever are not a good replacement for good strategy.

Mick: And the reality is that most jingles are written by musicians. And musicians are generally songwriters and they're used to writing songs. And I'm probably a copywriter first and a musician second, although I've been doing music longer. But I don't write as a jingle, as a musician. I write as a copywriter. I write with a strategic plan in mind and what you're trying to accomplish with a jingle is not actually the same thing you're trying to accomplish with a hit song. So in a sense, I would definitely recommend that you work with someone who's used to writing jingles.

If you've got a friend of yours who is really great with a guitar and can write songs, he might not necessarily be able to accomplish the goal, even if he writes you a nice song about your business, it might actually not be a strategically beneficial thing. It’s harder than it looks.

Ryan: It could be cute and clever, it could be fun, and it could be something that can be reused and leveraged, but it's not doing the strategic thing that you need it to do for embed-specific purposes.

Mick: I like putting this in a simple matter of putting an idea to music.

Chris: Mick talked about that idea of putting things at the beginning and the middle and the end or being able to put it. It's that idea of giving the jingle a role of beyond just being branding. Like, it's interesting about da-da da da daaaaa. Well, that's fine. It certainly attaches that brand to the story that we just saw. What I find we end up doing a lot is using a piece of music or a little sing or something just to intro the spot right? So there's a, a cluster of radio commercials and then there's a sung line with a piece of music that only belongs to this brand. And that first line then gets you in. And if this campaign has been running for a few years, then, as soon as people hear that line, it's like, Oh, it's another one of these commercials, right?

It sort of draws you in, you know, where you are. But it's that you've given that job to the jingle or to use it as the wrap-up, right? You tell a big story and then in the end you, you sum it up with a tagline. If the tagline is that summation. It's that idea of using the jingle to play another role. So your speaking people, your announcer or your characters or whatever it is, the spoken part of the ad does this, and then the jingle does this other thing. And you're not trying to get these people to do three things now, because you know, one of them you can leave to the jingle. And we're at the beginning, you leave the first one to the jingle and let them pick up from there.

Mick: Well, I also think there's a larger lesson to be learned because it just sort of occurred to me that the idea of finding something you don't like and fixing it, applies to more than just music. Like I did it with jingles. I didn't like jingles. I thought they were all shitty. And so I started writing jingles. If you don't like country music, write country music.  Like don't do something that's great, but that applies to business too. Like if in your town there are four great carpet stores, don't open a carpet store. Like if there are two shitty carpet stores that are really awful and don't do a very good job, open a freaking carpet store.

Chris: Find the opportunity,

Mick: Find the thing that you don't like that everyone's doing wrong. I think that's what Dewey Jenkins did when he started his HVAC company. He's like, everybody's screwing this up. Like there's nobody good. So I'll, I'll do that.

That's a bigger lesson. In a sense if you can't do that, if there's not something that you're fixing. If there's not something that you're truly doing right, that everybody else is doing wrong and would all admit that they're doing wrong, then that's not a good,

Chris: Then by definition, you also doing it wrong. 

Mick: Then you're just one of many. But if you want to be a standout in your category. Find a category where they're making mistakes and then do it correctly.

Ryan: So, say, you had to write a jingle for, say, I don't know, a bingo hall in Sudbury, Ontario. What might your approach be?

Mick: It's funny you say that because I actually wrote a jingle for a bingo hall. 

Chris: What was the name of this bingo hall?

Mick: In Sudbury, there were four bingo halls at the time. This is back in the 90s. This is a long time ago. So there was Star Bingo, Delta Bingo, Bingo Country and Bingo World. And so I was working for another agency at the time and my boss had sent me to Bingo Country, that was the one that we were going to see. And I did write what I believed was perhaps the best jingle ever for a bingo hall. And I think strategically it worked really well for this particular brand and in a sense, that's sort of the cornerstone of a good idea. If you've got a good idea for a particular company brand service, it shouldn't be interchangeable that you could just use it for another.

Chris: When you hear it, you've got to know it's for them. 

