Bernard Gauthier

If you love the way shows like shows like Saturday Night Live parody  TV commercials, or the way Apple’s commercial for the iPod Nano Video brought Feist’s fame to a whole other level, you’ll know what the headline of this posting is all about. Popular music in advertising seems to be all the rage these days but the flow between ads and music (or any form of art) has always run in both directions. Heck, even the Apple iPod spot was parodied by MAD TV. What I find especially interesting is the history behind these porous borders between art, entertainment and advertising.

This post, I have to admit, is a re-purposed post I wrote for a graduate course I recently completed at Carleton University. I was reacting at the time to an article by Timothy Taylor in Television & New Media in which Taylor looks at some notable contemporary campaigns with popular music (i.e. Mitsubishi). While he does a great job of exploring the economics of the music and advertising industries that contribute to this practice, Taylor doesn’t pay much attention to the history of the relationship between art, entertainment and advertising. As the links below will show, the history of long and interesting.

I quite agree with Taylor that advertisers act as “arbiters of taste” (p. 241) - a role they have been playing since the emergence of modern advertising in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, for example, ad men like Ernest Elmo Calkins started to take a closer look at the avant garde art movement in Europe and recognized its potential for advertising. He was struck by the ability of this style of art to capture and hold the audience’s attention and began a process that saw most of leading agencies of the day switch from more realistic illustration to modern, more impressionist or art deco design. In a letter he wrote upon his return to the U.S. from Paris in 1924, Calkins explained the potential link between advertising and modern art this way:

“It is an extremely new art and some of it too bizarre but it achieves a certain exciting harmony and in detail is entertaining to a degree… Believe me it is stimulating. It is not always beautiful but it is diabolically clever.”

Some nice examples include these ads for Pan American Airlines, Elizabeth Arden, and Capehart Radios. The print advertisers of the era, including Calkins, insisted on bringing modern art to product design as well, helping to bring modern design notions like streamlining into the homes of consumers and changing the way people bought and used everything from cars to toasters (both of which were to be clad in chrome and rounded edges) and bath towels (scroll down to see a classic example).

But what about music? How porous has the border been between popular music and advertising? In a word - very. Consider one of the first and most popular jingles ever - 1940’s Pepsi-Cola Hits The Spot. Difficult to find on the web, a portion of it is available on this very strange website and the entire jingle, nicely recorded is available in Real Audio format on the Old Time Radio site. Legend has it, the jingle was so popular it became both a hit single and the musical basis for a radio commercial to promote the sale of US War Bonds.

More recently, this movement from advertising to popular music happened with Coke’s legendary 1970s “I’d like to teach the world to sing” commercial/jingle. The story (as told by the Coca-Cola Company) behind this memorable song and TV spot includes multiple versions of hit singles recorded by two different groups and a host of references in popular culture ever since.  

A less famous but just as porous example comes from a TV commercial for the Plymouth Volare. Originally recorded in 1958 by Domenico Modugno (for which he earned a Grammy Award for Record of the Year), the song became a top 10 hit in North America thanks to Bobby Rydell. In 1979, the good people at Plymouth revived the song (with modified lyrics) for their TV spot. It has haunted me ever since.

One more example comes from a Canadian musician and songwriter, Hagood Hardy. What began as the soundtrack to a 1972 TV commercial for Salada Tea, became something of a classic in Canadian music - The Homecoming, which earned multiple Juno Awards for Hardy in 1975. Porous indeed.

The whole process came to a pitch boil in 1985 when Michael Jackson, who by then owned the rights to the music of the Beatles in addition to Neverland and its merry-go-rounds, began offering up the music to the highest commercial bidder. Nike, naturally, was first in line and used the song Revolution to advertise its shoes. The rest, as they say, is history. As neatly chronicled by this 2005 article by Sam McManis that began as a New York Times article and now exists in blog form. McManis mirrors Taylor’s position (though in more of a lament) that: “… selling out one’s artistic integrity has become an obsolete concept. The taint is gone.”

So where do I stand on the porous borders? On balance, I think it’s inevitable. Ad writers live in the real world, after all, and song writers watch and read and listen to ads all day long just like the rest of us. I also think the influence from one to the other is a positive thing when it is done right: great music in an ad engages us without resorting to unwarranted fear or meaningless titillation. And if an ad for an MP3 player or a car helps us discover a great band, then we’re that much the richer for it. I’ll leave it to the artists to decide what constitutes selling out these days.