The impact of music in advertising

Let’s be honest, life without music wouldn’t be quite the same. Music has the tendency to breathe life into things — whether it be your favorite movie, your daily commute or even that ad you like so much. 

Music in advertising isn't just background noise — it's an important component that can shape how we feel about a brand and even what we decide to buy. Think about that catchy jingle from your childhood or the upbeat song that makes you want to buy the latest gadget. Music has this amazing ability to stir up emotions, help us remember things and leave a lasting mark. 

We researched the impact of music in advertising to dig deeper into the importance of music in our day-to-day, how frequently music can be found in advertising and what the effect is when it is. Scroll to the end of this article to read more about our methodology.  

But before we dive in, here’s our main takeaways on the impact of music in advertising. When used effectively, music can: 

• Set the mood of your ad. Music can help elicit the emotions and feelings your ad is trying to convey.

• Help tell the story. Music can enhance the storyline and punctuate the narrative by serving as a secondary voiceover with the right lyrics. 

• Communicate product benefits. Music can be used to deliver key messages about your brand and product in an engaging way. 

• Become a trigger for your brand. If used consistently, a song can become an asset that cues a brand.

Now let’s take a deeper dive into our findings.

The impact of music in our daily lives is undeniable. For years, music has brought people from different cultures and backgrounds together, transcending language barriers. There have been countless studies about how music provides health benefits, improves mood and boosts memory. But music can also have an impact in the way humans process visual information. 

Research has shown that the limbic system, responsible for processing and regulating emotions and memory, lights up when people are exposed to music. This helps explain why listening to upbeat music might evoke positive emotions or make someone more likely to interpret information positively. 

In the cinematic world, music has been used extensively as a tool to aid in processing visual information. The choice of sound or music during a scene can make a fundamental difference in how the audience feels about it and interprets what is happening. 

Soundtracks play a pivotal role in grabbing attention, setting the scene, evoking emotions and ultimately creating a more immersive experience for the audience. 

For instance, take a look at this scene: 

Then watch it with a different song choice:

After playing each, it’s clear the music choice can evoke entirely different emotions and reactions from an audience. 

By adding to the overall experience, soundtracks help make movies more memorable. Beyond the storyline, everyone who has seen “Jaws” or “Psycho” can vividly recall the tension created by their iconic music. Franchises like “Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” have used music to transport the audience to different universes, immersing them in the storylines. 

We like to say advertisements should work as mini movies, telling short stories where the brand or product is the protagonist. So what impact does music have on advertising?

For our research, we classified our database into these categories: no music, barely present, a little prominent, moderately prominent and very prominent.

Within the last couple of years, 86% of ads researched contained at least some level of music. However, while being a vast majority, these ads only contain music for 49% of their duration on average. This means most ads with music don’t feature enough music for it to be classed as moderately prominent on our scale. Only 4% of all ads tested feature music for over 60% of their duration. 

Looking at the performance of all ads, there is no significant difference in overall effectiveness between ads that have music compared to those that don’t. In fact, we’ve seen plenty of high scoring ads that don’t use music like the classic “You’re not you when you’re hungry” ad with Betty White by Snickers. 

However, we found that music presence does have a profound impact on levels and type of emotion felt when watching an ad. Ads with at least some music within them saw an average overall emotion score of 56%, while ads with no music at all scored 52% on average. Additionally, the more prominent the music, the higher on average the overall emotion score; with ads with moderately and very prominent music significantly outperforming others (57% and 58% overall emotion respectively). 

For our overall emotion metric, we ask respondents to react to ads using emojis to tap into their instinctive system one thinking. Emojis depicting a positive emotion contribute positively to the overall score, while emojis depicting negative emotions contribute negatively to it. No emotion at all has the biggest negative impact. 

Asking people to react to an ad in the form of emojis is a great way to measure emotional response as they are interpreted consistently across demographics and used universally in written format. According to Yale University, emojis are well-established, non-verbal and the worlds’ fastest growing language. They are a way to ensure that all respondents can participate in an emotional response question without the need to download an app or rationalize an emotional response.

