The Germans call it ohrwurm. Here,it's known as the earworm -- the situation when a jingle or song gets stuck in a continuous mental loop and refuses to exit your head. You hear the song over and over and over again.

So it is with me and Yael Naim's "New Soul" -- the very addictive sound track to the Macbook Air Commercial. For the past six weeks I have been dealing with this earworm.

From a business perspective, is this a good thing for Apple for people to get an earworm from listening to their commecial? Will it make me more prone to buy the laptop or will I become so frustrated with the continuous loop pounding in my head that I wouldn't buy one for fear that the song would never stop invading my brain waves.

The commercial had me at the manila envelope. I didn't need the song to tell me this was new and different. BEfore the earworm became a chronic condition I loved the song. I intentionally listened closely to figure out exactly whqt the lyrics were--- I didn't try to connect the lyrics to the product I was infatuated with the song and it superceded my interest in the computer.

That was several weeks ago. Today I have a chronic condition and seeing the computer in a commecial or in the Apple store is not a good thing. My earworm has now depressed my desire to be the proud owner of a Macbook Air.

In the day when advertising used jingles the earworms were very product specific." My baloney has a first name..its O.S.C.A.R...."

So while the earworm may have driven you crazy, it did continuously remind you about the product which is afterall one of the goals of advertising.

Not so today. Jingles aren't around much. You may hear them for some local or regional advertising, but ever since 1987 when Nike decided to skip the jingle and use the Beatles "Revolution"as  a soundtrack for its advertising, you have heard fewer and fewer jingles and more and more pop music promoting products. The effect may give the impression of being hip but having a song that already has its own brand identity may not go very far in motivating people to buy the product.

And it can have some rather amusing consequences, depending on your sense of humor.. Laura K who writes wemove to canada has an extensive post about the rock in advertising trend.

I might as well hang a huge OLD FART sign above my desk, because the use of rock songs in advertising still disgusts me. Partly it's because I am so bothered by the encroachment of advertising in our lives. Partly it's because I always mute the ads when watching TV, so this commonplace phenomenon still has the power to shock me. In recent years, I've been amazed and horrified at the Clash's version of "Pressure Drop" selling Nissan, and The Pogues selling Cadillacs. (Clash songs have been used by Cadillac, too.). Before that it was Iggy Pop shilling for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

Seth Stevenson, who writes about advertising for Slate, asked readers for their favorite examples of incongruous advertising soundtracks. The question was in response to the song "Sixteen Tons" being used in "an ad that touts the wonders of coal". Stevenson says the overwhelming winner was Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life": "Nothing says maritime comfort like a song about shooting up junk."

Here is the link to Stevenson's 2005 article on the lyric/advertising mismatches

Tim Faulkner has an exhaustive piece on the history of jingles on HowStuffWorks. According to Faulkner General Mills gets credit for creating the first jingle. It was for Wheaties. And it turns out that without the jingle the Breakfast of Champions may have gone down in sales defeat.

Executives at General Mills were actually about to discontinue Wheaties when they noticed a spike in its popularity in the regions where the jingle aired. So the company decided to air the jingle nationally, and sales went through the roof. Eighty years later, Wheaties is a staple in kitchens across the globe
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Faulkner also shares that the jingle concept was one born as a way to get around a prohibition around advertising on the radio during prime time.

In the early 1930s radio was enjoying a golden age, but there were strict advertising rules. Direct advertising during prime-time hours was prohibited, so advertisers started using a clever loophole -- the jingle. Jingles could mention a company or product's name without explicitly shilling that product. For example, the introduction to "The Adventures of the Jenkins Family" program began with a sing-songy "Oh, my! It's Eskimo Pie!"

Soon advertisers realized that jingles were very effective because of the earworm effect. Jenny Crusie at Argh Ink shares the science behind earworms.

it turns out the reason you can’t dump them is that your brain pays more attention to unfinished things. According to Bill Thompson at the University of Toronto, the key culprits are simplicity, repetition and circularity, and the worst of these is circularity; a song with a circular structure (verse/chorus/verse/chorus) will just cycle in your head endlessly eating its own tail while your brain tries to find the place that it ends. And evidently almost all brains do it: according to another study, ninety-eight percent of people are afflicted with earworms at one time or another, and seventeen percent of people have had the problem last for days

Just hung up the phone with my daughter who is away at college. She was talking to me about her religion class and mentioned her TA has the New Macbook Airwhich she said "was so cool."
That's when I asked her if she was familiar with Yael Naim's song. She said no . When I suggested she go to YouTube and watch the commercial.
Her response was " Why would I do that? I don't want that song stuck in my head too."

According to the research, her brain might not respond the same way. While researchers have identified a TOP NINE list for earworms, the most common earworm varies from individual to individual. Here though is the top nine earworms that most of us share in common.

2. Chili’s “Baby Back Ribs” jingle.
3. “Who Let the Dogs Out”
4. “We Will Rock You”
5. Kit-Kat candy-bar jingle (”Gimme a Break …”)
6. “Mission Impossible” theme
7. “YMCA”
8. “Whoomp, There It Is”
9. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”
10. “It’s a Small World After All”

Elana blogs about business culture at FunnyBusiness