Mick: Yeah. It can really only be, that one bingo hall. If you could just simply replace it with the name of the other company and then sing it, that's not a particularly good jingle. I mean, I don't know if Casino Taxi could have easily had Dave's Taxi and have that same jingle, how it worked. But in the example with the bingo hall in Sudbury, I think it really was specific to that brand, perhaps the best jingle that I've ever written. 

Chris: So we're talking about this in the abstract. I mean, can you share it with us. 

Mick: Well, absolutely. No, because I wrote it and when you're to truly be able to tell how good a jingle is, you want to be able to hear it over and over and over again, and then remember it and be able to sing it back to you. Actually it's even better if you can play it for children because children are very, very good at remembering everything.

Chris: They like to repeat things back.

Mick: They read the same stories over and over…

Chris: Especially if it's got a good hook.

Mick: They love to listen to the same music. They sing along. So this particular jingle I'm going to prove that it's a great jingle because i'm going to sing it to you once I'm, not even going to sing the whole thing, I'm going to sing it to you once you're going to remember it forever on one hear. Which in my opinion is kind of proof that it's such a great jingle.

I'm gonna let you in on a little secret, Spoiler Alert. They didn't buy it. They didn't actually buy this jingle. I think they should have because it was the best jingle frankly ever that I think had ever come through their door and this the other part is gonna made you it didn't even take me that long to write it. I was actually in the bingo hall walking around when the idea came to me

Chris: Flashbulb moment.

Mick: Exactly, and it all became clear. And all I had to do is go back and, you know, get it down. 

So I'm going to sing the jingle to you now for Bingo Country, just the one. And I think you're going to appreciate just how great a jingle it was and what a tremendous missed opportunity it was for the good people of Bingo Country in Sudbury, who just didn't appreciate the genius of it. And it's not their fault. It was a long time ago. I'm not even sure if it's the same ownership now or management.

Mick: So here's how it goes. And you're not going to get the full production idea, cause I'm just going to be reading- singing it to you acapella here, but I think you'll get the idea. It kind of went like this. 

Hey, bing, bing, bing, bing, bingo country. Count, count, count, count, country. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bingo. 

And it kind of went like that. And that was sort of a 32nd idea with that sing. Now not everyone at Bingo Country agreed with me that that was a great idea. Jingle, but I think, well, it's memorable,

Ryan: It's memorable.

Mick: What's our first job as advertising people? Get noticed. Get noticed. There’s so much clutter. There's so much advertising. So many other people trying to get into your brain with their advertising message. So you have to get noticed. Ideally, someone would turn up the volume, and go, did I just hear what I think I heard? Yes.

Ryan: Yes, you did. You did hear that.

Mick: Turn that volume up. Listen to it again. Now, could they confuse that jingle with Star Bingo or Bingo World or Delta Bingo? No! It could really only be Bingo Country. So, with those big three competitors going up against them, I think really the only company that people would have remembered had this jingle been sold, and we gone forward, would be Bingo Country.

Again, tremendous missed opportunity. Not everybody has that visionary perspective on how music can be so powerful. But unfortunately, we can't help everyone.

Ryan: I can see how it would work very, very well. It could take over the country really in a lot of ways. 

Fun fact, the very first Jingle broadcast on radio was for Wheaties in 1926. It aired locally and boosted sales so effectively that General Mills rolled it out nationwide, helping save the iconic cereal brand from being discontinued.

Chris: Good heavens.

Ryan: We wouldn’t have Wheaties today if we didn't have jingles. I mean, that's kind of a big deal. I'm just putting that out there. You know in the olden days, jingles, predate radio by a long shot. In Elizabethan England, travelling musicians would sing-song sponsored by the local businesses. Essentially, early jingles. And these catchy earworms were

Chris: Bethany’s brothel. 

Ryan: All right, we are going to carry on here. Barry Manilow was known as the Jingle King. One of the most iconic jingles, Like a Good Neighbor,

Chris: State Farm.

Ryan: State Farm was there was written by the legendary music master, Barry Manilow himself. His catchy tune helped cement these jingles into advertising history. But every king does need a Wizard, don't they? 

