By Kelly Wiley

Subway started with commercials of Jared Fogle talking about the weight he lost by eating their subs. Now Subway advertises their singsong “$5 footlong” commercials.

It’s tunes like these that people catch themselves humming along to hours after a commercial, said Steve Broderson, creative director for Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions in Lexington.

The phrases that stick in the minds of viewers may be well planned, but it is the catchy jingles that go along with those phrases that advertisers sit around and ponder over for days, he said. Those songs are the ones that either make or break a commercial.

“People remember melody and rhythms,” Broderson said.

Broderson, a jingler – a name given to those advertisers who write the catchy tunes – himself, said he gotinto the profession by accident. Kentucky’s famous soft drink, Ale-8 One, bought a bunch of ad space on MTV and VH1. They came to Cornett looking to come up with a new slogan to replace their old ad because it wouldn’t fit with the audiences of those networks.

“All they had was their old advertising and it was dorky,” Broderson said. “It just wasn’t a good fit with the MTV crowd; it would have been laughed at.”

Broderson helped out with the Ale-8 One commercial and has been creatively designing commercials ever since. Helping with recent commercials for Keeneland and UK, Broderson records his own music for most of the commercials.

Broderson said some of the jingles from past commercials still inspire him while he sits in his basement, where his home studio is located, trying to come up with new jingles for clients.

Commercial jingles fell out of favor for a little, but Broderson said polls show people don’t remember the gist of the commercial if there is no music in the background.

“Nobody hummed the announcer on the radio,” Broderson said. “The stuff that is spoken to you doesn’t stick, but music is kind of the glue that holds the message and sticks it in your brain.”

Broderson said the only company who has been successful at making a commercial with no music is Apple. He said these commercials have been successful because they use the same slogan in every commercial: “Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.”

However, people on the screen with no background noise don’t usually grab the attention of the viewers like Apple has done.

“(Apple’s commercial) is consistent. You have to have consistency,” Broderson said. “Jingles, if you run them long enough, are consistent. You have to maintain that consistency for people to get it.”

Some people get it and some people don’t. If they aren’t humming it days later, then Broderson said most likely they either didn’t get it or it wasn’t clever enough. In the hopes of having people understand, jingles have received some fine-tuning during the 21st Century.

Nowadays, companies may skip the catchy jingle, but advertisers still pay close attention to music. By approaching pop and rock bands, advertisers have been able to get some well-known artists to record songs specifically for a commercial.

For example, the current Wrigley’s gum commercial features Chris Brown. Because of this newfound aspect, Broderson said commercial jingles will always be around, currently with some famous faces behind them.

Barry Manilow actually got his start writing and performing jingles on the State Farm Insurance, Stridex and Band-Aid commercials, he said.

“I don’t think jingles will go away,” Broderson said. “They will change form and they will probably sound a lot different than they did in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but I don’t think the music will ever go away. Music is a great tool for remembering things and I don’t see that going away.”