Comes from the days of radio. When all advertising had to be audio, a good way to get people to remember your product was to have a catchy short tune associated with it, often mentioning the product or company's name. This is even common with phone numbers for their services.

While not quite as common as they used to be, jingles work, so they will probably be around as long as we have commercials. They can even become quite popular and be released as a single. Some well-known jingles have been around literally for decades, periodically having their instrumentation and vocals updated to sound more modern.

Super-Trope of Top Ten Jingle and Phone Number Jingle. Sometimes, an agency will expend money rather than talent and use an existing song.

Examples:

Advertising

• Commodore 64 had a couple.
  • "Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Cause the Commodore is keeping up with you!"👁 Image
    (Australia)
  • "I'm more alive than ever before... I'm into my Commodore 64..."👁 Image
    (America)
• The distinctive song used in the United States to advertise Mister Clean cleaning products has been around for about half a century, having been written in 1958.
• "Chock Full o' Nuts is a heavenly coffee..."
  • This particular jingle dates back all the way to the heyday of radio; as of late Spring 2007, they were running a contest for customer-created "modernizations".
• Oscar Mayer has two: "I Wish I Was an Oscar Mayer Wiener" and "My Bologna Has a First Name."
• One of the longest-running jingles on British TV was for Fairy Liquid, a washing-up detergent, first heard in the late 1950s and used for well over three decades.
• R. White's Lemonade ran a single commercial, featuring the Secret Lemonade Drinker song, for almost 20 years.
• The very first commercial jingle was General Mills' "Have You Tried Wheaties?" in 1926.
• Another Dr. Pepper jingle: "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" This was famous enough to be parodied by SCTV and Remington Steele, Ask a Ninja, and VeggieTales in one of their "Silly Songs".
• Hitachi's "Hitachi No Ki"👁 Image
  (which is still used today, Japan only).
• "We love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet...👁 Image
  "
• Quitline Australia's "Marshall Menthol"👁 Image
  PSA is a mockery of menthol cigarette commercials using the titular fictional brand. To this effect, they used a catchy, upbeat jingle juxtaposed with images of cancer patients suffering the long-term effects of smoking, creating a heartwrenching contrast.
  It's the light for you, it's the light for me
  It's the way a smoke is supposed to be
  So come on, give it a try!
  It's the Marshall taste you can't deny!
  It's the Marshall Menthol feeling, it's the Marshall Menthol dream
  Smooth and mild, for the strong and wild,
  Join the Marshall Menthol team!
• This Filipino ad👁 Image
  for Racumin rat baits of all things, is centered around a rat eating the baits at night while a jingle plays. The lyrics, meant to be from the rat's POV, imply it got so addicted to the baits that it refuses to eat the actual food it finds.
  Heto ako, sabik na sabik sa 'yo (Here I am, very eager for you)
  Lahat gagawin mapalapit lang sa 'yo (I'll do everything to be close to you)
  Sa init ng araw lamig ng ulan (In the heat of the sun or the cold of the rain,)
  Susugod ako gagapang para sa iyo (In a rush I will crawl towards you)
  Kailanma'y di aayaw sarap mo'y laging isisigaw (I will never not relish you and I will shout,)
  Ikaw lang ang aking titikman (That you're the only one I will taste)
  Hanggang sa huling sandali. (Until my last moment.)
• This 2011 Indonesian ad👁 Image
  for Royco (the Indonesian/Kenyan name for soup brand Knorr) has a jingle that extols how tasty their bouillons are. It even has a 15-second version👁 Image
  .
  Bahan-bahan dan rempah pilihan (Selected ingredients and spices)
  Daging has dalam dan sumsum gurih (Delicious inner meat and marrow)
  Paduan kelezatan sempurna (The perfect combination of deliciousness)
  Kekayaan rasa yang menggungah selera (A richness of taste that excites the taste buds).
• Transformers: Generation 1 had a ton of different jingles done up for its toy commercials, tying into the product being advertised. Most of these were simply modified versions of the theme songs of the corresponding cartoon with different lyrics. But would eventually delve off into their own thing starting in 1987. The same applies to its sister line G.I. Joe.
• Early ads for gastritis medication Genoprazol always have a a jingle👁 Image
  sung by a woman about how the medication can relieve heartburn and irritation. This jingle became a meme among Mexican youngsters for how catchy it was.
• An early ad👁 Image
  for laxative lemonade Markos had a catchy jingle that extolled its flavor and how to drink it.
• Guatemalan food company B&B is a special case — they have a jingle👁 Image
  that's only aired in radio during every Christmas season since 1964. It was adapted from Bert Kämpfert's "Jingo Jango" melody and sung by Arístides Paz, Romeo Rodriguez, and Anabella Portilla in that year, and it became a success to the point it became an essential part of celebrating Christmas in Guatemala.
• Costa Rican confectionery company Gallito launched a jingle titled "Una cascada de chocolate"👁 Image
  (A Chocolate Cascade) in the early eighties, extolling the variety of candies they have. The melody was so catchy, it's still remembered fondly in the country and the company even threw a contest👁 Image
  in 2013 that encouraged people to record themselves singing their own version of the jingle.
  Una cascada de chocolate (A chocolate cascade)
  Y una dulce sonrisa Gallito (And a sweet Gallito smile)
  Haciendo montones de caramelo (Making heaps of candy)
  Confites, bombones, y mentas Gallito (Confections, lollipops, and mints from Gallito)
  Para que grandes y chiquitos (So that everyone, big and small)
  Vivan dulce con Gallito (Live it sweet with Gallito)
• Japanese electronics-store chain Yamada Denki's iconic jingle👁 Image
  always plays in their stores, extolling how cheap their deals are.
• Purina has one from the 1970s for their Puppy Chow brand of puppy food: "Puppy Chow, for a full year, 'til he's full grown."👁 Image
  
