Though advertisements probably provide the most commonly heard kind of music in contemporary urban society, such music is the least noticed and least studied. Music has been part of advertising since the first Street cries. With the advent of cheap, widespread print media in the 19th century, and of radio and television in the 20th, the possibilities of advertising, and of its associated music, grew enormously.
Most of the history of advertisement music survives in art composition. A 13th-century three-voice motet in the Montpellier Codex (no.319) records street cries, as do the madrigals of Janequin, Orlando Gibbons and Berio, and operas ranging from Cherubini's Les deux journées to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Engravings and written documents show that instruments (particularly noisy, attention-grabbing instruments like drums and trumpets) were used in conjunction with the voice, but how they were used is not known. The recorded history of advertisement music begins only when music printing became inexpensive.
During the 19th century the street cry was transmuted into the Jingle on trade cards and in newspaper and magazine advertisements. Some companies advertised on sheet music and in music collections; others published their own music. In early 20th-century England Beecham's Pills issued a series of portfolios which included popular songs, folksongs, numbers from operettas and other light classical selections, and excerpts from Handel and Mendelssohn oratorios, all interspersed with advertising copy and music specifically intended to promote Beecham's product. Though lacking obvious jingles, the portfolios included dances such as the ‘Guinea a Box Polka’ (alluding to the price of Beecham's Pills), the ‘St Helen's Waltz’ (that being where they were manufactured), the ‘Beecham's Chimes Galop’ and ‘Beecham's March to Health’.
While print was becoming the main vehicle for advertisement music, street cries did not die out. They were effective in large cities and the market centres of Europe, while along the rapidly expanding American frontier of the later 19th century the travelling medicine show combined the minstrel show with the street cry to draw an audience. At the same time music as an enticement to purchase was applied in a more genteel fashion in the big department stores of the East Coast and Midwestern cities. These stores organized orchestras and choirs as amusement and education for their employees, and to provide concerts for their customers. The altruistic thinking behind such projects eventually faded, but the idea remained that music makes consumers more susceptible to consuming, and by the end of the 1920s live music had given way to recordings. Soon after World War II commercial tapes of continuous, unobtrusive instrumental versions of popular song began to be installed in retail stores throughout the Western world; ‘Muzak’, the brand name of the most successful company in the field, became the title of the genre. The type of music played in a store is shaped to the clientele: easy listening for grocery shops, loud rock for a fashionable clothes store. In some large department stores the music is accordingly different in each department. On the other hand, Virgin Records has its own radio station, transmitted to all the stores in its chain.
The idea of the medicine show – an entertainment designed to attract an audience in order to pitch them a product – carried over into broadcasting. In the USA companies would purchase time on radio stations, and later television, and fill it with programming which would bring in an appropriate audience. A new dramatic genre, the soap opera, got its name from this practice, as cleaning-product companies favoured melodramatic romantic serials to draw in housewives. Music shows and variety shows, which normally included a great deal of music, were among the most consistently attractive kinds of programmes to advertisers because they appealed to large and varied audiences. As both audiences and advertisers grew more sophisticated in the 1950s, and as broadcast advertising spread throughout the world, sponsored programmes on both radio and television were replaced by advertisements inserted into independently produced programmes.
The most common kind of music used in advertising is the jingle, a short, catchy musical composition set with advertising copy which is typically dense with rhyme, alliteration, assonance and often sexual double entendres. Familiar songs are sometimes set with new words to create a jingle (The Beach Boys' You're givin’ me good vibrations became ‘Sunkist's giving me good vibrations’), or they are used because their words are already appropriate to the product (Kodak Film was sold by Cyndi Lauper's True Colors, and one of the counting sections from Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach was used by Orange Communications, which charges by the second). A more sophisticated kind of ‘subliminal jingle’ emerged during the late 1980s, in advertisements which play on the audience's knowledge of the words to songs heard only instrumentally. British Telecom used ‘Happy Talk’ from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, in this way, and a Renault commercial, which pushes to the limit the traditional advertising equation of a car with a woman's body, included a wordless version of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing. Purely instrumental jingles are rare, though Clark Teaberry Gum's Teaberry Shuffle hit the pop charts in 1964 as Mexican Shuffle for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and Robert Palmer's Johnny and Mary, stripped of its lyrics, is probably best known in Britain as the Renault theme. Art music is also frequently used. In Britain, the Air from Bach's Suite in D bwv1068 was long associated with Hamlet cigars; the slow movement of Dvořák's ‘New World’ Symphony is known there as the Hovis Bread theme, but in France it was used to sell – again – Renaults. The Flower Duet from Delibes' Lakmé was associated with British Airways from 1983.
