Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S7E12 - Famous Jingles

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

This week, we explore the use of jingles in advertising. So many brands were built on the backs of jingles. From the Big Mac, to Smarties, to Wheaties cereal. Successful jingles stay lodged in our minds forever. Once you hear them, learn the melody and start singing the lyrics, you become the advertiser.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling. Subscribe now and don't miss a single beat. We'll see you next time. new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 7, 2018. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly.

In the late 1960s, Hugh Wilson was looking for a job writing ads on Madison Avenue. But he had no luck. So he went to Atlanta and got a job writing ads for a flooring company. Later, he was hired by an Atlanta advertising agency called Burton Campbell, eventually becoming its creative director. As a creative director, he would hire actors to be in his commercials and became friends with one particular comedy team. That team eventually landed a job at Mary Tyler Moore Productions in Hollywood writing for the Bob Newhart Show. One day when Hugh Wilson was in Hollywood directing a TV commercial,

he visited them at the studio. While there, he expressed interest in writing sitcoms. So his friends introduced him to the president of MTM Productions, Grant Tinker. Tinker was not only Mary Tyler Moore's husband, but he had also been an advertising man prior to landing in Hollywood. He liked Hugh and hired him.

Not long after, Hugh began writing for the Newhart Show and a short-lived Tony Randall sitcom. One day, Grant Tinker asked Hugh if he had any ideas for a new sitcom. Hugh said yes. He had been kicking around the idea of creating a show that revolved around a small town radio station. Tinker liked the idea, so they went to pitch it to the executives at CBS. CBS liked it immediately, because most of the TV executives were actually ex-radio people.

And that's how W the air in Cincinnati. Cincinnati WKRP. Wilson populated the show with a hilarious group of characters and based the sitcom on a station that was at the bottom of the ratings and was always struggling to find advertisers. He chose the call letters WKRP because they spelled crap, an inside joke that described the programming success of the little station in Cincinnati.

Wilson based the show not just on a radio station, but on a small, privately owned radio station. That was an important distinction, as family-owned stations had a much quirkier dynamic than corporately-owned stations. Having worked for a small private radio station early in my career, I can tell you that WKRP was unbelievably accurate. During the four-year run of the series, Hugh Wilson and his writing team created many memorable moments, including the famous turkey episode, where the WKRP station manager throws live turkeys out of a helicopter as a Thanksgiving promotion, which, by the way, was based on a real-life incident at a Texas radio station. But in another episode, an advertiser walks into the station

and wants to run 30 commercials a day. It is the biggest contract the station has ever landed. The advertiser tells them he is in the volume business. He needs to move them in and move them out. His slogan? Over 6,000 satisfied customers. He offers free parking and group discounts. And he wants a light and bouncy jingle. The name of his business? Ferryman's Funeral Home. You're young and swinging No time to think about tomorrow

But there ain't no way to deny it Someday you're gonna find it The Ferryman, the Ferryman The Ferryman tomorrow The Ferryman, the Ferryman He's the man with the pot The man with the plan The Ferryman, the Ferryman, Ferryman, he's the man with the plot, the man with the plan. Ferryman, Ferryman, he's the mortician man.

A lot! Six count of six convenient locations, plus four group rates and free parking. It's all yours at Ferryman Funeral. Bye-bye! In the end, the cash-starved WKRP resigns the account, as station manager Arthur Carlson can't shake the feeling the jingle is in bad taste. But sales manager Herb Tarlick saves the day by rewriting the lyrics and selling the jingle to a tire company.

Writing a jingle is a very specialized skill. It has to capture the essence of a business and contain a lot of selling information, including the company name, the product, a reason to buy it, the address, and often the phone number. And all of that has to be squeezed into 30 seconds or less. And to top it all off, it has to be catchy. It's an almost impossible task. But some truly talented composers have created jingles that sold a lot of products.

Those jingles were successful because they contained one special ingredient. They were so sticky, we never forgot them. You're under the influence. When we asked our wonderful Under the Influence listeners if they wanted to hear an episode on famous jingles, their response was overwhelming. We asked you for lists of your favorite jingles, the response was overwhelming. We asked you for lists of your favorite jingles and received so many responses that we actually trended on Twitter. So we chose the jingles that had interesting stories behind them.