• Salvadorean snack company Boquitas Diana's "Quiero"👁 Image
  is an ad consisting of people in red and yellow shirts singing a saccharine jingle about how their snacks unite people, in reference to their slogan at the time, "Todo Mundo".
• Even Ad Council Japan had its own jingles.
  • From 1987 to 2011, PSAs ended with the logo and their iconic jingle👁 Image
    , which is nothing but a choir loudly singing "AC" in a two-note jingle. However, it eventually overstayed its welcome when the 2011 Tohoku earthquake meltdown drove advertisers to pull out their ads to save face, driving local TV networks to air a small handful of AC Japan's PSAs during commercial breaks. As a result, people in the area soon resented the jingle because of its loudness and the PSAs' dissonance with the situation at hand, driving AC Japan to mute it for the time being.
  • After the catastrophe died down, AC Japan created a new version👁 Image
    of the jingle, which is notably easier on the ears since it's less loud and sung by one woman; it was used until 2014.
  • From 2015 onwards, they end their PSAs with a new jingle👁 Image
    consisting of a woman singing "AC Japan" in a calmer voice, which is by far considered more refreshing than the old jingle and its new version.
• During its first years, the Korean Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) ended its PSAs with this jingle👁 Image
  , which is a short fragment of Schumann's 2nd Symphony.
• "O, O, O, O'REILLY! (O'Reilly) Auto parts. OW!"👁 Image
  
• Salvadorean bottling company La Cascada created this minute-long commercial👁 Image
  for their Kolashanpan soda, accompanied by a jingle that invokes Patriotic Fervor. It became a local success and still invokes nostalgic feelings on Salvadoreans who watched the ad as children.
  ¿Quién no ama el lugar, la tierra natal, y donde ha nacido? (Who doesn't love the place, the motherland, and where they're born?)
  Terruño de amor, El Salvador, donde yo vivo... (Land of love, El Salvador, where I live...)
  ¿Quién, quién, quién... (Who, who, who...) [x2]
  ...vivirá en su pueblo nato, palmará su mano ahí, (...will live in their hometown, will place their hand there,)
  como buen salvadoreño con orgullo vive aquí? (Like a good Salvadorean, lives here with pride?)
  ¿Quién, quién, quién... [x2]  (Who, who, who...)
  ...vivirá en su pueblo nato, palmará su mano ahí, (...will live in their hometown, will place their hand there,)
  y dirá con todo orgullo: "Madre tierra, soy de ti..." (and will say with full pride, "Motherland, I'm of you...")
• This ad👁 Image
  for Bagus Magic Chalk is set to a jingle extolling how the product can kill cockroaches and ants.
  Kecoa menyebar penyakit (Cockroaches spread diseases)
  Semut-semut menjengkelkan, pasti-pasti! (The ants are annoying, for sure!)
  Bagus Kapur Ajaib, basmi kecoa dan semut (Bagus Magic Chalk, it kills roaches and ants)
  SEET! Serbuk dari segala dapur, (SEET! The powder from the entire kitchen)
  Bubuknya bikin kecoa semut sempoyongan... (Makes the roaches and ants stagger)
  Dan mati! Bagus Kapur Ajaib! (And die! Bagus Magic Chalk!)

