music in advertising

The tradition & historical record

Music in advertising refers to music integrated into mass electronic media advertisements to enhance its success. Music in advertising affects the way viewers perceive the brand by different means and on different levels, and "can significantly affect the emotional response to television commercials." It also affects the musicians whose music is featured in advertisements. ¹

In advertising, "music can serve the overall promotional goals in one or more of several capacities." David Huron proposes six primary categories, which include: entertainment, structure and continuity, memorability, lyrical language, targeting, and authority establishment. Also, it can be used to appeal to a person's emotions and senses. The targeting of one's emotions is done so that the audience is swayed toward what is being advertised. Using music to influence a person's emotional state is effective, since "music has a significant influence on the consumer's emotional state and mood, which is an important concept in the establishment of attitudes since mood states seem to bias judgments and opinions in the same direction as the mood state". Being able to use music in advertising has made advertisements more enticing and attention-getting for the audience. Fifteen seconds is currently the standard duration of a television commercial so advertisers need to be able to successfully grab their audience's attention, which music does. ¹

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." ¹

Music can be used as a cue to help drive a message to viewers. The music in an advertisement can be an indirect influence on the viewer's attitude towards the product being shown. Exciting music has been shown to increase arousal in skin response and heart rate which can be seen as a physical form of showing emotion through music. Sad music has been shown to influence the purchase of intent more than either happy or no music at all. ¹

An example of the use of sad music is in the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) advertisements. The ASPCA uses sad music to help add emotion to the images and videos being shown to help drive the viewer to donate money to help the suffering animals. The music in the advertisement is used as a tool to get the viewer to empathize with the animals. ¹

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 can emphasize dramatic moments within the advertisement, and therefore creates both structure and continuity. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Music in advertising”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

music in advertising is music integrated into mass electronic media advertisements to enhance its success, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 17 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²