Let's begin of the bran. Won't you try Wheaties? For wheat is the best food of man. They're crispy and crunchy the whole year through. You just heard the very first jingle ever broadcast. Back in 1926, General Mills asked radio station WCCO in Minneapolis to come up with a special advertising campaign for its Weedy cereal. The station delivered a breakthrough that would forever change the advertising industry.

It was the first singing commercial, and it began airing on Christmas Eve 1926. It was performed by the Wheaties Quartet, which was made up of an undertaker, a court bailiff, a printer, and a businessman. Each week for three years, the Wheaties Quartet would sing the jingle live during a half-hour radio show. But by 1929, national sales of Wheaties had dropped by 50%, and General Mills was considering ending their experiment with breakfast cereal. When the company took a closer look, it noticed that 60% of Wheaties' sales were happening in one single city, Minneapolis, which happened to be the only city where the Have You Tried Weedies jingle was airing.

So as an experiment, this singing commercial was rolled out across the nation, and sales tripled the very next year. They quadrupled the following year, and the rest is Wheaties history. It didn't take long for the rest of the advertising industry to take notice. Soon, jingles became a major marketing tool, peaking in the 50s and 60s. Back in 1969, Gary Gray was a senior ad writer at the Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Agency in Toronto. One of the agency's biggest clients was Roundtree, and Roundtree had a brand called Smarties.

Gary was given the task of coming up with a memorable commercial for the candy. Smarties advertising had an unusual strategy. The message was aimed at kids and grandparents. The thinking was that while kids love Smarties, grandparents bought more candy for their grandkids than parents did. In all my years in advertising, I was never asked to create a commercial for kids and grandparents. Very unusual.

One day, Gary Gray took his two daughters to a park to play. While they were in the sandbox eating Smarties, one of his daughters took a red one out, licked it, and started using it as lipstick. She was trying to act like her grown-up mom. In that moment, Gary realized something. His daughters ate all the Smarties, but they only played with the red ones.

It was all about the red ones. He began humming a little ditty in his head, starting with the line, When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last? When he got home, he quickly scribbled down the rest of the lyrics.

The very next day, his client came to the agency, marched right up to Gary's desk and said, well, what have you come up with for Smarties? Now, most important presentations would normally take place in a boardroom, in a formal setting. But his client wanted an answer now. So Gary, a little taken aback by the question,

simply stood up at his desk and sang the entire jingle to him. When he finished, his client just stared at Gary for a few seconds, then picked up the phone, called the president of Roundtree and said, listen to this, then handed Gary the phone and said,

sing it again. When Gary got to the last note, his client took the phone back and said to the president, how do you like your new campaign? Terrific, right? Then hung up the phone without even waiting for an answer. And that's how the famous Smarties jingle was created and sold. When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?

Do you suck them very slowly or crunch them very fast? Eat the candy and milk chocolate, but tell me when I ask. When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last? The Smarties jingle resulted in a 10% sales increase every single year, and it became one of the longest-running campaigns in North America. One more thing. That jingle was so powerful as a marketing tool, it kept M&Ms out of Canada for years.

The Big Mac was launched in 1967. It was invented by a man named Michael Delagatti in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Delagatti was one of the first McDonald's franchisees in the state. At that time, he was finding it difficult to compete with the diverse menus of the other hamburger chains in the area. So he came up with the idea of adding a bigger double patty hamburger to his menu. McDonald's head office was skeptical. Their regular burgers cost only 18 cents. This new double patty variety

would cost 45. But they gave Delagotti the go-ahead to test his invention at his location. The only stipulation was that he had to use McDonald's ingredients only.

But Delagotti had his own ideas and went rogue. Two patties couldn't fit on a standard McDonald's bun, so he opted for a bigger sesame seed bun he found at a local bakery. He then

added a little invention of his own. He called it special sauce. The final product? Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Sound familiar?

