Zupe: Press

 

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Dave Villani can write a symphony or a jazz tune.  Some day he’d even like to score a motion picture.

Sure, as a guy who earned a master’s degree in music composition, he knows the beauty of Beethoven’s hour-long “Symphony No. 9.”  But when it comes to writing a jingle to promote a business, he knows the value of something that’s short and catchy.

“By Mennen,” may be one of the best ever written, he says.

Three notes, two words.  The kind of tune that gets stuck in your head and won’t go away.  The kind that sneaks into your subconscious and helps you make choices when you’re standing in the toiletries aisle looking for deodorant.

It’s the kind of jingle that sells products and garners the favor of advertising gurus.  It’s also the kind of jimgle that pays dividends to the writers for years to come.

“I have written hundreds of them locally and regionally,” Villani says.  Unfortunately in a small market like Altoona, the jingle is paid for on delivery with no future residuals.

Villani’s name may not be widely known, but the lines he’s penned and put to music are well known across the region.

“Join the switch to John Stuckey Ford,” is one of them.

Another one is “You get treated nicer at Shuster Chrysler.”

And he’s the guy who first uttered the comforting words for ACI Cellular, “You are never alone when you’ve got your cellular phone.”

“Part of the psychology behind a jingle is how often it’s played,” Villani says.  “A bad jingle, if it’s played often enough, will be just as memorable as a good jingle.”

He reflects on an interview the writer of the “By Mennen” jingle did, in which he said he didn’t feel confident that it would work.

That writer, Ned Davis, is a credentialed musician who worked to build many music studios.  In spite of his other accomplishments, his name is most often associated with those two words, “By Mennen.”

Villani also wrote a two-word jingle most Altoonans know.

The folks at the Blair County Ballpark asked him to come up with something memorable, a kind of chant with a country feel.

“They are almost diametrically opposed,” he remembers thinking when he heard the assignment.  But he took the challenge, wondering, “How am I ever going to marry those two ideas?”

What he came up with was the musical chant, “Altoona!  Curve!”

Zupe, a local musician who goes by a single moniker, says the art of writing a jingle for a customer is, “You have 30 seconds to get the point across that they are the best product or service available for your money.”

And although he’s written music that’s been played on television and in film, he says writing a jingle, “is challenging.”  His music has been picked up for use on Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle,” The History Channel and will be heard soon on NBC’s “Dateline.”

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges he ever got came from State College Electric and Mechanicals, a company that wanted a jingle for their water purification and air filtration systems.

“Sometimes you can be cute and try to rhyme,” he says.  Sometimes you can’t.

So he took a different route and wrote about “cleaner air to breathe, for the children, for the family and the quality of life.  State College Electric and Mechanicals.”

Jon McClintock, owner of ad agency Cherryhill Associates, Hollidaysburg, says, “We [consumers] are all blitzed by so many incoming messages every day, [advertisers] have to stand out.

“Anything we do has to be short, simple and sweet,” he says.

Mark Thomas, the Bedford-based car dealer, wanted to promote “negotiation-free selling” by his team of “non-commissioned salespersones,” McClintock says.  The words didn’t exactly meet the short, simple and sweet criteria, so Thomas came up with the notion of “upfront pricing,” which means the price on the car is the price it will sell at.

Most advertisers, expecially in regional markets, McClintock says, don’t have budgets large enough to saturate the market like the folks who run the ads that end, “Lost another loan to Ditech.”

Zupe says nationally known artists like Paul Anka and Barry Manilow made fortunes writing jingles aside from their successes on Top 40 lists.

“Paul Anka has written everything for everybody including the Johnny Carson theme,” Zupe says.

In a local or regional market, jingles work best when they’re written by someone who knows the market and can target the audience a little better, Zupe says.  Even so, he adds, “There are no area businesses that have the advertising budget of McDonald’s [restaurants].  No one is going to come close to the ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ campaign,” he says.

Villani says what he does best in the jingle market is to understand the advertisers and how to show them in the best light to the public.

One time a “reserved client with an upscale image” asked him for a jingle with an MTV sound.

It didn’t seem to work in his mind, so he created two jingles, the one the client asked for and another one he thought best fit the client’s inage.

“They bought mine,” he says.