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Slicing a Donut: the Many Formats of a Commercial Jingle

One of the most popular forms of a jingle is known as a “donut”. This style of jingle both opens and closes with vocals, but leaves a whole in the center for the talent to read copy. These donuts are a highly effective way to get a good balance of memorable catchy branding and spoken information. Regardless of the length of your spot, a donut can be seen as the overall basic form of a jingle, and should be considered a starting point for a majority of all jingle requests. From the donut, we can get many variations.


The Full Instrumental


On the “hole-ier” side of the spectrum, we have the same jingle with the same music, but without vocals. This is a “full instrumental”. A full instrumental still utilizes the melody, harmony, and sonic palette of the jingle but without the singers. This creates more space for a voiceover to occur. Typically these are best used once a jingle is already established in a market and listeners are already familiar with the branding and lyrics at hand.


The Full Sing


On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a “full sing”. This is an entire piece of music with no hole for copy. Just vocals and lyrics. A donut often uses the melody during the hole anyway, so this often just has added lyrics for that, but can also be a separate B section. 


The Open Front


The Open Front is a form of Jingle where the music starts out instrumental with a voice over, and then we have a sung tag of vocals with lyrics just before we end. 


The Open Back


The Open Back is the exact same thing as the open front, except we have a sung tag followed by instrumental music. 


The Open front and the open back give you the same benefits of a donut, but with the balance tilted more heavily towards the copy. These are often great for businesses that have a lot of information to get across while still offering the opportunity to get the lyrics stuck in their listeners heads.


The Shotgun


The Shotgun is often confused with a sonic logo, but they can be quite similar or perhaps even the same thing. A Shotgun jingle is typically a :5 second quick tag without any other music surrounding it. A separate :5 spot or a tag on the end of a spoken commercial. These are super effective for saturing the market with your branding, but doesn’t offer as much space in the way of getting information across. 


The Multi-Hole Donut


The most complicated form of this format, the multi hole donut is a donut where there are multiple copy breaks interrupted by vocals. Oftentimes, there is just a quick shotgun or tag between vocal statements rather than entire sections. You are able to have as many holes as your heart desires (and the time frame of your spot permits) however, more often than not, a donut with too many holes can be quite ineffective so use this format sparingly and with purpose.

An excerpt from our white paper on sonic branding

One Jingle Various Cuts


So as you can see, by writing one jingle we can actually create a whole package of advertising assets for your brand giving you the opportunity to maximize your budget and get more mileage out of one piece of music with very little additional work. And this is without even discussing various different musical arrangements and stem groupings that can be utilized. One Donut can get you at least 6 different ad formats that can be used with an infinite number of new voice overs while building your brand recognition through the power of music. 


If you’re interested in discussing jingles further, please contact me at joe@electricraindrop.com

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