Mick: And you know how good though Manilow was. One of the, his most favorite songs, most popular songs, I write the songs. He didn't write that. Like everything else, he did not write that. A little bit of Manilow trivia there for you.

Ryan: Fantastic. For more Jingle Factoids, check us out at our socials @advertisinginamerica. 

Where you can see more outtakes and behind the scenes footage that makes it directly to the cutting room floor. Essentially, are not safe for work and blooper reel. Stay tuned for three ways to put earworms to work, for more than freaking out your little sister after the commercial break.

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Remember that saying, only half of your marketing is working, you just don't know which half? Let's help you with that. Book a free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today at wizardofads.services. Yes, that's a URL, wizardofads.services. Now let's get back to the show.

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Ryan: You know, Chris, you sang me a catchy little jingle a few months ago and I still can't get out of my head. Do you want to hear it, Mick? Shampoo. It's the only poo you should put in your hair.

Chris: It's shampoo. 

Mick: His ten year old nephew really likes that one. 

Ryan: Shampoo. It's the only poo you should put in your hair.

Chris: Shampoo. If it's another other poo, don’t put it in there. Shampoo. 

Mick: There’s a lesson in that song. I mean that's for nephews. That's a song for nephews.

Chris: All those uncles out there. That’s yours. 

Ryan: That's royalty-free. No copyright infringement. Now that I've blessed the 13 people left listening to this podcast wondering what they're doing with their life. If you don’t have any good ideas on what to say about your brand, a full-sing jingle may do something to get locked into the market echoic retention. If your advertising isn’t frequent enough that it will struggle to get into the prospect's long-term memory, it may work out for you. If you want to get the full impact of a jingle, start with how it fits into your strategy and what you're trying to get people to actually remember.

You’ve got one shot. One opportunity. Don’t lose yourself in too much cute and clever. You see what I did there?  Great strategy outpaces cute and clever every time. 

Now I'm Ryan Chute, and these two co hosts that were geographically convenient enough to do a live podcast economically together, Chris and Mick Torbay. You've been listening to Advertising in America? Tune in next time and go leave us a review, will ya?

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Want to hear more?

Subscribe. Leave a review. And share this podcast with your friends. 
Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover? Join us on our social at @advertisinginamerica.

Want to spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and audience captivated.

I have a client who has a lot of marketing savvy. A few weeks ago he sent me a list of seven copy points and asked if this was our radio strategy.

I spent a lot of time crafting a carefully considered response, so I thought I might share it with you. Perhaps it will trigger a realization or an insight you can use.

There’s an equally good chance, however, that you’ll decide I’m wrong.

Here’s the response I sent him:

You’ve asked for clarity on the issue of our radio strategy and you sent along a very well-crafted chart to illustrate your perception of it. This is obviously important to you.

I’m happy to help in any way I can, of course.

My discomfort with the list you sent me is rooted in the following question:

What is the purpose of this document? Is it meant to be a guiding document?
Are we creating a standard by which ads are to be evaluated in the future?

If so, my experience has been that if I agree with this list, it will lead to the inclusion of too many claims being jammed into a single piece of copy. Within a year, I would likely be hearing,

This is a good ad, but you didn’t say this or this or this. We need to include those, remember? Didn’t we agree on this list of seven things that our ads should accomplish? Is there any way we can include those other three things, too?”

A good ad makes a single point, powerfully. A bad ad sounds like a grocery list.
The only person impressed by such an ad is the advertiser who wrote it.

If this document is meant to be a list of recurrent copy-points, it is incomplete. Consequently, the adoption of this list would put us at risk of focusing too much of our airtime on too few objectives.

Our strategy is to win not only the mind, but the heart as well. We need our prospective customer to feel good about us. This is very delicate and difficult and is not likely to be accomplished if we are constrained by a regimented list of intellectual copy points. My experience has been that such lists lead to the ad campaign becoming more structured and informative, but less persuasive.