Some commercials, particularly those with a dramatic scenario, are underscored like films. Advertising companies can purchase tapes from music libraries, and because they pay by length, this practice is sometimes called ‘music by the metre’. Other commercials may be scored to order, and just as the title music of a film will often climax with the name of the director, so the music in such advertisements usually peaks with the product's name. In addition to its traditional musical-dramatic functions, music can be used to build up semiotic richness: a French Femme de Rochas commercial, which focussed on the perfume's hourglass bottle, featured a solo cello, creating an implicit connection of shape linking instrument, vessel and wearer.
Prominent musicians have been involved with advertising products for over a century, among them Patti (Pears soap) and Paderewski (pianolas). The opera singer Félia Litvinne modelled corsets, and Mary Garden lent her image to Rigaud perfume and Désiles wines. From the 1920s to the early 1960s, popular musicians had their radio and television shows sponsored by companies ranging from Texaco to Colgate to Coca-Cola. But the relationship between advertising and popular music became more difficult with the emergence of rock and roll, which, with roots in black music, was initially unacceptable to most mainstream consumers and therefore to advertisers. Later the strongly anti-establishment attitude of rock did not fit in with advertising. However, as people of the rock generation matured in the 1980s to become both advertising executives and target audience, rock and advertising grew closer.
Music itself was now increasingly marketed, not through the traditional methods of radio airplay and concert tours, but through music videos, modelled on television commercials, which in turn they influenced. At the same time there began a strong association between rock artists and drinks companies. Coca-Cola had George Michael and Robert Plant; Michelob Beer had Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Phil Collins and Genesis; Pepsi had the two biggest stars, Madonna and Michael Jackson, and the biggest problems. Madonna's much-vaunted 1987 commercial for them, based on her single Like a Prayer, was withdrawn after one showing because the song's video version, introduced the next day, featured religious imagery which Pepsi feared would offend the public (as it did). Jackson's decade-long relationship with Pepsi, often turbulent, was terminated in 1993 after allegations against him of child molestation. Some artists, notably Bryan Ferry and Sting, reaped the benefits of corporate advertising without tainting their ‘artistic integrity’ by appearing in commercials that would be seen only in Japan, evading the notice of the critical Western audience.
The participation of major rock stars in advertising was part of a new marketing strategy, ‘synergy’, that emerged in the late 1970s. Sparked by the phenomenally successful cross-promotion between the film Saturday Night Fever (1977) and its soundtrack, synergy grew enormously as multi-national entertainment corporations consolidated during the 1980s: for instance, Sony bought out both Coca-Cola and Columbia, already a powerful music-television-film conglomerate. Drinks companies did not just use rock stars' images and music to sell their product, but sponsored concert tours that would promote the rock stars and thereby increase their own sales. Films promoted music by including it on the soundtrack, and conversely a popular song could boost movie-ticket sales, especially if the video version included clips from the film; Flashdance (1983) was the first film to exploit the new marketing medium of the music video with success. Additional avenues of cross-promotion opened, and by the mid-1990s any major film was expected to have not only a soundtrack release and accompanying music videos but also a paperback ‘novelization’ of the screenplay, a home video and a promotion with a major fast-food chain, not to mention toys and even a Saturday morning children's show if appropriate.
Though music is present in almost every commercial on television, advertising agencies tend to know very little about music and therefore to use it conservatively. Against that trend music has increasingly merged with sound design in the creation of evocative soundscapes: a comic advertisement for Atlantis Lynx cologne uses exaggerated party noises, blurring the boundaries between natural sound and music, a technique also used in a number of advertisements for alcoholic beverages. Also, despite the close links between music and advertising, and despite the research that goes into marketing, very little work has been done on the effect of music in selling. Where studies have been done, it is difficult to assess their results because so little detail about the music has been given. Recent scholarly interest has focussed on advertisement music in order to confront musical meaning: since music for advertising is intended to have the most direct musical effect, understanding its messages may help us understand less overt ones.
See also Environmental music.
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J.-R. Julien: Musique et publicité: du cri de Paris … aux messages publicitaires radiophoniques et télévisés (Paris, 1989)
R.S. Denisoff and G. Plasketes: ‘Synergy in 1980s Film and Music: Formula for Success of Industry Mythology?’, Film History, iv (1990), 257–76
H. Klempe: ‘Musical Stylistic Analysis and its Applicability in the Understanding of Advertising Music’, SMN, xvii (1991), 113–24
L.L. Tyler: ‘“Poetry and Commerce Hand in Hand”: Music in American Department Stores, 1880–1930’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 75–120
N. Cook: ‘Music and Meaning in the Commercials’, Popular Music, xiii (1994), 27–40
ROBYNN J. STILWELL