He called it a Big Mac, and it was an immediate hit. So McDonald's decided to run with it. By 1968, the Big Mac had a place on McDonald's permanent menu and was introduced nationwide. And soon, nearly 20% of McDonald's total revenues were from Big Mac sales. In 1974, the words, To all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, were written as a headline on a McDonald's print ad that ran in college newspapers. When the creative director of

McDonald's advertising agency saw that ad, he thought, that would make a great jingle. During that time, McDonald's ran a contest, offering customers a free Big Mac if they could recite the jingle in under four seconds. All these patties, pickles, sauce, lettuce, cheese, and there's pickles now. Pickles, cheese, oh. Lettuce and onions, sesame, all, seed bun. I think they're describing a big... To all these patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, all, sesame, seed bun.

In 1974, I was one of those customers who got a free Big Mac when my friends and I walked into the McDonald's in our hometown saying we could sing the jingle in three seconds. We must have been one of the first to try it because the manager's eyes widened, he flashed a big smile, gathered all his staff around us, and timed us on his wristwatch.

When we did it, everyone cheered and the manager presented us with our free Big Macs. Ah, the power of a jingle. The original jingle only aired for a year and a half, 44 years ago. But many of us can still sing it word for word today. Big Mac, Big Jingle, Big Impact. Black's photography started in the year 1930. Actually, it was called Eddie Black's Limited. Situated on Yonge Street in Toronto,

it mainly sold radios and home appliances. In 1939, the first royal visit to Canada was planned, and it occurred to Eddie Black that the public was going to have a sudden interest in picture-taking. So he added a few cameras to his store. They quickly sold out, so he added more. Soon, photography would become the store's main focus. Eddie was also a smart marketer and used many creative ways to advertise his store.

That legacy of creative advertising was embedded into the company's DNA and continued well into the 1980s. Robert Arms was one of my business partners at Pirate for many years, and before that he was the music director at the Air Company. Robert is an extremely talented composer, and he was doing work at the time for a company called Saffir Advertising, who happened to have the Black's photography account. Robert and another excellent composer named Tim Tickner had written a short piece of music

for Blacks commercials singing the line Blacks is Photography. When presenting the track to agency president Morris Saffer, he liked it but said, Can it go like this? Blacks is...

Then he slammed his hand on the table twice, Photography. The hand slaps were meant to represent camera clicks. It was a very smart and simple idea and from those hand slaps a very catchy jingle was born. That jingle added a lot of positive numbers to Black's bottom line. As a certain taxi company in Halifax would discover when they added a jingle to their numbers.

And we'll be right back. If you're enjoying this episode, why not dip into our archives, available wherever you download your pods. Go to terryoreilly.ca for a master episode list. There were many famous regional jingles created in this country, too. If you grew up in Halifax, there is

a certain jingle you might be familiar with. One day, in around 1973, commercial producer Charlie Doucette received a phone call from the Casino Taxi Company. The owner wanted a television commercial to advertise his cabs. He asked Charlie to meet him at the bottom of Citadel Hill. When they met, the taxi owner said he already had an idea for the TV commercial. He wanted to line up all of his 35 taxis in a row

and wanted Charlie to film them driving down the hill on Sackville Street. When Charlie got home that night, something bothered him. So he phoned the taxi company owner and said, if people are caught in the rain

and they need a taxi and if they think of your commercial, all they'll remember are 35 cabs driving down a hill. What you want them to remember is what to dial. Let me write a jingle that features your phone number.

The taxi owner said, okay. And one week later, Charlie Doucette came back with this jingle. If you're a person on the go, write down this number. It's the key to traveling quick. It's Casino Taxi's number. 429-6666 That was 44 years ago, and the Casino Taxi jingle is still on the air,

making it one of the longest-running jingles in Canada. Now, let's go from the East Coast all the way out to the West Coast. Tony Antonius spent 40 years creating advertising for radio station CKNW in New Westminster, B.C. He created many successful commercials for a multitude of advertisers, but he is known for one jingle in particular. It was for the Woodward's department store. On the first Tuesday of every month, Woodward's would have $1.49 day, where a long list of items would all be on sale for one price. They wanted a commercial to promote the sale.

