Music in advertising

Music in advertising refers to music integrated in (mass) electronic media advertisements in order to enhance its success. Music in advertising affects the way viewers perceive the brand by different means and on different levels, and “can significantly effect the emotional response to television commercials.” It also has an effect on the musicians whose music is featured in advertisements.

In advertising, “music can serve the overall promotional goals in one or more of several capacities.” David Huron came up with six primary categories, which include: entertainment, structure and continuity, memorability, lyrical language, targeting, and authority establishment.

The entertainment aspect of music helps make an advertisement more appealing by adding aesthetic value to it. An advertisement that has high aesthetic value will be able to capture more attention from the audience. From this point of view, “music need not necessarily manifest any special affinity with a particular product or service in order to play an effective and useful function.”

The music functions more as bridge between viewer and advertisement in this case.

Music supports an advertisement's structure and continuity by mediating between disjoint images”. Accompanying a TV commercial, music either structures the narrative or tells a narrative itself. It can also create an antagonist and protagonist within this narrative by giving them typical musical figures, harmonies or melodies. Moreover, music has the ability to emphasize dramatic moments within the advertisement, and therefore creates both structure and continuity.

Music in advertising is “the most common musical technique for aiding memorability and hence product recall".

Music serves the function of making a product more memorable to viewers, as it is known to "linger in the listeners mind." When used in an advertisement, the content of the ad lingers along with the music. Easily recognizable music is put in television ads to produce a “significant positive relationship with recall and comprehension” for the viewer. On top of this, “recall of information is improved when cued with a well-known song.” Advertisements strategically use popular music to make a lasting impression on viewers.

For providing rational facts in the same time “mixtures of speech and song provide advertisers with opportunities for both logical, factual appeals [through spoken and written language] and emotive, poetic appeals [through music].”

...
Wikipedia