We killed the jingle because marketing got bored of it. Customers didn't.

Somewhere in a marketing meeting right now, someone is saying their jingle feels a bit dated.

Here’s how it usually goes. The brand has had the same five notes for years. The marketing team has heard them in every edit, every approval, and every agency presentation since day 1. Call it 400 times or more a year. So someone new (a new CMO, a new agency, a new brand manager with something to prove) suggests a refresh. Something more modern. Or no sound at all, because nobody wants to be “the cheesy brand”.

Meanwhile the customer has heard it maybe a dozen times. Most of those while doing something else. They’re only just starting to connect it with your brand. And if you think jingles don’t work, just hang out for an hour with my 5 year old and listen to some things he randomly sings. O O Ohh O’Brien is his favourite!

In my experience, most brand assets don’t die because they stopped working but because the people inside the business got bored of them first.

At Cannes this year, Mark Ritson put it less politely.

Ritson shared the stage with Andrew Tindall, chief growth officer at System1, to present new research on audio. System1 looked at more than 1,250 campaigns from the Effie Awards between 2007 and 2023, across the UK and Ireland, Europe, and the US. (Cannes 2026: Mark Ritson and Andrew Tindall on global audio research, LBB Online, 24 June 2026)

The headline numbers:

• Campaigns using audio saw an 81% lift in price insensitivity and trust
• Across all campaigns, audio drove a 75% profit uplift
• The uplift varied by market: 23% in the UK and Ireland, 16% in Europe, and 5% in the US

Tindall called the price insensitivity result “wild” and “the rarest brand effect”. He’s right to be excited. Getting customers to care less about price is the thing most brands spend years (and a lot of discounting) failing to do.

Ritson’s takeaway was blunter.

”Get a jingle and use a jingle; [it] is probably the single f***ing best thing you can do for your advertising.”

The real problem: nobody knows it’s you

The line from the session that stuck with me wasn’t the jingle one. It was this: “80% of your ads, your viewer doesn’t know it’s you.”

That’s the problem sound solves. Ritson’s view is that a top-quartile distinctive ad carries seven distinctive brand assets, with four of them in the first two seconds. Most brands I’ve worked with struggle to name seven assets, let alone fit four into two seconds.

Sound is one of the few assets that works when people aren’t looking. And most of the time, people aren’t looking.

Why sound punches above its weight

Tindall boiled audio’s advantage down to three things: scale, repetition, and emotion.

Scale is the easy one. In the UK, he pointed out audio can be around 10 times cheaper than TV for similar reach. Similar numbers are being seen in Australia, with 6 to 10 times the reach for a similar spend (ThinkTV Payback Australia full report).

Repetition is where most brands fall over. A sound only works once people have heard it enough times to link it to you. That takes years and a broad media plan, which is why getting bored of it internally does so much damage.

Emotion is the bit that’s hardest to measure and easiest to underrate. People remember how something made them feel long after they’ve forgotten the ad. A few notes can carry that feeling across every place your brand shows up.

We had the opportunity to chat to Dominic Burnham from sonic branding agency Smith and Western. “Sound has always been used as a memory tool, from traditional storytelling to early years education. In essence it works because it gives the brain an additional cue for memory retrieval.”

What Smith & Western sees in practice

Where do brands start with sonic branding?

No matter your marketing budget or media spend, every brand can be taking advantage of sound. Whether you are creating something bespoke or applying consistent criteria for music and voice choices, it all begins with a cohesive strategy.

Ask yourself a few questions:

• What are you trying to say about the brand? (Brand positioning)
• Where do our customers experience our brand? (Audio touchpoints)
• What do my competitors sound like? (Sonic distinctiveness)

With a clear idea of the role of music, you can build a strategy that amplifies your brand, works for current and future audio touchpoints, AND helps you stand out from the crowd.

What are the most common mistakes brands make once they have a sonic asset?

The most common reason brands stop using a sonic asset or a consistent music strategy is governance. A new marketing team member, creative agency, or content creator comes on board and they are not made aware of its importance.

How long before it works?

Because this is a long-term brand asset, it takes time to establish and become attributable. Most likely the sonic logos you can hum right now have been around for 15+ years: Maccas, Bunnings, Netflix, and so on. Of course, recognition is largely down to repetition, so those with large media spends, in-store radio, or a direct speaker into your living room have a huge advantage. But recognition is best achieved through multi-contextual exposure (your brain attributes a sound faster when you hear it across multiple touchpoints). So for smaller brands without large media spends, get your music and sonic assets across every channel you can for maximum effectiveness.

What’s a recent Australian example of a brand using sonic branding well?

TPG are doing just that. They operate in a very noisy category but are applying their sonic strategy consistently across marketing channels, internal, events, and on-hold, whilst their noisy neighbours are distracted by silly walks, puppets, and Steve Buscemi in space!

For the sceptics, what would you say to a marketer who thinks jingles are cringe?

That is the theory, but in practice you may still receive pushback from agency partners or team members who think “jingles” are cringe. Not all sonic branding is created equal. Listen to Finneas’ Apple TV intro and Budget Direct’s Insurance Solved jingle. Two very different examples of recent work that show very different approaches for brands with vastly different brand personalities. Find what works for your brand and embrace it.

What this looks like with small teams and budgets

If you’re running marketing with three people and a small budget that gets reviewed every quarter, this probably sounds like a big-brand problem. I’d argue it’s the opposite.

Here’s some rough maths. Say you build a three-second sonic logo once. Then you put it on everything: every video end frame, every radio or podcast spot, your support hold music, your app open, your social cuts. If your support line alone takes 3,000 calls a month, that’s 36,000 brand moments a year from one asset. Add 15 videos a month and you’re well past that. Over three years, you’re into six figures of exposures for something you paid for once.

Compare that with a visual refresh every 18 months, where you pay again and reset the clock on recognition each time.

To be fair to the research, bigger budgets did see bigger results. Small-spend campaigns saw a 27% profit lift, medium-spend 74%, and large-spend 88%. So no, a jingle won’t make a small budget behave like a big one. But 27% is still more than most of the things lean teams spend their energy and budget on.

If I was starting from scratch, this is what I’d do:

1. Audit what you already sound like. Hold music, app sounds, the stock track on your last three videos. Most brands already have a sound. It’s just accidental and inconsistent.
2. Pick one asset. Not a full audio identity on day one. One short, ownable sound.
3. Put it everywhere, the same way, every time. Consistency is the whole game.
4. Give it longer than feels comfortable.
5. Lock it in the brand guidelines. Make changing it a board-level conversation, not a new-agency one.

Dated to who?

The jingle didn’t disappear because it stopped working. It’s more than likely it went out of fashion because internal marketers got bored of hearing it.

So next time someone in the room says your sound feels a bit dated, ask them one question. Dated to who?

If you’d like to explore how your brand could be brought to life through sound, get in touch with Smith and Western for a free diagnostic and a conversation about how sonic branding could support your brand’s growth.