Alternate Reality Games

• Omega Mart: "O-O-Oh-Omega Mart, you have no idea what's in-store for you!" is sung from time to time while you are inside. The last line is quite literal, as you are inside an Eldritch Location.

Audio Plays

• Stan Freberg took this to a logical extreme with Omaha!, a parody of Oklahoma! for Butter-Nut Coffee, that ended up turning into a six minute mini-musical released as a novelty record.

Comic Books

• The Tintin adventure Land of Black Gold has "Boum!" by Charles Trenet repurposed as a jingle for a breakdown assistance company, with lyrics about what to do when your car goes boom. Thompson and Thomson start singing along to it, and then their car mysteriously explodes.

Fan Works

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: Calvin quotes the famous McDonald's jingle at one point in "Eggs for Calvin!".

Films — Live-Action

• In A Face in the Crowd, Lonesome Rhodes creates a jingle for Vitajex. Its first verse runs:
  Oh, Vitajex whatcha doin' to me!
  Oh, Vitajex whatcha doin' to me!
  You fill me full of oomph and ecstasy.

Literature

• The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel) has the Mrs. Carillon's Pomato Soup jingle, set to the tune of "On Wisconsin." Leon/Noel hates the jingle so much that the tune causes him to have a fatal accident.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "The Land That Time Forgot". Kinga Forrester and Max introduce the Mesozoic Ranch Dino BBQ sauce and various dishes and after each little bit, a jingle starts to play. However, when Max remembers he left the Alliosarus cage unlocked and it got out, the jingle gains a mind of its own and mocks the two.
  Jingle: Never should have tampered in God's domain! Moon 14!
  Kinga: Yeah, yeah. We're in serious danger. We don't need a jingle right now.
  Jingle: Jingle's self-aware now and saying what he wants to! Movie Sign!

Musicians

• Anna Russell's "A Practical Banana Promotion" included not only "Eta Banana," a parody of the Chiquita jingle, but also "Alas, What Should I Do," which sounds like just a rather mushy ballad when played the first time, but with subliminal advertising supposedly included. The song is repeated to reveal many contemporary (1950s) commercial jingles and slogans.
• An early part of Barry Manilow's career was helping major corporations sell you stuff. He even incorporated them into a medley for his '70s stage show and Barry Manilow Live album.
  • "Join the Pepsi people, feelin' free"
  • "The original soft drink, Dr. Pepper"
  • "I am stuck on Band-Aid"
  • "Grab a barrel of fun (Kentucky Fried Chicken)"
  • "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there". Apparently, singing the jingle in State Farm commercials can make State Farm representatives materialize into the area.
  • "You deserve a break today (at McDonald's)" Barry Manilow did not actually write this jingle, but it was popular enough for him to include it in the aforementioned medley, thus causing the confusion regarding his authorship.
• McDonalds' current jingle: "Buh-dah-buh-bah-bah, I'm lovin' it!" Taken from a Justin Timberlake song.
• More than a few musicians have made a living doing jingles either as a jumping-off point or as a career onto itself - Barry Manilow (as noted above) and Paul Anka regularly wrote commercial jingles between their biggest hits; Richard Marx started out doing jingles for Peter Pan brand peanut butter when he was a child, and Survivor's second lead singer Jimi Jamison cut radio jingles for Memphis-based jingle company Pepper-Tanner between 1979 and 1983 before joining the band.

