When David was in high school, his youth choir performed a musical on their annual summer choir tour/mission trip. When the choir returned home from these mission trips, it always performed the musical on the following Sunday evening at church.
This is a picture of David's youth choir performing at a church in Idaho the summer after his senior year in high school.
One year David suggested that they ask their pastor if they could perform during the Sunday morning service to reach a bigger audience. Their choir director, Jean Pilcher, called David a cockeyed optimist for thinking Brother John would give up preaching on a Sunday morning for the youth choir to perform. Ever since then David has considered himself a cockeyed optimist.
Through the years David has pursued numerous paths with this mindset. Most recently, as we have prepared the groundwork to raise funds for our Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure, we have tried to think of anything we could do to generate interest and excitement and hopefully get people to invest or donate to our dream.
One thing we've thought of is commercials. To give our business more credibility, we think it would be good to come up with a musical tag or zinger, kind of like the four musical notes played at the end of Intel TV commercials. We also like the musical tag on the insurance company commercials: "We are Farmers. Bum be dum bum bum bum bum."
With that in mind, David decided to call one of the musical geniuses of our day, John Williams, composer of so many great movie soundtracks including the Raiders March from the Indiana Jones movies. (Congratulations on your latest Oscar nomination in February, Mr. Williams.) We were hoping he would let us use the first 7 notes of the trumpet solo in "Raiders" or better yet create a musical tag to go along with our logo. The only thing we know about John Williams is that he conducts the Boston Pops once a year, so David started with the Boston Symphony.
He called and was transferred to the woman on staff at the Tanglewood Music Center who assists Mr. Williams. David left a voice mail and was surprised when a day or so later a gentleman from her office called. He very nicely explained (or tried to. His cell phone cut out so much David could only hear about one-third of what he was saying. Do you miss the old phone attached to your kitchen wall that seldom cut out but you could sometimes listen to your neighbors' conversations?) that as the winner of many awards and such, Williams was under great demand and wouldn't have time to speak to me. Apparently he only takes calls from people named Spielberg and Lucas.
He said we could go to the BMI website and find out who owns the copyright to the Raiders of the Lost Ark March and request permission from them to use the music, but because it was so popular, he said our chances were "slim to none." He also made it very clear that we would violate copyright laws if we used any portion of the music (even 4 notes) that sounded anything like the Raiders soundtrack.
So we asked Devin, our musical nephew who performs regularly at Murry's Dinner Playhouse, if he would try to come up with something to match our logo. He hasn't yet, so to our musical friends, we issue the same challenge: come up with a music tag to play at the end of our commercials and feature on our website and Facebook page. Compose a winner and you will get an Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure T-shirt and two free passes to our dream when it gets built.
If you own a small business or want to start one, keep in mind the value of a jingle. Small business owners should take cues from successful companies such as McDonald's, Coke and Chevrolet, and many of them have used great jingles in their commercials to separate them from their competition.
David vividly remembers the broadcast of the 1971 Arkansas-Texas football game. Perhaps it was because Arkansas won that game, but he also vividly remembers the songs from the TV commercials played during the game (Chevrolet "building a better way to see the USA" and "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there"). Think of all the music jingles you can remember from TV commercials in your childhood. Do they bring back warm memories?
No comments:
Post a Comment