Everyone’s Talking About Jingles. Here’s What They’re Missing.

Somewhere between Cannes 2026 and the flight home, the jingle became cool again...

Our LinkedIn feeds suddenly became a fever dream. Marketers were talking about sound. Creatives were also talking about sound. People who spend years avoiding the word jingle were suddenly talking about… jingles.

The catalyst was Mark Ritson’s wonderfully blunt Cannes provocation: “Get a jingle.” Backed by new System1 analysis of more than 1,250 Effie-entered campaigns, the research showed just how hard distinctive audio can work as a brand asset. Sonic devices delivered 2.3× the brand fluency of a standard visual logo in the research; jingles scored 1.9×. (LBB ↗; Commercial Radio & Audio ↗)

As two people who work in this industry everyday at MassiveMusic, we obviously enjoyed watching the rest of marketing discover what we’ve been banging on about for years.

But the conversation also exposed something else: we’ve made branded sound unnecessarily complicated. So when Ritson says “get a jingle”, we’d interpret that more broadly as: get a distinctive sonic asset.

The research tradition around distinctive brand assets has been saying much the same thing for years: assets become valuable through recognition, uniqueness and consistent deployment, not simply because someone made them. Sonic-branding research reaches a similar conclusion. Keller and Spence’s review of sonic-logo design argues that building recognisable sonic identity requires consistent use of distinctive sounds across multiple channels. (Sounds Like Branding ↗)

So yes, get one. But then comes the important bit: launch it properly, use it relentlessly, and treat it like an asset, not a deliverable.

Collage of classic jingle-era brands including Wheaties and Dr Pepper from the golden age of advertising jingles
The jingle never died. We just got embarrassed by the word.
Vintage photo of the Wheaties quartet at a piano, singers of the first radio jingle in advertising history

One thing the renewed sonic conversation has exposed is just how unnecessarily confusing our little corner of marketing has become.

Jingle. Sonic logo. Sonic device. Sonic asset. Soundmark. Mnemonic.

Mark Ritson made a similar point about distinctive branding terminology last year: marketers had managed to develop several different vocabularies for essentially the same strategic territory. (The Drum ↗).

Sonic branding is guilty of the same thing.

Contrary to “sonic logo”, everyone knows “jingle”. When Laura explains to her mum what her job exactly is (don’t we all), she says “Sonic branding”, to which her mum looks confused, to which she replies “Like jingles, for example”, and she understands.

The jingle, in its truest form, is a sung melody, including the brand name, and sometimes also the tagline.

Jingles also have one hell of a case study behind them.

On Christmas Eve 1926, Wheaties aired what is generally credited as the first singing radio commercial. At the time, the cereal was struggling badly enough that executives were considering discontinuing it. By 1929, more than 60% of Wheaties sales were coming from Minneapolis–St Paul, the market where the jingle was being regularly broadcast. The company expanded the radio campaign nationally. Sales soared. (General Mills’ own history of the campaign ↗).

Almost a century later, the underlying mechanism looks remarkably familiar: repetition builds memory. And sometimes the unfashionable thing works because human brains have not received the latest advertising-industry trend report.

Laura’s home country of Belgium provides another almost comically perfect example. Everyone knows:

CarGlass herstelt, CarGlass vervangt.

Move across the Channel and you get:

AutoGlass repair, AutoGlass replace.

Same melodic structure, different market. Variations of the asset have been deployed internationally for years. It is not merely a catchy piece of music; it is a piece of brand infrastructure.

The 2026 version of this, of course, started on TikTok.

Romeo Bingham casually posted:

“Dr Pepper baby, it’s good and nice.”

The clip exploded past 45 million views on TikTok. Dr Pepper recognised what was happening, licensed the idea, collaborated with Romeo and turned it into a national commercial airing during the College Football Playoff National Championship - a broadcast that averaged 30.1 million viewers. (People ↗; ESPN ↗).

What we love about the Dr Pepper example is that nobody sat in a room and decided the brand needs a viral jingle strategy. Culture created the asset first. The brand embraced it as a ‘reactive sonic strategy’. We’ll be interested to see if the sonic logo is still part of the core brand strategy in a few years.

Collage of TikTok's Boom-Tring sonic logo with listeners in headphones, a modern take on the jingle
A sonic logo is only an asset if people actually hear it.
Audio waveform in TikTok's teal and pink colours representing the platform's sonic identity

Moving on to sonic logos, the definition becomes broader.

A jingle can be a sonic logo. A sonic logo does not have to be a jingle.

The best sonic logos act almost like visual logos for your ears: short, ownable signals that tell you who is speaking before you have consciously processed the message.

And there is good evidence that these tiny pieces of sound can carry surprising emotional weight. A 2022 study in the Journal of Product & Brand Management found that even very short sonic logos could influence emotional response and attitudes towards both the advertisement and brand. Researchers have also shown that variables as basic as pitch, pace and intensity change attention and the personality listeners attribute to a sound. (Scott, Sheinin & Labrecque, 2022 ↗; Mas et al., 2021 ↗).

