Ad buyers use jingles in radio and television commercials; they can also be used in non-advertising contexts to establish or maintain a brand image.
Many jingles are also created using snippets of popular songs, in which lyrics are modified to appropriately advertise the product or service.
According to one account, General Mills had seriously planned to end production of Wheaties in 1929 on the basis of poor sales.
[2] Encouraged by the results of this new method of advertising, General Mills changed its brand strategy.
After General Mills' success, other companies began to investigate this new method of advertisement.
[3] A jingle could get a brand's name embedded in the heads of potential customers even though it did not fit into the definition of "advertisement" accepted in the late 1920s.
The jingle was used in the advertising of branded products such as breakfast cereals, candy, snacks, soda pop, tobacco, and beer.
In August 2016, The Atlantic reported that in the United States, the once popular jingle was now being replaced by advertisers with a mixture of older and recent pop music to make their commercials memorable.
Accurately the term in the context of radio is used to describe only those station branding elements which are musical, or sung.
Sung jingles are the most common form of radio station branding otherwise known as imaging.