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The jingle is perhaps one of advertising’s greatest contradictions. They’re catchy and annoying in equal measure. People complain about them but might still find themselves humming them involuntarily. In extreme cases, some listeners will even mount campaigns to get these short, commercially driven songs back onto the airwaves once they’ve been retired. It’s not much of a stretch to say many people love to hate jingles.

The jingle, as you might expect, has its origins in radio, with the 1926 cereal advertisement Have You Tried Wheaties? often cited as the first concrete example of the form. However, the arrival of television is said to have helped the jingle evolve further, with some researchers suggesting the heady association of sound and visuals help create a more intense and memorable psychological response—the same reason, perhaps, the music video remains a popular and effective way of promoting songs.

The not entirely pleasant word ‘earworm’ has been coined in order to describe the short, catchy songs that accompany ads and the effects they can have on listeners. The science around the topic is uncertain, but some researchers have identified the brain’s working memory and phonological loop as areas that potentially process and retain these jingles (the shorter and catchier the better), with certain music possibly staying in the short term memory longer than other aural information. Individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder are more likely than most to end up frustrated by earworms.

Simply hearing a specific song can trigger various associations and memories, and advertisers want those associations to be of a specific product. The melody is key but the words of a jingle can hold even more power—in many cases becoming an integral, almost inseparable element of a product’s branding. Phrases like ‘snap, crackle and pop’ or ‘take a break, have a Kit-Kat’ have become embedded in the public subconscious thanks to hummable musical interpretations— indeed, Rice Krispie ads from the earliest days of television showed that advertisers were acutely aware of this even at the dawn of modern advertising.

It’s not always original jingles. The popular Go Compare ad jingle repurposes patriotic war song Over There and changes the gung-ho lyrics to suit an insurance comparison website (as you do). “That the yanks are coming, the yanks are coming” becomes “when your choice is many, you could save a pretty penny”, for example. The famed Just One Cornetto advertisement series, one of the all-time definitive UK ad campaigns, satirised the Italian mainstay O Sole Mio, featuring stereotypical Italians declaring their love for a certain ice-cream cone. The jingle version of the tune became near ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s, perhaps even more so than the popular original.

Often voted the catchiest jingle of all, particularly for UK and Irish consumers, Cornetto’s campaign returned in 2006—tellingly, featuring London residents singing the iconic tune themselves. Time cannot dilute the most effective earworms.

Sometimes there’s not even any repurposing of music, and an ad simply uses a shortened version of an original work. The song Guaglione by Pérez Prado might not mean much to a lot of people. However, play it and an awful lot of listeners would most likely instantly associate it with the incredibly popular Anticipation or ‘Dancing Man’ Guinness advert from 1994 (perhaps the most commercially successful Irish ad of the last two decades).

If jingles irritate you, then you might want to bring ear plugs if you ever visit Japan. The country offers a veritable assault of earworms, and they’re not restricted to TV or radio adverts. Some traffic lights are musical. Every station along many of Tokyo’s rail lines features its own unique jingle to signal arrivals, departures and other announcements. And many chain stores feature their own catchy little ditty, playing once every few minutes (surely driving their ever polite employees up the wall).

Few visitors will be able to shake the equally catchy and irritating music that greet them every time they enter a 7-Eleven convenience store or Yodabashi Camera electronic superstore. You can’t escape them, either: there are more than 16,000 7-Eleven stores in Japan. That’s an awful lot of jingles around the clock, every day of the week.

But in Ireland the jingle mostly remains restricted to advertising. Here’s a few that might have those earworms burrowing ever further into your musical memory...

Five of the catchiest jingles:

I feel like Chicken Tonight—if there’s a single jingle to sum up evening television in the 1990s, it’s this. A popular campaign on both sides of the Atlantic, the catchy theme even enjoyed the most prestigious of responses: a parody in an episode of The Simpsons. The product itself, however, failed to set the States alight, but continues to be sold in supermarkets here (albeit under new ownership).

Holidays Are Coming—there’s many full dissertations to be written on Coca-Cola’s many advertising campaigns, but in Ireland and several other countries it’s the annual Christmas advert that appears year after year. For many fans of the song and accompanying festive images, it’s not putting up a tree or hearing the first Christmas song on the radio that marks the beginning of the festive season: it’s the first appearance of the Coca Cola trucks and the accompanying ‘Holidays Are Coming’ chant.

If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our… Club—don’t forget the dramatic pause and drum roll before the final ‘Club’!

The Oscar Mayer jingles—Oscar Mayer brand meat products might not be a household name here in Ireland, but odds are you know its two most iconic advertising jingles. The first features a chorus of children exclaiming “oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener”, because all children dream of growing up and becoming… a hot dog? The second features a young boy musically spelling out the brand name while fishing beside the lake. The Simpsons are at least partially responsible for spreading these jingles internationally, particularly through the inspired Rainier Wolfcastle spoof of the latter.

I’m Loving It—one of the few more modern jingles to really catch on, variants of this short and simple little number have become an integral part of McDonalds’ advertising campaigns over the last few years. If you’re actually ‘hating it’, well than the advertisers in a way have done their job right—it’d be the rare person who wouldn’t automatically associate these three words with the McDonalds brand, regardless of whether the song itself drives them up the wall or not.

This article originally appeared in Newstalk Magazine for iPad in February, for more details go here.