Selling Products With a Swelling Score
“There are so many production catalogs that have lush orchestral versions of all these songs
that don’t require purchasing rights because they’re in the public domain,” said Chris Clark, the director of music at Leo Burnett U. S.A. “It’s wonderful to be able to open the classical music treasure chest.”
Agencies also benefit from what the composer and arranger Robert Miller calls the recognition factor
And just as Looney Tunes cartoons used chunks of Brahms, Rossini, Smetana
and Chopin as oh-so-civilized foils for the mayhem of Bugs Bunny and associates, commercials have often juxtaposed “this supposedly educated music with foolishness and tomfoolery,” said David Muhlenfeld, vice president and creative director of the Martin Agency.
Consider the Applebee’s ad that features a robed choir paying full-throated reverence to riblets and tenders (“All you can eat … $12.99, all you can eat”) to the tune of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna,” from the cantata “Carmina Burana.” Or the 2015 Oreo Thins ad
that was backed up by Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” otherwise known as the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But these days, ad agencies are using classical music as more than a jokey device or a signifier of wealth and sophistication.
Classical music has long had a place in commercials.
“The name of the game is to stand out,” said Jon Pearce, the chief creative officer at Hudson Rouge, a boutique ad agency in the WPP network.
When the figures on a graffiti mural came to vibrant life in a Coke commercial
that debuted during the Olympics last month, they leapt, rolled and scaled buildings to the accompaniment of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” a movement of Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” Suite.
