Jingle

A jingle is a short song or tune used in advertising and for other commercial uses. Jingles are a form of sound branding. A jingle contains one or more hooks and meanings that explicitly promote the product or service being advertised, usually through the use of one or more advertising slogans. Ad buyers use jingles in radio and television commercials; they can also be used in non-advertising contexts to establish or maintain a brand image. Many jingles are also created using snippets of popular songs, in which lyrics are modified to appropriately advertise the product or service.

The first radio commercial jingle aired in December 1926, for Wheaties cereal.

Have you tried Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all 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, The kiddies never tire of them and neither will you.

So just try Wheaties, The best breakfast food in the land.

The Wheaties advertisement, with its lyrical hooks, was seen by its owners as extremely successful. According to one account, General Mills had seriously planned to end production of Wheaties in 1929 on the basis of poor sales. Soon after the song "Have you tried Wheaties?" aired in Minnesota, however, sales spiked there. Of the 53,000 cases of Wheaties breakfast cereal sold, 40,000 were sold in the Twin Cities market. After advertising manager Samuel Chester Gale pointed out that this was the only location where "Have You Tried Wheaties?" was being aired at the time, the success of the jingle was accepted by the company. Encouraged by the results of this new method of advertising, General Mills changed its brand strategy. Instead of dropping the cereal, it purchased nationwide commercial time for the advertisement. The resultant climb in sales single-handedly established the "Wheaties" brand nationwide. After General Mills' success, other companies began to investigate this new method of advertisement. Initially, the jingle circumvented the ban on direct advertising that the National Broadcasting Company, the dominant broadcasting chain, was trying to maintain at the time.

A jingle, it was discovered, could get a brand's name embedded in the heads of potential customers, despite not fitting into the traditional definition of "advertisement" accepted in the late 1920s. In this sense, the rise of the jingle marks a critical milestone in the development of comprehensive marketing, which would become the inclusive interdisciplinary term for the field.^{[citation needed]}