Worst jingle of all time?

So I sucked at getting any sort of Top 10 list together for 2009, but one theme came up in the show last night regarding jingles being dead that might make up for it. Best/Worst of the year? Not sure because I don’t know that I really heard what you can call a jingle in the classic sense. Are they dead? I don’t think they are as much as they’ve just morphed into musical taglines slash brand cues.

Gone are the heady days of McDonald’s singalong masterpiece, or Burger King’s classic. Even, wait for it, taca, taca, taca TACO BELL! had one long before their current gong sign-off. Commercials tend to either license a track off something the art director found on Last.fm, or something from the past the ECD found, or the latter’s special cousin: Top 40 hit that replaces the lyrics with brand-speak.

But the most annoying of any of jingle slash audio tagline HAS to be the damn PC Richard & Son “whistle.” Everyone in the Tri-State area (NY-NJ-CT ) knows it and dreads it. (Even at Giants Stadium events.) Doesn’t matter if it’s annoying though, the catch-22 of badvertising is that once a lousy logo, tagline or jingle becomes well-known, the brand’s not getting rid of it because that’s what people recognize.

Enjoy!