IN THE BEST CASE, SONIC LOGOS ARE BUILT ON STRATEGY, NOT LUCK. THEIR SUCCESS ISN'T DOWN TO CHANCE OR VIRALITY, BUT MORE TO IMPLEMENTATION AND BRAND FIT. A FANTASTIC SONIC LOGO THAT ISN'T IMPLEMENTED CORRECTLY, AND THEREFORE NEVER HEARD BY THE CONSUMER, IS A TERRIBLE WASTE.

But even brilliant sonic design does not magically become a distinctive brand asset.

It has to be used. A lot.

One example close to home is TikTok.

When TikTok approached MassiveMusic, one of its challenges was increasingly obvious: TikTok content was travelling far beyond TikTok. Videos were being downloaded, reposted, embedded and shared across other platforms.

So the opportunity wasn't simply to make TikTok sound good. It was to make TikTok identifiable when you couldn't see TikTok.

The resulting two-beat sonic logo became embedded into the experience and consequently heard at enormous scale.

Today it has 81% global familiarity, with 84% associating it with attributes including entertaining, welcoming, authentic and unique. (The Sound of TikTok ↗).

Laura sometimes uses it as the second stage of the mum test.

Ask somebody if they know “TikTok’s sonic logo” and they might stare blankly.

Sing:

Boom-tring.

“Ohhhhh. THAT.”

Distinctive brand assets often do their best work before people have language for what they are doing. Nobody walks around saying, “I experienced a strong unaided recall of that distinctive auditory asset.”

They just know it. And this is where the industry can occasionally confuse creating the asset with building the asset.

You can spend six months developing the perfect sonic logo and destroy most of its commercial value with timid implementation. Conversely, a simple piece of sound with strong brand fit, deployed intelligently and consistently for years, can become enormously powerful.

The strategy doesn't end at the final mix.

In many ways, that is where it starts.

So, what’s the difference between a jingle and a sonic logo?

A jingle is a sung melody built around the brand name and sometimes its tagline.

A sonic logo is a distinctive, ownable sound that identifies a brand before the listener has consciously registered what they heard. Think of it as a visual logos for your ears.

Craftsman polishing a glass Apple TV logo, showing how far brand identity has moved beyond the jingle
0:000:01
Launch is part of the asset now.
Surreal portrait with a lily pond inside a woman's head, evoking how jingles lodge in listeners' memories

There is another wrinkle that feels particularly important in 2026. People now increasingly care how creative things get made.

Generative AI has made it possible to produce music, imagery, voices and entire campaigns at extraordinary speed. But the cultural response is complicated. Getty Images’ 2026 VisualGPS research found that while 66% of consumers are excited by the creative possibilities of AI, respondents still strongly preferred “real” imagery in advertising; 66% also believed work created solely by humans should command a higher price than AI-generated creative. (Getty Images: Human Craft or AI Potential? ↗).

That does not mean brands should avoid AI. It means craft has acquired signalling value.

Thus bringing us back to Dr Pepper.

The interesting part wasn't simply that the brand acquired a catchy piece of music. Romeo was credited and involved in developing their original TikTok into the national campaign. That creator relationship became part of the story.

When Apple TV launched its new identity, it commissioned FINNEAS to create its new sonic mnemonic. He created multiple versions for different contexts: a one-second sting, a five-second version for television and a longer cinematic version for theatrical releases. (The Verge ↗).

And look at what happened visually. At perhaps the precise historical moment when everyone expected an immaculate tech-brand animation to have been generated digitally, Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab built the identity out of actual glass, lights and cameras using practical effects. One of the world’s most technologically sophisticated brands deliberately made its new identity feel made, then put an extremely recognisable human creator behind the sound. The production story became part of the branding. (Apple TV case film↗)

That is an increasingly interesting consideration for sonic identity. Ten years ago, launch strategy might have meant “put the sonic logo on the end frame." Today it can mean making the creation itself a cultural event.

So, yes. Get a jingle and launch it properly.

The difference between a sonic asset and a distinctive brand asset is implementation. A jingle, sonic logo or mnemonic becomes valuable through recognition built over time, not through the quality of the audio file. Create it strategically, launch it as a cultural moment where possible, and deploy it consistently for years. That is what the jingle revival conversation is missing.

Ritson’s provocation works because it is wonderfully simple. So yes, get a jingle. Or get a sonic logo. Call it a mnemonic, if you prefer. But don’t mistake owning an audio file for owning a distinctive brand asset.

The real work is in making it ownable, using it consistently, and giving it enough exposure to become familiar. Increasingly, how it was made and launched matters too: who created it, where it came from, and what that story says about the brand.

And then comes the hardest part for an industry addicted to the latest trend: keep using it.

Because in an age of infinite content, memory may be the scarce resource. And three seconds of sound, used intelligently for ten years, can be worth more than another thousand pieces of content nobody remembers.

If this got you thinking about your own sound, let’s talk.

MassiveMusic helps brands define and build distinctive sonic identities ↗ that stand out against the competition. When done right, a sonic ecosystem can strengthen your brand's personality, increase memorability and become a more powerful asset over time.

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