FAQs

We always suggest to clients that they should work with as small a decision-making group as possible. You’ve heard the one about giraffes, right? (They’re horses designed by a committee). Everyone should be available for every call—this makes the process move faster, meaning you get your customized jingle sooner. And it’s also just a lot more fun when you don’t have to work backwards and catch people up with what happened during the previous calls.

Ideally, everybody who has “veto power” over the final jingle should participate in every call. It’s the best way to make sure that everything goes right from the start. And it’s also a very good idea to involve your radio representative or agency folks on every call with you. They’ve got years of expertise and experience, and if you aren’t sure about something, they’re your best local touchstone.

Keeping the group small and involving your rep will help you to move things along.

If you already have a slogan you’ve been using for your business for a long time, it’s a good idea to keep that tagline. The whole point of setting your tagline to music is to boost memorability and keep your business in the top of your audience’s mind. If they already know you by one great line, you’re halfway home; the jingle will bring it to life and make it unforgettable. (Can you still remember taglines from hometown businesses where you grew up? We bet you can!)

But even if you don’t yet have a slogan you like, you’ll have one by the time we finish. We work with our clients every day to develop taglines that really describe who they are and what they do and what makes them different from everybody else in town. Recently, working with a company that did mobile home liquidation, we collaborated and came up with “We Bring Great Value Home,” for example. It sounded fantastic with their customized music track and they loved the double meaning.

We know what you mean. A lot of people think that jingles are somehow a “thing of the past.” (If some of those people are your competitors, good for you…study after study has consistently shown for decades that music increases customer recall.)

The good news is, your music can be as hot and contemporary as you like. We have invested thousands of hours creating a comprehensive library filled with music tracks that run the gamut from classic to jazz to rock to “hip and contemporary” dance beats. We almost always find something in the library that’s just right for a client’s musical needs.

But there’s even better news. If you want everything about your jingle to be tailored just for you, we can do custom music, too. In this process, we build a music track for you from the ground up! We recently worked with a department store in northern California. Once we’d arrived at custom music for them (it was a traditional sounding piece), they decided they also wanted some “hip” versions of the same music that let them play their jingle(s) on a number of different stations with different formats.

This is a very common question, and we think the best answer is, we are all consumers! We all listen to the radio and watch television. We’ve probably spent thousands of hours hearing other people’s jingles. You know what sounds good to you, not because of some arbitrary personal quirk, but because all those years of listening to ads has actually been a deep education in what works for you. Think about all the jingles you can remember from years gone by.

Chances are, if a piece of music has grabbed your attention and imagination, it will grab someone else’s attention, too. Trust your instincts. Trust us, too. We design our jingles to be successful… it’s what our process is all about. And if you really want a second opinion, bring in your rep or somebody close to you to help you narrow down your final choice.

You always have the option to keep your music and have new lyrics sung. In fact, a great number of our clients call on us regularly to change or “update” a jingle. It’s remarkably inexpensive and allows you to keep the consistency you’ve developed with the music and melody going strong.

Another option is this: We can extend your original music or change it slightly to give it more “oomph.” An example…we recently just updated a jingle for Courtesy Chevrolet in Modesto, CA. They had been using the same music for a good long time (a smart thing to do), but they felt it needed a “boost.” They were also changing their name to Courtesy Auto Center. No problem…we developed a more forceful piece of music based on their established melody, and we simultaneously changed the lyrics. The result was a brand new sound, but it was still familiar to their listeners. Music helped build a bridge between who they had been and who they were becoming.