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This chapter examines the rise of television in the 1950s and the use of emotional appeals in advertising music in the 1950s and the 1960s. It focuses on the effectiveness of music used in advertising with respect to the question of emotion. The chapter also identifies the composers who helped broaden the emotionality of music in advertising: Mitch Leigh, Mitch Miller, and Roy Eaton.

This chapter presents an overview of theories and research on the role of music in television advertising and other persuasive media. Using Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model as a theoretical framework for attitudinal change, the chapter examines the multiple roles music may play in advertising, either as a background element or as an integrated element in an audiovisual medium. Music may increase or decrease motivation and ability to elaborate on a persuasive message, thereby guiding a person to use a central or peripheral route to processing the content of the advertisement. Music may also provide information (e.g., affect-as-information) in the persuasive message that is processed within either route. To delineate these effects, music as a means to attract attention, facilitate recall, and construct meanings is also examined. Findings of these strands of research are applied to audio branding, understanding musical fit, enhancing implicit learning, and the creation of virtual atmospheres on the Internet.

This chapter returns to the history of the jingle, particularly the standardization of jingle production in the 1950s. It discusses the entry of Broadway composers into advertising music and the rise of jingle singers. It also discusses the rise of a unique style of music in the postwar era, which was commonly referred to as jingles that employed the Madison Avenue Choir. The chapter also chronicles the decline of the jingle in the 1990s.

Prokofiev’s legacy in the concert hall is well established, but there has been little study of his legacy in the popular consciousness. If we examine the multitude of uses of his music in popular contexts (television programs, television advertisements, film, in the works of other musicians, etc.), what patterns emerge? Which Prokofiev pieces appear most often and to what associative ends? Can viewers even recognize the music as Prokofiev? If not, are there particular stylistic features of Prokofiev’s music that lend themselves to certain kinds of uses? What, in short, is (and has been) the use and meaning of Prokofiev’s music in the popular consciousness? This chapter sketches out answers to these questions using analytical methods from musicology, music and multimedia studies, music psychology, music sociology, and the analysis of viewer responses to the range of uses of Prokofiev’s music in everyday media.