When you think of the most memorable advertising from the ’80s and ’90s, what comes to mind? We’d wager a bet that it’s a jingle—maybe dulcet tones from Stanley Steemer, promising to get your home cleaner, or a jaunty phone number sing-along for Empire Today flooring. Even Full House, the pinnacle of all things ’80s and ’90s, made a point of referencing the humble jingle: Joey has a gig penning them for an advertising firm.

Those musical ad slogans from yesteryear represent “peak marketing,” Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, the “branding guru” of TikTok, said in a video, pointing to older examples like State Farm’s “Like a Good Neighbor” tune written by Barry Manilow in the ’70s, or songs from the mid-aughts advertising FreeCreditReport.com. But the term itself is falling out of fashion.

“I think the word jingle means something specific; It’s that ’70s, ’80s, ’90s song that is cheesy, or at least a throwback,” Zach Pollakoff, executive producer at audio production house Heavy Duty Projects, said, while Heavy Duty’s music producer Tom Cathcart said the term “comes with baggage.”

That doesn’t mean the jingle itself is dead. Call it what you want, but branded songs have been experiencing a revival thanks to TikTok, where a brand’s custom audio can become an irresistible earworm and help it stand out.

“We create singles, not jingles,” Geoffrey Goldberg, co-founder and CCO of creative agency Movers+Shakers, which has made audio for Hasbro and made the original track for e.l.f.’s #eyeslipsface TikTok challenge, told us.

Read the full story here.—AM

A seamless customer experience is a huge selling point for brands—one that can make a marketer’s job easier.

In the name of improving customer experiences, Amazon and Panera are turning to large language models and conversational AI to improve ordering. The success they’ve seen so far is undeniable, but is this really the future? Learn how this new phenomenon could change the game.

Today Meta rolled out brand safety and creative tools for Reels advertisers, expanding the brand suitability controls it released for Facebook and Instagram feeds in March.

Meta’s inventory filter uses AI to help sort organic content into categories aligned with Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) suitability standards, a framework that helps identify content related to topics some marketers may not consider brand-safe, such as “arms and ammunition,” “spam or harmful content,” and “adult and explicit sexual content.” Zefr, a third-party verification service, provides advertisers with reporting on how Meta’s inventory filter performs.

The inventory filter lets advertisers choose whether they want ads to appear next to content on an expanded, moderate, or limited basis according to its content classifications. Some content, such as anything that promotes illegal drugs or misinformation, cannot be monetized, according to Meta’s policies.

The update is part of a broader overhaul of Meta’s brand-safety functions. Samantha Stetson, VP of client council and industry trade relations at Meta, told us that the decision to start with the feed came from client interest. From there, the “next obvious place” to begin testing was Reels given how much the short-form offering has grown in use, hovering around 200 billion views per day.

“It definitely took us time the first time around, because of the complexity, but the great thing is now that the underpinning of the taxonomy, and how to read it, and the AI, can be translated to help us expand it to placements like Reels,” Stetson said.

Advertisers will be able to see what types of content falls under which category in the Zefr portal, Stetson said, which can help brands understand what the difference between expanded versus limited means in practice.

Continue reading here.—KH

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Jason Apaliski is executive creative director at Pereira O’Dell, where he’s spent more than 15 years. Previously, he was an art director at AKQA.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? There have been so many memorable campaigns over the years. One brand I love working with is Adobe. They are a brand that truly understands their audience and how to engage them by tapping into culture—they also have massive creative ambitions, which is the best type of client to have. Some of my favorite campaigns we’ve created in partnership with Adobe include our Cover Art Song contest with Lil Nas X, What Whack Wears contest with Tierra Whack, and our most recent campaign, ”Create What’s True to You” with Billie Eilish.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? One that sticks out in my head is Wendy’s “Keeping Fortnite Fresh” campaign from a few years ago. Fortnite had just introduced a new mode called Food Fight, inviting fans to choose either Team Burger or Team Pizza based on the world’s two most popular restaurants, Durrr Burger and Pizza Pit. You would think Wendy’s would be Team Burger, but they astutely observed that Durrr Burger only had freezers for their patties, so they aligned with Team Pizza and made it their primary objective not to be the last person standing but to make sure not a single burger freezer was left in the game. Talk about living the brand truth of “fresh, never frozen beef.” It was so simple and smart, but most importantly, it was a great example of how a brand can show up in a way that not only respects an audience’s culture—but adds something ridiculously fun and memorable to it.

Keep reading here.

IRL ads hit different. A whopping 84% of consumers can remember seeing digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads. For context, recall rates for social media ads were 55% for Gen Zers, 46% for millennials, and 26% for boomers, according to a study by Kantar and Snapchat.

Moral of the stat story? DOOH ads can be a game changer in helping you reach your audience. Download Vistar Media’s ebook Mind the Gap here.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Reputation: A guide to checking your “email sender score,” plus tips on how to improve it.

All mine: The case for ditching shared marketing budgets to make more out of your spend.

’Tis the season: This holiday marketing guide from Microsoft covers how to cash in on the gift-giving season.

Tune in: Find out how to make the most of CTV opportunities and enhance your TV performance strategy in a changing media landscape with Freshpet and our sponsor, MNTN.*

Holiday helper: Nothin’ like that festive time of year to keep marketers on their toes. We teamed up with Intuit Mailchimp to give you solutions to help clear holiday hurdles. Check it out.*

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Paramount selected iSpot.tv to serve as a currency alternative to Nielsen on linear and streaming TV, meaning advertisers are expected to be able to transact on iSpot data beginning in the first quarter.
• Hollywood writers ratified a three-year contract with major film and TV studios, officially bringing the 148-day-long writers’ strike to a close.
• Brooklinen-owned Marlow will be sold in Walmart stores across the country as part of the bedding brand’s continued expansion into traditional retail.