You’ve mentioned on a number of occasions that you believe the strongest response we’ve had was triggered by an ad I sent you that was written in a very intimate, confessional style. The effectiveness of that ad rose from the fact that it didn’t speak to the listener in the style of an advertiser speaking to a customer. It spoke in the style of a friend speaking to a friend. That ad surprised and delighted the customer. It’s hard to put surprise and delight on a checklist, but I know how important they are. Every fiber of me knows it. Thirty-seven years of attempting to persuade the public and then monitoring the results of those attempts has carved it into my soul.

It’s perfectly natural for an organized person to want a document that summarizes the intellectual elements of their advertising, point by point. You have several years of experience as a CEO that has taught you the wisdom of this.

My experience as an ad writer has been otherwise. This is at the root of my anxiety, I think. The hidden danger of lists is that they lead to predictability.

If you continue to feel that you need a checklist, I suggest that we add the following to the top of it:

1. Be remembered.
   We must be memorable. This requires us to surprise the customer in some small way in every ad. Without an element of surprise, there can be no delight.
2. Make them like us.
   If we win the heart, the mind will follow. Our minds routinely create logic to justify what our hearts have already decided.

Add these to your list and I’m good with it. There will be times when these two points will be the only two things I attempt to accomplish in a script.

Thank you for asking for this clarity in such an elegant and respectful way.
Your style of communication is one of the things I like best about you.

And it’s one of the things our audience likes best about you, too.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

Showmanship is symbolism, the essence of pageantry and tradition: the sweep of an extended arm with an upraised palm in an expansive gesture; a deep bow with the added flourish of both arms extended to the sides, again with palms turned upward; dramatic emphasis expressed by hopping in place on the balls of your feet – timed precisely to the syllables you speak – pent-up energy that demands release.

Showmanship is mesmerizing but it takes courage because it’s easy to feel you’re making a fool of yourself.

Storytelling requires finesse and restraint as you work your way through a series of small reveals, waiting with the patience of a magician for the moment of the big reveal.

Showmanship and storytelling don’t change reality but they do change perception.

Are you beginning to understand why an ad man might be interested in these?

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school determined that the intensity of the pleasure we experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. “And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.”

The story you tell about the wine affects how it tastes.

The study wasn’t speculative; it was medical. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to monitor the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the pleasure center of the brain – of wine connoisseurs who tasted wines after hearing stories about them.

The scientific verdict: good stories accelerate the physical pleasures generated through our senses. This should come as no surprise, really. We’ve known for decades that humans are uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sounds.

Words. Work. Magic.

Daniel Whittington’s “Tour of Scotland” – an adventure in storytelling and showmanship and single malt Scotch – has attracted so much attention that Wizard Academy is launching the world’s first curriculum to officially certify Whisk(e)y Sommeliers. In this endeavor he’ll be joined by cognoscenti Tom Fischer, the founder of BourbonBlog.com, one of the world’s most authoritative voices on corn liquor (Bourbon.)

Whisk(e)y Marketing School isn’t about making whiskey; it’s about putting on a great show and telling great stories to accelerate the pleasure of customers “taking a Tour of Scotland” or “going on a Bourbon Run.” Fine restaurants worldwide will soon have tables full of people mesmerized as their Whisk(e)y Sommeliers wheel carts to their tables, open elegant wooden boxes, slip magnificent badges of office over their heads, and begin their tales of wonder.

Same song, second verse:

Angel Skating^TM is a new organization whose mission is to use storytelling and showmanship to popularize a little-known sport called artistic roller skating. You’ve seen figure skating in the Winter Olympics, right? Now imagine exactly that, but on roller skates. The objective of Angel Skating is to help artistic roller skating become the figure skating of the Summer Olympics.

Angel Skating was born last week when Craig Arthur, the director of Wizard of Ads, Australia, was in Austin for 10 days of catching up at the home office. Wizard of Ads partners Tom Wanek, Paul Boomer and Dave Young flew in from Columbia, Cleveland and Tucson to hang out with Craig, who mentioned that his daughter, Bridget, was becoming rather good at artistic roller skating, but that the sport wasn’t very well packaged or promoted.

