Music techniques in advertising lately.

I noticed two spots lately with interesting approaches to music in commercials. The first is a spot for allergy relief med Zyrtec. The character asks at the open “You know that song Time in a Bottle?” Then she proceeds to make make a connection with the duration of relief in the bottle of Zyrtec. Now that’s cagey — just mention a song title and let the viewer fill in the musical blanks. That’s bound to make licensing simpler.

A second spot that caught my ear is one for iShares in which they replaced the lyrics to Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” to present the world as an investment problem with iShares as the solution. Lyric replacement as a technique has been out of fashion for a long time, but it’s coming back, just as swing music does every ten years.