Love is the biggest contributor to an ad’s overall emotion score, and we found that ads that have at least a little bit of music are more likely to score higher on love. The average love reaction also increases when music is more prominent.

Ads with no music or barely any music saw only 22% of people on average react to them with love. For ads where music is a little bit, moderately and very prominent, this rises to 27%, 29% and 31% respectively. 

Increasing emotional engagement is a key way to drive ad effectiveness. We have seen that ads that score within the top 25% on overall emotion are twice as likely on average to drive immediate sales (Sales Impact: 78 vs 41 for ads outside the top 25% on overall emotion).

However, simply adding music won’t necessarily drive higher levels of emotion for your ad or make it more effective. Music should be used purposefully, being considered up front as part of the creative process rather than added as an afterthought. It shouldn’t detract from other elements in your ad or overshadow key associations you are looking to build or reinforce; it should add to the total experience of other visual and audio elements that make up your ad. 

When used effectively, music can:

1. Set the mood and tone of your ad

Music can help evoke the feeling your ad is trying to convey and even take the audience to the place where it is set. In Magnum’s ad “Stick to the original,” the eerie classical music that intensifies as the narrative unfolds gives it an air of mystery, but also adds to its overall comedic aspect. 

In Dr Pepper’s “Skatelife Crisis,” the Rick Astley tune gives the ad a nostalgic and joyful feel and transports the audience to a different time period.

2. Help tell the story and punctuate the narrative

Music can enhance the storyline by almost providing a secondary voiceover with the right lyrics. Stella Artois’ “Missing Chalices” doesn’t have a voiceover, but through their choice of music and visuals the ad manages to tell a gripping, funny and highly relatable story.

Beyond helping tell the story, music can accentuate different moments in the ad and help drive peaks of emotion throughout. In Dove’s “The Code” the music starts off quite mellow as the unrealistic AI-generated images of “beautiful women” are being shown, and then builds to a more upbeat chorus as new images are generated including the Dove prompt. 

Lay's Wavy’s “Dogs” cleverly uses music when the dogs are waiting for a bit of dip to fall to drive more attention to that particular moment and generate an even greater emotional connection between the audience and the story.

3. Communicate product benefits

Music can be used to deliver key messages about your brand and product in an engaging way. Some brands create custom tunes to communicate product benefits in a way that stands out against competitors, like Nationwide with “Sometimes” and Just Eat with their iconic partnerships with top-selling artists (Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera & Latto).

4. Become a trigger for brand association

Music can tap into people’s associative memory. If used consistently, a song can become an asset that cues a brand. With a long-lasting Christmas campaign, the “Holidays are coming” song has become synonymous with Coca-Cola. 

A catchy song that fits your narrative can also make an ad more memorable and drive further attention to the brand, like the award-winning “Gorilla” by Cadbury featuring Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.”

The simple addition of music to advertisements doesn’t make them more effective. However, using music choicefully and intentionally can elevate an ad and drive a deeper connection with the audience. The presence and prominence of music has a positive impact on the overall emotional score of an ad, which in turn can boost its effectiveness.

At Zappi, we’ve developed an annotation tool that can automatically break a video down into its individual components, which include: video frame captions, audio transcripts, video objects, audio objects and scene detection (definitions below). The individual video and audio components can then be processed by the tool in an unbiased manner to create a rich and extensive metadata set, which in turn can be used to tag the characteristics of any video to learn what might drive success and in what scenarios.

For example, through video objects and captions the tool can identify whether there is an animal present during the video, and use an automated tag about animal presence to separate videos that have an animal from those that don’t. Furthermore, the tool can use the object and caption data to tag videos that have animals based on what type of animal was present and how long it was present in the video for. 

We took over 1,000 US TV ads that were researched using our Amplify ad development system in 2023 and early 2024 and put them through our annotation tool. Using audio object data we were able to segment ads based on the presence of music within them. 

In its rawest form, the audio object data unpacks an ad, indicating a probability of whether music was present at any given second. Using the median of the second-by- second data we created a set of tags: first a binary tag defining whether there was music present or not, then a scalar tag applied to ads with music, which identifies how prominent the music is in the ad.

You can learn more about Zappi and our methodology here.