On the morning of February 17, 1958, Tony wrote them a jingle. He presented it to Woodward's. The store wasn't sure about it and hemmed and hawed over it for six weeks. Eventually, they approved it and the jingle was recorded on Easter Sunday, April 6th, 1958 and aired for the first time the next day. If you spent any time in the Vancouver area, I think you might recognize this jingle. $1.49 a day, Woodward's, $1.49 a day, Tuesday, $1.49 49 Day, Woodward's, Dollar 49 Day, Tuesday. Dollar 49 Day, Woodward's, a day to shop and save.

Values, tops, and quality for your home and family. Shop Dollar 49 Day, Woodward's, Dollar 49 Day, Tuesday. That jingle ran for decades and sold a lot of $1.49 items. Now, let's drive over to my hometown. Back in 1968, a 21-year-old Carl Dewar had started a tire business with partner Vic Duhamel. One evening, Carl was walking to the local arena to see a Sudbury Wolves hockey game.

As he walked past a bar called the Townhouse Tavern across from the arena, he noticed a sign on the door that said, Tom Stomps at 9. He had no idea what that meant, but it caught his eye. During the first intermission

at the hockey game, Carl and a few friends slipped out of the arena for a beer at the townhouse tavern, since the Sudbury Arena wasn't licensed in those days. When they walked in, a singer named Stompin' Tom Connors was singing a song called Bud the Spud to a nearly empty bar. He was standing on a small piece of plywood and stomped on it to the beat of the music. When he finished his beer, Carl introduced himself to Stompin' Tom He was standing on a small piece of plywood and stomped on it to the beat of the music. When he finished his beer, Carl introduced himself to Stompin' Tom and asked if he would consider writing a jingle for his new tire business.

Tom said sure. The next day, Stompin' Tom pulled up in front of the Duhamel & Dewar tire store in a pickup truck with the words Stompin' Tom written in in front of the Duhamel & Dewar tire store in a pickup truck with the words Stompin' Tom written in big white letters on the tailgate. He sat down with Carl and Vic and asked them what kind of a jingle they were looking for. Carl said he wanted a catchy song like the ones Tom sang at the townhouse tavern the night before.

And they told him a few things about their tire business. Tom said okay. He'd return with a jingle and left the store, then walked back in a half hour later. He had written the entire tune in his truck outside. He played it for Vic Duhamel and Carl Dewar. They loved it and didn't change a word. When your tires are old and worn

And you know they should look newer Just drive down to the tire town And see to Hamelin Dewar At wholesale prices In the rings of the nickel city's fire You can dress the wheels of your automobile In tomorrow's best built tire In rain or shine You you're bound to find

your troubles will be fewer when you drop round at the tire town and see to Hamelin Dewar. As my wife says, if you grew up in Sudbury in the 70s, you know that tune by heart. It ran for more than 15 years. And what did Stompin' Tom get paid to write that famous jingle?

A set of snow tires. Stompin' Tom also immortalized the city of Sudbury in one of his greatest songs, called A Sudbury Saturday Night. And that's why there is a statue of Stompin' Tom outside the Sudbury Arena today. Jingle writing is an art form. Having sat in many meetings with clients who requested jingles, getting all the information down they wanted crammed into those little ditties, I would often look across the table at our wonderful composers and wonder,

how will they ever be able to come up with anything that will possibly work? But they always did. So many brands were built on the backs of those jingles. There's something about singing commercials that lodge in our minds like burrs on a wool sweater. Some scientists say jingles tap our inner voice, the area of the brain that repeats sounds in order to remember them, the very process that's vital in early childhood for developing vocabulary and in

adulthood for learning new languages. But above all that science, it's the music, the melody. It has to be catchy and oh-so-sticky, as evidenced by how many jingles you probably sang along with today. Next

week we'll air part two of our jingles episode, and we'll tell the story of a simple jingle that not only saved a big company, but earned it billions of dollars. That's the power of jingles. Once you hear it, learn to like the melody and start singing the lyrics, you become the advertiser for the brand. It was a powerful lesson Wheaties learned all the way back in 1926,

proving jingles are the breakfast of champions when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. Under the Influence was recorded in the Terror Stream. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound Engineer, Keith Ullman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian LeFever. Co-writer, Sydney O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Oman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Anne Lefevre. Co-writer, Sydney O'Reilly. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Terry O'Influence

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