Radio Sales Café

We have been contacted by another jingle company planning to come into the market, etc. You know the spiel (sp).

 

While I have had good success with jingles in the past (emphasis on PAST); does anone have any recent/current success stories? 

 

This guy's presentation is all about "branding" and "TOMA"; which is THE way we sell, so even if he doesn't sell any, I suppose it would be a good affirmation to our Sales Team and the clients who sit though it.

 

Thanks Gals and Guys!

 

 

 

Joel

Joel, Jingles are one of the "Powerful Seven" tools and techniques I've used successfully over the years to help clients. We all like to remind our prospects that we learned the alphabet by singing it, and we memorized the ingredients of the Big Mac by singing them, etc. Come to think of it, Intel made a fortune with a jingle that wasn't even sung - just the four notes that ran underneath the words "Intel Inside" (can you hear them?) - and they were all over TV, thanks to the aggressive coop funding they provided to all the computer companies for including it at the end of their spots. But I digress... The one thing I've had to fight when jingle companies come into the market (at our invitation, by the way) is their tendency to follow a rather predictable CNA meeting by feeding back to the client lyrics that cover many/most/all of the salient points derived from the CNA. The result is a jingle that tries to do too much - to say too many wonderful things about the client*. Don't get me wrong, the client usually eats it up - all that chest-thumping. And therein lies the problem. A jingle - any commercial, for that matter - that makes the client feel good about himself because of all the swell things being said or sung about his business, is likely to have just the opposite effect on the listener. Because the listener doesn't care about the advertiser. The listener cares about...himself or herself. So, just as we've learned to write commercials that talk to the customer about the customer in the language of the customer (big nod to Roy the Wizard), we need to take the same approach in crafting jingles, especially at the local/regional level, where we're not necessarily getting the top-tier talent that national accounts can afford to hire. For better or for worse, listeners consciously or subconsciously measure the quality of local jingles against the standard of national jingles, just as local TV production stands in the shadow of national production. A year or two ago, one of my clients was featured in Radio INK magazine. I'd written about them earlier, and posted a copy of their jingle at the end of the blog piece, The Client Whose Ad Copy Never Gets Changed. You might find the story interesting. In any case, I'm grateful that they asked me for help, rather than simply signing off on what the jingle writer had come up with. By investing the additional time in a rewrite and insisting on getting it as "right" as we could, we ended up with a spot that has served the client well for many years now. So, I guess my thought would be: monitor the process and get involved, for the sake of your clients and salespeople, who will have to live with the results long after the jingle guys have left town. Let me hasten to add - just to set the record straight, especially in view of the number of "jingle guys" who are active members and participants here at Radio Sales Cafe (and I hope they'll agree with me on this) - serving the client is our ultimate objective, whether we're selling radio advertising or musical images. So, the best results will come when we're working with the jingle company and the client in a team effort, as opposed to individual players jockeying for position. Thanks for the post, and the opportunity to weigh in. *There are always exceptions to the rule. The attached jingle does, I think, a fine job of painting pictures in the mind of the target consumer (someone looking for help with landscaping or home gardening), without getting so cluttered with superlatives that it falls over itself. What do you think?

Hi Joel:

It had been a pretty long time since any jingle company had been in Jamestown. One of our newer clients had worked with BRG Music Works and we were getting all sorts of requests wanting to know how they got their jingle. So we set up some appointments in January and sold all but one. They worked well with us and the clients getting the right sound, etc. They're a little more spendy than some of these guys that travel around, but the quality is there.