Advertising royalty, Allan Johnston, better known as the ‘Jo’ in ‘Mojo’ has created his first jingle in many years, singing ‘Black T-shirts’, co-written by Tinkerbell’s Jim Ingram, to help promote Adam Ferrier and Brent Smart’s media and marketing podcast, Black T-Shirts.
To hear the ad, and listen to the whole interview click HERE.
Mojo, are the preeminent creative team to emerge out of Australia and were known for their extraordinary run of creating iconic Australian brand platforms such as ‘I feel like Tooheys’ for Tooheys, ‘You ought to be Congratulated’ for Meadow Lea, and ‘Hit em with the ol Pea-Beu’ for Pea-Beu. Much of their iconic work featured ‘jingles’ or as Jo puts it connecting brands and people through song. Mojo’s advertising was long lasting and created strong distinctive brand assets (although Jo would no doubt baulk at the term), Pea- Beu being just one example where the advertising has actually outlived the actual brand!
After the recording of the ‘Black T-Shirts’ jingle Johnston hung around to feature on the latest episode of Black T-Shirts, giving several insights into his inspiration (Australia’s bush poets and Buddy Holly), what made Mojo so successful, and also why the jingle is no longer popular in advertising today.
‘Jo’ puts the dearth of jingles in advertising now down to at least three factors; a) ‘the dominance of the ‘English art director’ in Australia, b) a lack of ‘making’ talent in advertising agencies today, as the production is now separate from the creative talents, and c) clients preferring to put their money into buying well known songs to try and leverage pre-existing equity, for example ‘I want to know what love it’, featuring a hamster or whatever it is.’
To find out what consumers think of jingles one of Mojo’s classic jingles were put to a focus group, with very mixed results.
Ferrier said of the episode: “It’s fascinating to hear how in some ways we’ve lost our way. Marketing Sciences would back up the effectiveness of jingles, yet for seemingly both superficial and easily surmountable practical reasons, the industry has all but stopped making them. It would be great if this episode could inspire a few more brands to invest in ownable songs for their brands.”
Black T-Shirts is a podcast powered by and housed on the Listnr podcast network.
