Music In Advertising: An Analytical Paradigm
These are only segments taken from the full article: Musical Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4 (1989) pp. 557-574.
David Huron

Of the estimated sixty billion broadcast advertising hours encountered by North Americans each year, approximately three-quarters employ music in some manner. Music can serve the overall promotional goals in one or more of several capacities. For the purposes of this essay, six basic ways are identified in which music can contribute to an effective broadcast advertisement: 1) entertainment, 2) structure/continuity, 3) memorability, 4) lyrical language, 5) targeting, and 6) authority establishment. The following discussion of these six features is ordered in more or less historical order according to their chronological introduction as marketing strategies.

1. Entertainment
Good music can contribute to the effectiveness of an advertisement merely by making it more attractive. A good ad engages the attention of an audience, and the most straightforward way of achieving this is to fashion an appeal which is entertaining. Historically, the use of music in advertising originated in early vaudeville, where music served to candy coat a spoken narrative sales pitch. Music served to engage listeners' attention and render the advertisement less of an unwanted intrusion. The music need not necessarily manifest any special affinity with a particular product or service in order to play an effective and useful function.

2. Structure/Continuity
Music may also be employed in various structural roles. Perhaps the most important structural role is in tying together a sequence of visual images and/or a series of dramatic episodes, narrative voice-overs, or a list of product appeals. This is the function of continuity.

A second structural function is the use of music to heighten or emphasize dramatic moments or episodes. This is also a major function of music in films. This structural use is evident in a 1983 McDonald's Restaurant radio spot created to introduce the "Sausage McMuffin."

3. Memorability
The use of rhythmic foreshadowing in the "Sausage McMuffin" ad points to a third important function for music: to increase the memorability of a product or the product's name. Consumers are known to favor products which elicit some degree of recognition or familiarity -- even if it is merely the product's name. It is one of the peculiarities of human audition and cognition that music tends to linger in the listener's mind. Surprisingly, such musical lingering may occur even when the mind is an unwilling host. Thus, the association of music with the identity of a certain product may substantially aid product recall. Despite the largely visual orientation of human beings, photographs and visual images do not infect human consciousness to the same extent tht some melodies do. Listeners are sometimes known to display evasive behavior in an effort to prevent being "seeded" by a melody they know will persist mentally long after the actual sound disappears. The classic "jingle" is the most common musical technique for aiding memorability and hence product recall.

4. Lyrical Language
A fourth technique of musical enhancement is the use of lyrical language. Vocal music permits the conveyance of a verbal message in a nonspoken way. Language utterances can sound much less naive or self-indulgent when couched within a musical phrase rather than simply spoken. An individual can respectably sing things which would sound utterly trite if said.

Agencies exploit this polarity between speech and song by relegating factual information to spoken language and emotional, nonfactual messages to lyrical language. Mixtures of speech and song provide advertisers with opportunities for both logical, factual appeals and emotive, poetic appeals.

In general, national brand advertisers tend to favor poetic appeals over logical appeals, since specific logical, factual distinctions between competing products often tend to be weak. Minor product differences may often be amplified through the use of music. Also, musical lyrics (as opposed to a straight narrative pitch) are useful as an authoritative frame. Statements which are sung elicit less critical reflection than spoken statements. Indeed, this distinction is reflected in courts of law, which are much less apt to find sung statements slanderous than their spoken counterparts.

5. Targeting
Musical styles have long been identified with various social and demographic groups. Musical style might therefore assist in targeting a specific market. The style may function as a socioeconomic identifier -- a device for addressing a specific audience.

The highly competitive environment of advertising strategies ferrets out those targeting strategies which are less optimal. It follows that an observer can learn about social meanings in music simply by examining the advertising strategy. Radio and television advertisements are the most overt records joining life-style, social class, and material aspirations to musical style. They are, consequently, useful tools for unraveling musical meanings in a social and cultural context.

6. Authority Establishment
Closely related to the targeting function is the use of music to enhance an ad's credibility, to establish its authority. Indeed, it may be the case that effective targeting is merely the result of proper authority establishment. A simple way of establishing authority is through expert testimony (such as race-car driver Jackie Stewart advocating Ford motor cars) or expert endorsement (such as Crest toothpaste's approval by the American Dental Association). Authority may also be fostered through testimonials of non-technical authorities -- notably by testimonials of celebrities who have no specific expertise with respect to the product. Despite their lack of product-specific expertise, however, celebrities will have a distinctive demeanor, style, or air which may lend weight or credence to the testimonial.

In addition to credence established by personal authority, advertisers may employ actors and actresses on the basis of group authority, the most important groups being those associated with race, sex, age, and social class or status. Since differences in musical taste have close correspondences to such groups, musical style may be used as a very effective nonverbal identifier.

To the extent that advertising succeeds in enticing an audience, the advertising must have some genuine appeal. A successful advertisement is able to strike some meaningful chord -- something the listener values. The product itself rarely carries sufficient appeal alone, so advertisers will endeavor to link or join the product to some cultural value which stirs more profound allegiances. Bathroom tissue, for example, does not conjure up deep allegiances or emotions except for Western travelers in developing countries. The cuteness of fluffy kittens, however, does manage to elicit more fundamental attractions -- and so such associations are created by advertisers to sell bathroom tissue.

What distinguishes music from traditional advertising is that advertising maintains a distinction between the ad itself and the service or artifact to be purchased. Consuming the ad is not identical to consuming the product. In music, however, this is not the case. The product and the advertisement are one and the same -- they are inextricably intertwined. A musical work can be regarded as self-advocating; a work sells itself. The same techniques of social targeting, memorability, and establishment of authory are just as crucial as they are in advertising .

Indeed, top-forty production practices as well as the advent of music videos reflect a growing entanglement of music and promotion -- of values and marketing. The so-called musical "hook" is just a species of jingle, oriented toward the achievement of the same purpose: increasing memorability and product recall. Through quotation, allusion, or plagiarism, musical gestures such as riffs, instrumental timbres, rhythms, and so forth are used both to target audiences and to establish msuical authority.

However one measures good music, it must be acknowledged that, on a second-for-second basis, advertising music is perhaps the most meticulously crafted and most fretted-about music in history. Nationally produced television advertisements in particular may be considered among the most highly polished cultural artifacts ever created. But it is the overt knowledge of objectives and the consequent desire to control and handle the tools of musical meaning which make advertising such a compelling object of musical study.

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