Radio

• Most countdown shows, including American Top 40, its sister show American Country Countdown, and Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40, use jingles identifying the show for seguing into and from commercials. AT40 and ACC have additional jingles to identify which position a song is on that particular week's show.
• The sponsors of Our Miss Brooks had some pretty catchy ones:
  • "Brush your teeth with Colgate/Colgate dental cream/It cleans your breath (what a toothpaste)/While it cleans your teeth."
  • "Dream girl, dream girl/Beautiful Luster Cream girl/You owe your crowning glory to/A Luster Cream shampoo." (This one was set to the tune of "Toyland" from Babes in Toyland.)
• Taken to an extreme by radio jingle company JAM Creative Productions^note As an aside, their name is a Fun with Acronyms referring to the company's co-founders - Jon and Mary-Lyn Wolfert with the aptly named "The JAM Song👁 Image
  ", highlighting many of the radio stations and shows (including American Top 40, the BBC, and VH1) sung for circa 1985, ending with a jingle for the fictional "Zorp Furble, Andromeda". Ironically, the song would itself be used as jingle on Sirius XM's 60s channel.
• JAM, along with RCA Records, would turn the opening bridge to Starship's "We Built This City" into a makeshift jingle for several radio stations👁 Image
  , many of them already featuring jingles and IDs by the former. While this exhibits the skill of the jingle singers being able to match the vocal tone of the song near flawlessly; it also goes to show just how corporate the song itself ended up being labeled as down the line as people thought Starship themselves did these intros, and not the jingle company.
• Radio station jingles tend to date quickly as a result of general changes in musical trends. But they can also be evocative of places and times (as can be heard on oldies stations, with several such as Sirius's dedicated decade channels using period accurate packages for authenticity). BBC Radio Two's retrospective shows presented by forty-year veterans like Johnny Walker and Tony Blackburn are an opportunity to dust down and revive equally old jingles. On one level they sound ridiculously cheesy and 1960's/1970's, but for people who were around to hear them first time out, they are surprisingly evocative and remain fond memories as they grow up. In fact, one of the selling points for Radio 1's 50th anniversary was the use of many of their JAM-commissioned 1980s and early 1990s jingles played throughout, with an added "Vintage" shout at the end of them except for one jingle, which was actually resung to include it.

Theater

• The Pajama Game has the cast sing a jingle for Sleep-Tite pajamas.

Theme Parks

• MarineLand in Niagara Falls, Canada might be the only theme park to have a jingle, but they started using it in the early 90's and are still using it in some capacity in the 2010's. It usually has the same tune, with slightly different lyrics depending on what attraction they're advertising, but the "chorus" is always "Everyone loves MarineLand!" In the 90's, this catchy as-all-heck jingle combined with its status as a Repeating Ad in northeast Canada and the US means most Millennials who lived in that area could probably finish the entire jingle if you went "There's a place I know in Ontario..."👁 Image
  

Western Animation

• Arthur:
  • In "Arthur and the Crunch Cereal Contest", Arthur is trying to write a jingle for Crunch Cereal so that he can enter it in their jingle contest, but the song that he writes isn't great since there's no tune and it's just the phrase "Eat Crunch!". He then overhears D.W. singing a song to her Imaginary Friend, and decides to enter that song instead (changing only the last word). But feeling guilty of stealing her song, he decides to write D.W.'s name on the entry form instead of his, thus giving her all the credit when the song ends up winning the contest and gets her a lifetime supply of Crunch Cereal.
  • In the Christmas Special Arthur's Perfect Christmas, D.W. Read really wants the toy Tina the Talking Tabby, a talking plush cat toy, having repeatedly heard its advertising jingle. Arthur, however, hates hearing said jingle, saying that it gives him a headache. The jingle goes as follows: "What's always at your feet and is really, really sweet? It's Tina the Talking Tabby! Just scratch behind her ears and this is what you'll hear: "I'm Tina the Talking Tabby!" Oh, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina the Talking Tabby..." Later, Arthur traverses a toy store at the mall and is forced to endure the chorus of "Oh, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina, Tina, tiny Tina, Tina the Talking Tabby..." seven-and-a-half times before finally escaping.
• Family Guy would parody the practice of radio jingles in "Mother Tucker", by having Dumbass DJs Weenie and the Butt, and later on Brian and Stewie when they host their own radio show on the same station, abuse them to no end.
• The Magic School Bus: In "Goes Cellular", Ms. Frizzle struggles to remember the words to a jingle about a snack called Seaweedies at first.
• Metalocalypse: The first episode features the band Dethklok performing a concert consisting of a single death metal coffee jingle. The Ultimate Flavor!
• 1961 Looney Tunes cartoon "Nelly's Folly" has a parody. Nelly the singing giraffe's first gig in America involves recording a jingle for indigestion medicine to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".
• Phineas and Ferb with Doofensmirtz Evil Incorporated!👁 Image
  
• The Simpsons has the "Canyonero" jingle, sung by Hank Williams, Jr.