Earworms and adverts

How music turns memory into sales

Music can change everything. It can control how we feel. Think. Act.

Picture a scene from a horror movie. Now close your eyes, and imagine ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams playing over the top. The scene becomes less scary – funny, even.

Throughout the years, ads have experimented with leveraging the effects music has on our brains, and more importantly, our purse strings.

Founding father of advertising, David Ogilvy, famously said, “if you have nothing to say, sing it”, yet in the same breath claims, “advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything”.

It’s safe to say the industry is still divided, but music, memory, and behaviour certainly aren’t. Let’s dive in.

Original songs in adverts

Without the sound, are you able to identify this advert? Can you remember the song? The brand? The story?

If you guessed Milky Way, you are correct. This ad began circulating in 1989 and was broadcast all the way up to the early 2000s. For many, it ignites nostalgia - and this is no accident. Music lights up nearly all parts of our brains; to get technical, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the parts responsible for emotion and memory. If catchy enough, the music in the ads plants ‘earworms’ in our minds that trigger a positive association when we hear the song.

If you didn’t guess Milky Way, what did you guess? Or have you never seen it? Your uncertainty itself is evidence of how weak immediate brand recall can be when it’s not tightly linked to branding. Much like a baby duck who thinks the first thing it sees is its mother, our brains work in a similar way. Memory is rooted in how we felt at the time, so if the brand name/image isn’t woven tightly into that, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to remember it – at least straight away.

Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday!

For many Brits, Jess Glynne and Jet2 are synonymous, thanks to over a decade of her song ‘Hold My Hand’ being used relentlessly in advertising and on the planes themselves. Although some are frustrated by the songs’ overuse, there’s no doubt that the brand association is there.

However, in Summer 2025, a new earworm came to town. The classic ‘Hold My Hand’ song was overlayed with a voiceover done by Zoë Lister. For those familiar with the internet, you’ll no doubt recognise the opening lines of the audio: ‘Nothing beats a Jet2holiday!’

Did you read that in the original voice-over style?

For those who are perhaps unfamiliar, the UK social media space picked up the audio initially last summer and used it to layover videos and images of their tragic holiday mishaps – waterslide fails, drunk moments, missed flights. Soon, the trend became international - much like Jet2 flights themselves – and Jet2 experienced a £5.3 million revenue increase following the campaign. Wowza!

But why was it so popular? Well, while a full trend deep-dive is beyond the scope of this article, there is some insight from a Guardian interview with social media strategist Adam Gordon that can help us understand why the viral success of the campaign does not come as a shock.

“…the hold my hand line was always married to an on-screen POV shot of someone holding someone’s hand – a classic Instagram holiday shot – so the seeds were sown early, and deliberately.”

In a nutshell, the visuals are responsible for the success, and the audio earworm was just a tool to help it get there. Do you think the same rings true for the Milky Way ad?

Jolly jingles

To find out, we need to strip it right back.

The first-ever jingle was released 100 years ago by Wheaties in 1926. It started as an experiment, where a vocal quartet were paid $15 per performance (about $200 in today’s money) to sing the jingle live intermittently between their sets, but the success of the campaign quickly changed advertising forever.

Since then, many brands have used jingles as an attempt to force their way into the memory stores of consumers. There are too many to list, but here are some of my favourites. See if you can fill in the blanks.

• Autoglass repair, Autoglass _____

• Go com______! Go ____pare!

• Compare the market! Simples!

If you had a smile on your face while guessing those, then the earworm has done its job!

Conclusion

I think we are using jingles less because of the short-lived nature of trending soundbites on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Nobody wants an expiry date! Jet2’s viral success proves that audio can stick in our minds and translate to brand recognition, but today’s earworms burn bright and fade fast.

A thought to leave you with: the future of music in ads may no longer be about creating nostalgia that lasts a lifetime, but more about capturing attention for just long enough to stay relevant.