FreeCreditReport.com is running at least six commercials featuring a down-on-their-luck rock band singing in various settings bemoaning the fact that their credit is bad.  The actors are obviously musically talented, the drummer actually knows how to play drums, you can tell by looking at him.  I found out that the singer is a French Canadian actor/musician named Eric Violette,  (it’s not actually his voice we hear though, he’s lip-syncing).  

I think these are very strong ads. They feature the time-tested, but somehow out-of-favor Commercial Jingle.  A jingle is a song written expressly for a commercial.  The music and words of a jingle are directly targeted to sell the product.  When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, jingles were the way most products were marketed on television.  Most people of my generation can still recite or hum the jingles from that time.  

Jingles gradually lost favor with advertisers and were replaced by what we all now hear everyday on TV - the licensed pop song put in service of a product.  I’ve written before about why I don’t like this method of advertising. I call it “lifestyle” advertising, where the marketer tries to create an ad that will connect with to the viewer’s sense of identity therefore connecting the product too.  Using a pop song is the fastest/easiest way to do this. If you can connect your brand with a song by Wilco, for instance,  that’s a valuable cultural connection to make for your product.  Your product can now live in the same cultural space that the songs of Wilco inhabit appealing to fans of that music and others that want a sense of the contemporary.

In actuality, I do not think this type of ad is very effective because when the spot gets placed into the ad mix that viewers see on a typical TV day, the lifestyle that the ad is portraying gets merged with all the other lifestyles from all the other lifestyle ads and the spots’ message gets merged as well into this jumble of  lifestyle imagery and pop hits.  The products, however, don’t get defined and their identities and marketing messages get muddled.  Viewers recognize the pop tunes but the connections to the products are lost.  Even with repetition, I believe these ads are a weak way to sell the product.

Jingles on the other hand are written directly for the product.  A good jingle campaign, like the FreeCreditCard.com ads, will brand the company name right into the song.  A successful ad will, over time, have viewers singing along with the jingle, either subconsiously or even overtly.

Lately I’ve heard a few fresh jingle campaigns.  Optimum’s Reggaeton Jingle  and also AAMCO’s I Got A Guy campaign use jingles.   I am willing to bet that these ad campaigns were very succcesful as well.

I was at a cocktail party last New Year’s and I was talking to a young advertising executive and I asked him why jingles lost favor.  His response was interesting.  He said that more often than not, it is the client, not the ad agency, that is pushing for the high-priced licensed song.  He explained it as the client getting bragging rights for the company.  They are able to boast to the industry and their competition that they have gone out and licensed a multi-million dollar song for their latest campaign.  To me, this is to lose site of the goal of the campaign, which is to sell, no?

Other articles on this subject
Where have all the jingles gone?

Swiff it Good, The Music Industry in Chaos

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Digitization and the Internet have blown the issue of what is and what is not “Fair Use” up beyond anyone’s imagination.  When the concept was originally set as part of copyright law, Fair Use was to

1. facilitate the quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment
2. allow for the reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson;
3. allow the reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports;
4. to allow the incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

The Forbes.com article, written by Dan Fisher and Dirk Smillie makes these important points…

The real problem? Copyright laws never anticipated a time when people would be able to broadcast essentially private content all over the world, including scraps of copyrighted material.

Yet for all its importance, [Fair Use] remains a tricky concept courts determine on an agonizing case-by-case basis–making it difficult to determine whether the Next Big Thing on the Web is providing a valuable public service or violating copyright law on a wholesale basis. Judges must consider the nature of the work that has been copied, how much of it has been copied, and whether the copying hurt the ability of the content owner to make money off of it.

Today’s tug-of-war is mainly between Internet content providers, who use the doctrine of Fair Use as the rational behind posting copyrighted material without permission and content creators who believe that some content web sites are infringing on their copyrights and thus their right to earn money from their creations.

In the end, it’s about money. You have web content providers using Fair Use to enhance their business model on one hand and on the other, you have the content creators who feel that today Fair Use is being used to take money away from them.

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YouTube, according to Credit Suisse, will lose $470 million this year.  

But the cost of bandwidth, content licensing, ad-revenue shares, hardware storage, sales and marketing and other expenses will total about $711 million, putting YouTube squarely in the red, the Credit Suisse report estimated. 

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But now Virgin is closing this store as well as their flagship store in Times Square.   Everything is on sale at 20% off yet I couldn’t buy anything.  I don’t know if I just couldn’t get interested in music in the climate of the store or if I just became distracted.  For me a trip to the record store was an experience akin to how some people experience going to church.   I feel bad for music-loving kids that won’t know the experience of browsing a record store. 

There is a lot of debate about what happened to the music industry.  It seems pretty clear to me that file-sharing, which essentially devalued the recording into a “free” giveaway, killed the industry.   

I know some would say good riddance - that labels are now justly paying for their gouging of consumers with over-priced CDs.   Though I think there is some truth in this, I think the reaction, file-sharing on p2p networks,  which essentially allows one to steal the product, is just as bad.  

When I read posts by folks who favor or partake in file-sharing, their language often has a revolutionary tone  -  ”down with the oppressive corporations” being the main rallying cry. It’s a convenient rationalization that covers the truth of what file-sharing really is. 

Chris Purifoy of restoringmusic.com has posted a great article titled Defining the Music Industry Crisis that seeks to outline the problems facing the music industry and suggests some possible paths to restoring an equillibrium between the consumer’s rightful need for fair pricing and artists/labels need to work in a viable, healthy and yes, profit-making industry.  Music will be better for it.

More on this subject?  Read Chris Castle’s great blog Music, Technology, Policy.  

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