Or, the Dos and Don'ts of  Music for Advertising

Using music, especially sung jingles, has been the backbone of many a commercial for as long as commercials have had backbones. Music sets a mood, it sounds a fanfare and it fills in the gaps between words. In fact, music has been used more as pointing between the bricks of the script than it has been used in any other way. If you are going to use music in advertising, using it right is important. Music is an investment; just using it as some sort of glorified glue could be viewed as a bit of a waste.

This was highlighted to me a couple of years ago when I was writing a large pile of scripts for one radio station. Several of my scripts did not specify music, simply because I did not want music on them. Later I discovered that the production company who recorded the commercials put some pappy music track on them anyway because the sales rep felt that “a commercial that is just a voice over doesn’t make any sense.” This exposed an attitude towards advertising that I had somehow managed to miss, or perhaps cleverly avoid: If you wanted your advert to stand out, to be neat and fit the hole left for it, you shoved a bit library music on it. Better still, you got a cheapo off-the-shelf jingle thrown together; preferably a rip off of some famous song (can’t afford the royalties, you see.)

It seems I was spoilt while working in London; most of my clients had half decent budgets. If they were to use music, they would use great music. The voiceovers were mostly the best around. The production studios, such as those I worked for, could make a commercial sound like a film soundtrack and were given the hours to achieve it too. We had it all.

Out in the real world, however, the world of the local radio station, the regional cheap daytime TV spot, the run-it-once-and-hope-it-doesn’t-hurt campaigns of the small company, budgets are miniscule. What money they do have gets used up very quickly in the first hit. Over the years, as the radio groups have become bigger, the internal production has become a lot better, and local radio stations in particular are producing some fine ads. But the picture is very uneven. Decent lead time’s are still at a premium, and many of the clients, unused to high profile above the line campaigns, are probably not being as well served as they might be. There is an old saying “to cut your coat to suit your cloth.” I have heard that espoused in various forms quite a lot recently. However, experience has also taught me that a fine worker can really make a rather nice purse, even if only from a sow’s ear, however much he mixes his metaphors.

The point here is that just because a client is small and is somewhat short of budget they need not be automatically redirected to the waste bin of commercials manufacture. They can have a great commercial, well thought out and reflective of their business, and made in a timely fashion. All it requires is a rocket scientist.