Familiarity Breeds Content

Why do so many commercials feature the same handful of songs?

For years I said that if I owned a business and hired an advertising agency that proposed using “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C + C Music Factory in my ads, I’d fire them and hire a more creative team. I felt the same about “Send Me On My Way” by Rusted Root, a record I liked but heard too often.

To be fair, it wasn’t just commercials. Those two songs also appeared over and over in TV shows and movies. I guess it was a kind of musical shorthand, reminding people of warm and fuzzy feelings they may have had about those tracks. But it was also lazy.

Now it seems that the song of the moment is “Feeling Good,” written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. It’s been recorded by many people over the years but perhaps the most well-known version is Nina Simone’s and that’s the version that seems to be all over the place right now. (A Facebook post about this by my friend Dave prompted this piece.)

I have a personal connection to “Feeling Good.” The musical for which it was written, “The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd” was the show that introduced me to my wife. I was the musical director and she played the role of The Kid.

Despite the specialness of that song to me, I tire of hearing it being thrust upon me, especially when it’s used to advertise cars and drugs. (Not as tired as I am of hearing the endlessly misguided versions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” . . . but that’s another article.)

On the other side of things, Amazon Prime has an ad that features the Bacharach/David classic “There’s Always Something There To Remind Me” but in its original version by Lou Johnson, not the more familiar cover by Naked Eyes. That’s a nice surprise and it helps me remember the product better.

I get that advertisers use familiar songs to elicit familiar feelings, but with the millions of songs that have been recorded, do they have to keep using the same two or three?