Our Best New Ad is a Jingle
We’ve written before that the overwhelming majority of an ad’s persuasion happens through the audio that the listener hears.
As Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign mastered 75 years ago, the best campaign ad might just be a jingle.
So we used our best-in-class technology (and our musically inclined team) to make jingles we now serve directly to voters where they listen to music: Spotify, Pandora and Youtube. Our jingles turn a campaign’s core message into a short, repeatable musical phrase designed to stay with the audience, built on tested messaging.
The coolest piece of it? We can serve them up in genres specific to each voter’s preferences. Listen to a lot of country music? You’ll get the country version. Big pop fan? You’ll get the pop version.
Now, we’re running dozens of versions for many of our clients right now.
Trust us, it’s worth your 15 seconds!
The evidence our jingles work
Of course we didn’t just make a few jingles and get right to running them, we confirmed our jingles hold attention and persuade voters. We ran a randomized experiment with 10,746 voters. Respondents saw one of our jingles, a non-political commercial, or no video at all, then filled out a mock ballot that included a fictionalized judicial race. The ads asked voters to vote NO on three named judges, so the scoreboard was simple: did you remember those names and vote NO?
The jingle won, and it wasn’t close: 60.5% of jingle viewers voted NO on the named judges, performing significantly better than the other ads we tested. We re-ran the result thousands of times allowing for sampling error, and the jingle finished first every single time.
It’s not rocket science that people love music and we remember a catchy hook better than just about anything else. And we know that persuasion happens in your ears. So the message is delivered where your brain is looking for it, packaged up in a way you’ll remember.
The song matches the listener
The country music jingle we linked above is just one version of what we can make. We’re now able to match the genre of the jingle a voter receives to the kind of music they actually listen to on Spotify and YouTube. The country listener hears the country cut, the pop listener hears the pop cut, and the message inside stays identical and tested.
Persuasion research and streaming-era targeting, finally in the same ad.
Jingles are built for late money
Late money has one job: turn dollars into persuasion, fast, among the voters who are still gettable, in races that are already defined.
By the closing weeks, the tuned-in voters have picked a side. What’s left is the hardest audience in politics, people who are undecided or barely aware the race exists, who won’t watch a debate or read a news story between now and Election Day.
That’s the voter the jingle is built for. It doesn’t ask for their sustained attention, it takes 30 seconds and leaves something behind, a name and a message that keep replaying after the ad is over. In our experiment, that translated to about 15 extra votes per 100 viewers on the exact question late money cares about: did the name stick, and did a vote attach to it.
And it moves at late-money speed. The template is built, the four genres exist, every cut carries tested messaging, and they’re on the air right now. Swapping in your message, your name, and your state is fast enough to fit a closing-weeks buy. The survey result sets the expectation, and the field test comes next.
If your dollars have to work in the next three weeks, put them in a song voters can’t shake.
Want to hear yours? Get in touch.
