With the ARIA’s happening this week, and several in the industry up for best use of music in an advertisement (the last category as listed on the ARIA nominees page!) I thought it might be timely to talk about the value of music in your ads, writes Gerry Cyron, executive head brand thinker at Thinkerbell.
Everyone knows music moves us, literally and laterally. It’s the universal language that scores our lives – the goosebumps on a crescendo, the nostalgia of a chorus, the way a single note can trigger a thousand memories. What was your soundtrack of your first kiss, anybody?
Anyhoo, for advertisers, this is old news: the emotional pull of music has long been part of the creative toolkit. But what’s often been missing is hard proof that music doesn’t just move hearts, it moves the bottom line.
That’s what MassiveMusic and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) set out to prove in Sound Science: How Music is the Missing Link in Marketing ROI. Their study, spanning 150 UK TV ads and over 7,500 respondents, provides the kind of evidence marketers and agencies crave: that highly engaging music can boost your marketing ROI by an average of 32 per cent, and in some cases, even double it.
The report builds on the foundational work of Les Binet and Peter Field, showing how music isn’t just an emotive fluff but a measurable business driver. When a track captures attention, aligns with visuals, and provokes emotional resonance, it amplifies marketing effectiveness across every key metric – from purchase intent to long-term brand equity. In other words, bangers don’t just boost moods; they boost business.
One of the most striking findings from the research is that re-recordings significantly outperformed licensed, bespoke, or library music in terms of memorability. The science behind it sits deep in our wiring: our reptilian brains crave familiarity, but also surprise. A re-record hits that sweet spot. We recognise it instantly yet it is still surprising enough to be committed to memory. Job done.
This tension of familiarity and surprise is powerful. The study found that surprising music—those creative leaps that defy expectations—made ads five times more likely to drive brand fame. Fame, as Binet and Field have shown, is not just vanity; it’s one of the strongest predictors of long-term profitability. Add memorability to the mix—where recallable music made brands four times more effective at driving salience—and you have a potent formula to grow business.
Something, we are unsurprisingly familiar with at Thinkerbell. We reimagined the infamous ‘I Feel Like Tooheys’ jingle, fusing nostalgia with contemporary energy. ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ for Menulog, created with Australian hip-hop icons Bliss n Eso, turned local dining into a lyrical love letter to community and flavourful cuisine. Both campaigns have struck such a chord that they’re nominated for the ARIA Awards, proof that when you take music seriously, the work resonates far beyond the ad break and deep into culture.
This research provides ammunition to justify those kinds of choices at the boardroom table—to argue not just from taste or instinct, but from evidence. Because while everyone already knows music is powerful emotionally, now we know just how powerful financially it is.
“Money” is not just a tune that Pink Floyd fans embrace wholeheartedly but it’s an earworm for every CFO. Let’s make some noise, peeps!
Cyron’s taste in music is debatable but his appetite for building brands through creativity, in every shape, form, and sound, is undeniable.