Packaging and promoting are just different names for showmanship and storytelling.

A Tour of Scotland and a comical comment from Indiana Beagle was all it took. Angel Skating^TM was born before the sun went down. An official logo, a cartoon character mascot, a series of domain names and the rules of advancement through a series of “elegance levels” were all agreed upon within 36 hours.

Showmanship and storytelling – packaging and promotion – are what whiskey tasting and roller skating have in common with what you do.

And now you know what we do.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and we’ll hook you up.

Occasionally a client will send a spreadsheet of company statistics and ask me to comment on what I see.

I usually look and see ambiguous statistics but I certainly don’t want to say that.

Discussing business numbers with people is like discussing religion. No matter what you say, you’re unlikely to change their intrinsic beliefs, so I always approach these conversations carefully.

“What do you see?” I ask.

“Well, last year 68 percent of our customers were repeat customers and 32 percent were new customers. Now we’re selling 63 percent repeat customers and 37 percent new customers.”

“What do you think this tells us?”

“It tells us your ads are working!” the client says excitedly.

“Perhaps it does,” I say. “But it could just as easily indicate that our competition is growing stronger or that we have somehow offended or disappointed our old customers.”

My client gave me a confused look, so I continued, “If a smaller percentage of our business is repeat customers, couldn’t this mean that fewer customers are choosing to buy from us again? Couldn’t it indicate that we’ve disappointed them somehow?”

The confused look became a worried look. “But our sales volume has never been higher.”

“I know that,” I said. “But that could mean that we’re bringing in new customers fast enough to disguise the very serious problem that we’re losing our old customers to someone else. After all, you said yourself that our percentage of repeat customers is down.”

“Do you think we have a problem with our old customers?” the client asked, now truly worried.

“Not at all,” I smiled. “I’m just saying that nothing can be learned from the numbers you gave me.”

Not everything that can be measured has meaning.

Many of you are now recoiling in doubt and disbelief. I get that. Like I said, talking about business numbers is like talking about religion.

Here’s how I finished that conversation: “If a company sells a product or service that people buy once a year, what percentage of their customers will be new customers in year one?”

“One hundred percent,” said my client with confidence.

“And if our sales volume doubles in year two and exactly 50 percent of the customers are new customers, what percentage of customers did we retain from year one?”

The client thought for a moment, then said, “If business has doubled and one half of our customers are new and the other half are repeat, this means that one hundred percent of last year’s customers chose to buy from us again.”

I continued, “Sales in year three are exactly triple the sales of year one. One third of the customers are new and two-thirds are repeat customers. What does this tell us?”

Another moment of thought, he answered, “We have 100 percent retention of customers from the first two years.”

That’s when I said, “But someone is likely to point out that your percentage of new customers is falling and they’ll likely interpret this to mean that your ads aren’t working. After all, your sales volume grew 100 percent in year two but only 50 percent in year three and your percentage of new customers has fallen from 100 percent to only 33 percent. You’re now doing triple the volume you were doing just two years ago but these numbers would seem to indicate that you’ve got serious problems with your advertising.”

The client began to smile again, so I continued, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that this company increased their prices by 12 percent at the beginning of year two, so none of what we just calculated is accurate. And that company has only been in business for 3 years! Your company, on the other hand, has been in business since 1939 and you sell a product the average person buys every 13 years and lots of old customers have died or moved away and new people have moved to town and some of your old competitors have gotten more aggressive while others have gone out of business and we need to factor in the percentage of sales opportunities your salespeople are closing and yes, you’ve also got a brand new ad campaign. If we take all that into consideration – assuming all the data is available and can be trusted – how are we going to calculate it and what do you think we’re going to learn?”

He smiled as he ceremoniously tore up the spreadsheet and said, “We’re making a lot of money and I like the ads.”

“Good. Let’s go have lunch.”

So we did.

When I got back from lunch, two other clients had emailed spreadsheets to me and asked me to comment on what I saw.

Sigh.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.