Classic Radio Jingles & Commercials

Where to hear the great American radio advertising — the commercials people still quote, and the jingle houses that gave every station in the country its voice.

Radio advertising produced a body of work that has never been properly collected in one place. Some of it is preserved by archives, some by enthusiasts, and a good deal of the best of it was made by three or four people whose names almost nobody outside the business knows. Everything linked below is free to listen to.

The commercials people still quote

Stan Freberg. If you listen to one thing on this page, make it the original six 1965 spots Freberg made for the Radio Advertising Bureau. The famous one drains Lake Michigan, refills it with hot chocolate, floats a seven-hundred-foot mountain of whipped cream on top, and has the Royal Canadian Air Force tow a ten-ton maraschino cherry into place while twenty-five thousand extras cheer. Then the line: now try that on television.

It remains the most efficient argument for radio anybody has made, and it is sixty years old. The same spots are on KCRW’s SoundCloud, and 99% Invisible devoted an episode to how it was made, A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream. Freberg’s wider commercial work — Sunsweet prunes, Chun King, Jeno’s — is worth an afternoon; start with the overview of his career and Stretching the Imagination.

Bob and Ray for Piels beer. Bert and Harry Piel, two brothers who bickered their way through hundreds of spots from 1955 onward. The campaign is a case study in a problem advertisers still have: the commercials were beloved and the beer did not sell, which is the argument for measuring the right thing. A collection of the Bert and Harry spots is on the Internet Archive, and Bob and Ray returned to the characters in a 1975 revival.

Dick Orkin. The most decorated writer in the history of radio advertising, and the man behind Chickenman, the 1966 serial that began as a Chicago station promotion and ended up syndicated worldwide and broadcast to troops in Vietnam. Episodes are online. His commercial house, Radio Ranch, is still trading, and his Radio Hall of Fame entry is a decent short account of why the industry rated him so highly.

What these three have in common is worth stating plainly. None of them shouted, none of them used a hard sell, and all of them assumed the listener was intelligent and slightly bored. That combination is still the most reliable way to make radio work, and it is still the hardest thing to persuade a client to buy.

PAMS of Dallas

The company that defined the station jingle. PAMS produced packages from 1951 into the late 1970s, and the series numbers — Series 27 “Jet Set”, Series 32 “Sonosational”, Series 40 “Changes” — are still how collectors talk about the era. The demo reels are the best introduction, because a demo compresses fifty station cuts into a few minutes.

PAMS 1970s jingle demos at the Internet Archive — free streaming and download. PAMS company history is useful for making sense of the series numbering.

JAM Creative Productions

Founded in Dallas in 1974 by Jon and Mary Lyons Wolfert, and still trading. JAM acquired the PAMS library and has re-sung a great deal of it, which makes their demo archive the one place where the classic packages can be heard in something close to their original arrangements. Their demos are sorted by year.

JAM Creative Productions — radio ID demos, browsable by year. Company history.

TM, Heller, Pepper & Tanner and the others

TM of Dallas, Heller, Pepper & Tanner of Memphis, Johnny Mann’s custom packages and the Drake–Chenault libraries all worked the same market. They turn up throughout the station archives below rather than in libraries of their own.

The station archives

The Bay Area Radio Museum jingles collection is the best-organized on the web, sorted by call letters — KFRC, KYA, KEWB, KSFO, KGO and others — with PAMS, TM, Johnny Mann and Drake packages identified by series. Start here if you only visit one.

ReelRadio is not jingles as such but airchecks: over 3,500 recordings of actual Top 40 broadcasts between 1955 and 1989, where the jingles and the commercials sit in their proper place between the records. A non-profit archive with free registration, now hosted with the North Carolina Broadcast History Museum. This is the only way to hear what a commercial break actually sounded like in 1972.

Also worth an hour: the Jingle Collection Series on the Internet Archive, and a well-documented single-market collection from Jacksonville covering PAMS, TM, JAM and Pepper & Tanner.

Why an advertiser should care

The jingle houses and the great radio writers solved the same problem from opposite ends. They had a few seconds, no pictures, and a listener who was driving. The jingle houses answered with a melodic hook that did the remembering for the audience. Freberg and Orkin answered by making the listener build the picture themselves, which is cheaper than any production budget and more vivid than anything a camera can show.

Both answers still work, and most modern radio creative uses neither. If you are writing radio now, an hour with the Freberg spots is worth more than most of what has been written about audio branding since. See why radio advertising works, and classic TV commercials for the television side.

Berk Marketing represents advertisers, not radio stations or media companies. If you want a radio schedule planned or an existing proposal read, get in touch.