The next time you dismiss as inconsequential those ”silly jingles” that periodically interrupt your prime-time TV viewing, stop and consider: How often do you catch yourself humming ”Heartbeat of America” or ”All Aboard Amtrak” and wondering where your brain picked up such flotsam?
Whether you like it or not-and it does smack of the Orwellian-your brain has been manipulated with meticulous care to whet your appetite for everything from automobiles to junk food, even as you headed for the refrigerator during commercial breaks. If you watch TV at all, you can run, but you cannot hide, from the jingles.
Mozart may have never crafted a symphony with the care employed by jinglemasters Susan Hamilton, David Buskin and Robin Batteau. But then Mozart had a lot more than 15 to 30 seconds to get his musical message across.
The jingle, born of radio and grown to vigorous adulthood in the TV era, is an art form and a masterpiece of compression. Batteau said he actually created a complete audio history of rock `n` roll when he wrote ”Heartbeat of America” for Chevrolet.
”What I thought Chevrolet meant to Americans like me was a kind of legend: the `57 Chevy,” he said. ”Chevrolet and rock `n` roll, in my mind, seem to have been born together. They were twins, separated at birth, so what I set out to do in creating `Heartbeat of America` was to re-create the birth of rock `n` roll.
”It starts out with kind of a country-folk opening, then it goes into more of an urban black style, and it merges the two at the end, which is what rock did in the `50s. To me, that`s what Chevrolet was about, and it worked.” All that in 30 seconds, and more.
”In order for anything to work, all of the elements have to line up in a row,” said Hamilton, who has plied the jingle trade in New York for 23 years. ”The style of music and the style of advertising has to fit the product category and the demographic, and the execution has to follow through. Then the advertiser has to put it in the right places, on the right shows, in the right time slot to reach the right group of people. If you get one of those elements out of line, the whole thing is defused and the thrust is lost.”
All that precision emerges not from a tightly controlled high-tech lab as might be expected, but from a joyful chaos of clutter and creativity.
HB&B, Hamilton, Buskin and Batteau`s company, occupies the Oscar Madison of New York offices: plastic foam containers with half-eaten lunches litter the place; Clio awards (the Emmys of advertising) are stacked at random among scattered videotapes; and a couch, facing a dusty fireplace, bears the unmistakable signature of a cat, not present for the interview but obviously in training for the Olympics of Scratch.
Two floors down, where the nitty-gritty of mixing and taping is done, engineer Jon Smith sends newly created music thundering through the electronic system that eventually will turn it into another psyche-tapping jingle. People run in and out of the bedlam like hyperactive children, singing, gibing, laughing and bouncing ideas off each other as if they were in a game of dodgeball.
It is exactly the atmosphere preferred by what Hamilton calls ”the absolute ultimate triumverate” of partners she formed last year after talking folk-singers/composers Buskin and Batteau into joining her as partners.
”I like to think of this brownstone as breaking out, releasing good humor, a lot of laughs and a lot of creativity,” she said of the company`s headquarters on Manhattan`s Upper East Side. ”The atmosphere around here is like the salons of the late 19th Century. You get a bunch of great people who get along and are very creative and put them all together, and all kinds of stuff comes out of that.”
Hamilton wears cowboy boots, exudes an aura of steely command and boasts that she has not had ”more than two weeks off in 23 years.” She may be the only Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude (Occidental College) graduate in the jingle-making business.
Following college, she won a Fulbright scholarship to study music in Rome and became a concert pianist before deciding that ”concertizing in Europe”
lacked the action she needed.
Returning to the U.S., she landed a $90-a-week job as an office assistant to commercial-maker Herman Edell and saw him off to Aspen, Colo., for a vacation that stretched to two years. She bought him out when he decided to run for mayor and has been at it ever since.
Buskin and Batteau still do concerts when they aren`t creating jingles. They are folk singers of the late hippie era who made several record albums for Epic and Columbia before forming the short-lived Pierce Arrow rock band. When it folded they decided that despite their counterculture roots, a bit of materialism might not be so evil after all.
”In the early `80s, David decided the record business was getting tougher, and he noticed that friends of his who were doing jingles instead of records all had houses in Connecticut, so he decided to give it a try,”
Batteau said.
Buskin`s first time out as a writer-composer for Hamilton won a Clio for the NBC prime-time theme song, and Batteau joined the firm a few months later, adding another Clio for ”Heartbeat.” Now they can both afford houses in Connecticut.
”I`ve got more generals than the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Batteau said.
”General Motors, General Electric, General Foods, General Mills and, of course, the Colonel”-Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Getting it together
They also have an advertising bonanza called diet Coke, for which Hamilton, who is successful enough to attract some of the biggest names in show business to sing her lyrics, paired the unlikely duo of Elton John and Paula Abdul. They made their commercial debut with TV spots on the American Music Awards show and the Super Bowl. Hamilton called it a gamble that paid off.
”Even though their musical styles are different, their energy and personalities mesh,” she said. ”They`re both energetic, spontaneous and full of humor and style. It`s the best use of celebrity talent I`ve ever seen.”
But it takes more than talent. Buskin said it also takes the malleability to change as the times change, to assimilate more and more information in less and less time.
”If you look at old TV ads from the `50s and `60s, they did live ads, usually with a spokesperson standing in front of the product, and they went on forever,” he said. ”I used to think the Smothers Brothers were very fast-paced, but then I saw `Laugh-In` a few years later and that made the Smothers Brothers seem slow. We change as a culture. Fast and slow are relative to the perceiver. To kids, 15 seconds seems just fine.”
Batteau, however, said 15 seconds may be nearing the minimal level in which a sponsor`s message effectively can be delivered by a jingle.
”We won`t have three-second commercials because the FCC won`t permit it,” he said. ”That approaches subliminal advertising.”
But does subliminal advertising, in which the image of a product is flashed on the screen for an unseen microsecond, really work?
”Actually, it doesn`t,” Batteau said. ”Satan and naked women are not lurking in ice cubes in advertisments for booze. That`s silly. Every message has a text and a subtext. The subliminal that works is when you tell a message without actually saying it; when you`re associating your product with a good feeling.
”In a sense that`s subliminal, but it`s fair and it may actually improve the product. If what you want to get from something you buy is satisfaction, then the advertisement is improving the product.”
