The Catchiest Advertising Jingles of All Time

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that advertising jingles have been part of American culture for a very long time — nearly 100 years. By most reports, the first jingle broadcast on the radio debuted on Christmas Day 1926 to praise the virtues of Wheaties cereal. Intervening decades brought a rise and fall in the production and popularity of jingles. At their peak, these artfully produced ditties shaped the minds and spending habits of generations of Americans.

Of course, not all jingles are created equal. Some, once burned into our consciousness, will never leave us. Others don’t make such a strong impression. And changing media habits have made ads easier to avoid. The Atlantic went so far as to declare jingles dead in 2016 — but that pronouncement just might have been premature.

To explore the staying power of jingles today, we got 735 U.S. residents to share their impressions of 67 advertising melodies … then had to go on a weeklong silence retreat. Once we returned with our hearing and sanity intact, this is what we found:

• “Nationwide is on your side” was the best-known jingle, recognized by 92.6% of survey respondents. It was followed closely by McDonald’s “Ba-da-ba-ba-baaa… I’m lovin’ it” and the canyon-crossing cry of “Ricola!”
• The top 10 most recognizable jingles are all attached to brands between 50 and 100 years old. Five of those jingles themselves reach back to the 1960s.
• Insurance firm jingles were immediately known to roughly half the survey’s respondents. All four insurance jingles — Nationwide, State Farm, Farmers, and Liberty Mutual — placed in the top third of the pack for recognizability.
• The Folgers coffee jingle placed second in the most likeable and catchiest categories, and near the top for recognizability, as well.
• Chili’s “baby back ribs” ditty won the title for catchiest jingle. Following in second and third place were Folgers’ timeless rhyme and the über-simple Ricola yodel.
• The repetitive jingle for Liberty Mutual tops both the most hated and the most annoying lists — but it also lands in the top 10 for catchiest.
• The jingle for Sara Lee is by far the most commonly misheard, with 74.6% of people thinking the lyrics are, “Nobody does it like Sara Lee.”

We tested our respondents’ familiarity with jingles in a variety of ways — remembering the tune, remembering the lyrics, naming the brand based on the jingle, and filling in the blanks. Read on to see what else we learned, as well as some best practices for advertisers planning their next jingle-based campaign.

The Power of the Earworm

Anyone who’s watched TV or listened to the radio knows that some product jingles are sticky, refusing to leave your head for hours — sometimes even days — after you’ve heard the ad. The lyrics don’t have to contain recognizable words (McDonald’s, Farmers, Chia Pet) or an actual melody (Ricola cough drops). You don’t even have to connect it with the product it represents to carry a jingle around all day: You just have to hear it. Then you can’t unhear it.

As a 28-year-old female survey taker from Texas put it: “The catchy ones are stuck in my head forever. I will never need to call J.G. Wentworth, but I will always remember their phone number because of their jingle.”

Read the full report here.

Using a weighted average for responses in the “Definitely remember, ”Maybe remember,” and “Doesn’t ring a bell” columns, we analyzed how recognizable each jingle was to our survey respondents. Here we show the results for the Top 20 Catchiest Jingles, but you can find rankings for the entire list at the end of this article.