The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) is running a wonderful story today regarding rock and roll music themes in advertising. Once considered anti-establishment, rock music is not the anthem behind a number of mainstream 
advertising campaigns. According to The Journal, the flood gates opened with Carly Simon’s Anticipation as the background for Heinz ketchup. Since then, all kinds of national brands are linked to famous boomer tunes. Examples include Bob Seger’s Like a Rock for GM trucks, and Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll for Cadillac. The Rolling Stones provided Start me Up to Microsoft for the launch of Windows 95. Licensing these tunes is a boon to aging artists (assuming they own the rights.) But finding just the right hit tune for commercials is increasingly more difficult. "A lot of the big, known songs and baby-boomer hits that we have grown up with have been used," says Mike Boris, a vice president and executive music producer at Interpublic Group of Cos.' McCann Erickson. Marketing Blurb says rock on.
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