First published in the May-June edition 2007 of Aurora.

The jingle turned 80 last December. It was conceived by four men – and cereal giant General Mills – who sang a little ditty about Wheaties. They spawned, eventually, a monster and for a brief while in the 1950s, when the jingle was negotiating its mid-20s and 30s, it was at its zenith. Cigarettes, candies, colas, cars, personal care products – if they didn’t come with a catchy tune, they weren’t worth having.

The mania tapered off a little thereafter, adapted itself a touch for TV but it never really went away, enjoying a sudden boom here, a quick burst there. In Pakistan, for example, alongside bell bottoms and tight polyester shirts, the jingle lorded over the 1970s. Sohail Rana, Farrukh Abid and Anjum Affandi, among many others, steered the boom, stamping jingles for Kiwi, Binaca and Peek Freans (to name but three) firmly onto our minds.

Now, after a brief interlude, jingles are again jingling. Telecoms, biscuits, tea, chips, cooking oils, phone services, colas, shampoos, there isn’t a product category in the market without a jingle. In the words of one senior advertising professional: “It’s getting very boring and surely it’s affecting the way ads are made. The jingle is NOT A MUST.”

So are we overdoing them? Does every product need a jingle to sell? Have we sacrificed, at the altar of the jingle, a compelling concept and story line in our ads? Quite possibly.

Imran Syed, CEO, Adcom, the agency behind the wildly hummable and successful Talkshawk jingle, points to our love for formula.

“People feel they have a formula for success. You show, in a one-minute commercial, feel-good slices of life, nice visuals, bung in a jingle and you are onto a winner. This formula has been overexposed: jingles don’t work if they are there just for the sake of it. Just by singing you cannot break clutter.”

The Talkshawk jingle, explains Syed, was thought out.

“It was relevant information about the brand. It wasn’t there just for the sake of it. It had a reason.”

Zohra Yusuf, Creative Director at Spectrum DYR, seconds the thought.

“I find jingles are often a substitute for talking about product attributes. For example, there’s not much one can say about biscuits or milk, so it’s easy to resort to singing their praises. But they are being used for almost all products – sometimes for a feel-good factor.”

When it does make sense, there is nothing like a jingle. A jingle, and a good one in particular, as Syed points out can achieve what visuals, good concepts, great copy might all struggle to achieve: instant recall. It is why people like Salman H. Khan think you can never have enough of the jingle.

Khan is the Business Development Manager at Speed of Sound (SOS), a recording studio owned in partnership by Strings and Shuja Haider, and the creator of numerous jingles.

“I don’t agree that it’s been overdone. It’s a great way of registering a brand. If something can be recited by you, it’s great for brand recall. You can forget an image, but a catchy tune is more difficult to forget.”

And it’s true. Arguably, the majority of the great local ads that we do remember are because of their jingles, whether it is Binaca’s ‘Subha aur shaam’ or Macleans’ ‘Twice a day every day.’ It applies to recent vintage as well. Whether or not they are great ads or even brands, it is difficult to not be able to hum along with Kurkure, or even the insanely repetitive Telefun jingle, ‘Zero nine zero zero.’

This is essentially why we can never rid ourselves of the jingle: we have always made good jingles.

Yusuf tellingly points out that “advertising in Pakistan started with more of an audio tradition – through radio and the film industry – and it was the only talent available when TV came to Pakistan. The quality of jingles was excellent. By and large, it still is.”

Farrukh Abid runs the Magic Notes studio and is among the industry’s most respected and accomplished jingle-smiths, having worked on the classic Binaca tunes, Peek Freans and a number of shampoo products, with composers like Sohail Rana and Anjum Affandi.

“There is a time for everything,” he says. “The 1970s were the golden age for jingles, then it went quiet again until the early years of this decade when jingles came back into fashion. This period could last another two or three years before things change again.”

As well as the rich tradition of jingles in Pakistan, part of the reason for this second wave lies in the growth of the indigenous music scene in Pakistan.

“Since the end of the Zia regime, the music scene has grown,” explains Khan. “More people are making and listening to music now, and it has had an effect on jingles.”

Although Abid voices a refrain expected from a veteran (“jingles were better in our day”), he stresses justifiably that the technological changes in making music are likely to have an effect on future jingle-making. Not as much though, others add, as the evolution of radio in Pakistan.

In hindsight, it makes perfectly good sense that the first advertising jingle appeared approximately three years after radio became massive. The jingle’s natural home is on the radio, where sound, not visuals, is key. The rationale is that as FM radio in particular continues to progress, the art of jingle-making will too.

In Pakistan, there are currently two broad schools of thought on jingles on radio. Those (and Abid is among them), who believe that the current trend among advertisers to lazily paste on their TVC jingles to radio actually makes sense.

“It should be the same, otherwise recall will go. There has to be coherence between what the viewer sees on TV and what he hears on radio and the jingle achieves that,” argues Abid.

It may be a generational gap of sorts but the other broad thought, put forward by Khan and Syed, is that advertisers can be lazy in just pasting the same TVC jingle onto radio.

“It happens still and that mindset is there. It’s a shortcut. But in every campaign you have to do justice to the medium you use. You have to treat each as a separate medium and work to its specific requirements,” says Syed.

But, he reaffirms, it is something the industry will adjust to over time. Radio is still young in Pakistan and advertisers still relatively unfamiliar with its workings and benefits.

“People are beginning to think about it more now, about how to approach radio as an advertising medium,” explains Syed. “The awareness will come.” And with it will come more jingles.

Have we overdone the jingle? We probably have done in the past. We probably are doing it now. We probably will continue to do so in the future. But does it matter, if as most assert, a good jingle gives terrific recall? Few brands complain that it doesn’t work. Fewer still are likely to start now.