This Singer Got His Start Writing Commercial Jingles

Every famous musician’s path to success looks different—they all had to start somewhere. One chart-topping singer in particular launched a career in the music business by writing commercial jingles.

After first working in the mailroom at CBS in 1965, Barry Manilow took on the role of music director for the TV series Callback in 1967 and arranged the theme song for The Ed Sullivan Show. He was then presented with an opportunity to write commercial jingles.

“I got this phone call from a commercial agency: Would I be interested in trying for a jingle for Dodge? They needed a melody,” he explained in a 2019 interview with the Television Academy. “So they gave me their lyric, and I wrote this melody for Dodge. It got selected, so people kept calling me to do jingles.”

Some of Manilow’s most famous jingles include State Farm (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there”), for which he was paid a flat fee of $500, as well as Band-Aid (“I am stuck on Band-Aid, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!”) and McDonald’s (“You deserve a break today”). He’s also written jingles for Pepsi, KFC, and more. Many of his jingles, such as the one written for State Farm, are still used today, and he sometimes plays medleys of them during his concerts.

How Writing a Jingle Is Like Writing a Pop Song

Manilow also credits his early work writing jingles with helping to teach him how to craft a pop song.

“It taught me how to write a pop song because the rules are the same,” he once said of the writing process. “You’ve got to grab the listener within the first 15 seconds… I attribute my ability to actually write pop songs because I had a couple of years of writing jingles.”

In 2009, Manilow was presented with a CLIO Award for his accomplishments writing jingles, and in 2026, the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Fame honored him with their President’s Award.

Manilow went on to have a successful career as a singer and is best known for hits like “Mandy,” “Copacabana (At the Copa),” and “I Write the Songs.” He has sold over 85 million records sold worldwide and is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.