• Associated Press, Wednesday, January 4, 2006 11:45 AM

There was a time when marketers relied on a snappy jingle to help them sell their wares--a little ditty so memorable that consumers would find themselves humming it despite themselves. Remember "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener," or how about "The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup!" But these days the advertising jingle has been replaced by old rock and roll tunes that have already made their way into buyers' consciousness. A good example is Microsoft's use of "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones for a Windows campaign. Why the change? A successful jingle today would simply cost too much to achieve the kind of repetition necessary to make it stick. In the past, national advertisers could guarantee jingle saturation by buying time on the big three TV networks, whereas now they would have to include technology's new media platforms: cable, the Internet, satellite radio. "You need the old media environment to make it work," says Advertising Age Editor at Large Bob Garfield.

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