5 Catchy Commercial Jingles That Are Worth A Head-Turning Amount Of Money

When it comes to commercial jingles, many of us can't help but sing them to ourselves over and over. But besides being eminently catchy, some of these jingles have also generated serious amounts of money. And not just a pretty little bank deposit either, but enough funds that sizing up the figures can make you feel a little dizzy. Though it's hard to always tell precisely how much a single song earned, a peek into a company's profits and consideration of their ad campaigns gives some pretty strong hints as to how successful a jingle has been.

Lest you still feel skeptical about the whole thing, consider the various jingles you've heard from State Farm or McDonald's. How many times do you suppose those songs have appeared before you? Imagine that, each time, someone gets another amount added to their residual check, or that a couple of people are gently pressured into going out for a Big Mac. Now, imagine that commercial getting played thousands upon thousands of times, until it's considered part of the cultural lore and perhaps even gets a mention in the Library of Congress — just like when Coca-Cola donated its ad archive to the Library of Congress in 2001. Ultimately, all those seemingly little things add up – way up.

Nowadays, State Farm's "Like a Good Neighbor" jingle is so ubiquitous that you don't really need the appearance of red-shirted salesperson Jake to kick off the tune in your mind. But, back in the day, it was the result of a workaday jingle writer named Barry Manilow. In fact, Manilow has credited his time in the jingle-writing world as being seriously instructive, helping him learn how to write the sort of catchy tunes that would eventually make him famous in his own right. For the State Farm tune, however, Manilow didn't exactly ride high on the hog; instead, he got a flat rate of $500.

That's not so bad, given that he wrote it in 1971 and that fee would be equivalent to around $4,000 as of 2025, but Manilow may have wished he'd performed it, too. That way, he would have gotten a recurring residual payment. As he joked in 2012, he expected that the woman who sang the original tune "is on her third Rolls-Royce for now" (via People). State Farm itself hasn't disclosed just how much the jingle is worth, but Manilow appears to be on the right track by assuming it's netted some hearty dollars. State Farm reported that it earned $132.3 billion in revenue for 2025 and, while that's hardly the result of a single tune, we imagine the jingle has grown greatly in worth from a comparatively piddling $500.

Given its status as one of the world's largest fast-food restaurants with some weird history to boot, it's no surprise that McDonald's has a seriously profitable commercial jingle in its corporate pocket. But the precise value of that tune may nevertheless surprise you, especially considering its utter simplicity and the dire straits in which it was conceived. You see, in the early 2000s, McDonald's was facing an alarming financial downturn and the closure of almost 200 restaurants by 2002. Clearly sweatin' it, the company set a global challenge to advertising agencies to fix its image. Execs ultimately went with a German company that came up with the simple, three-word phrase that we now all know: "I'm lovin' it."

But the phrase was only half the battle — they needed a tune, too. Inspired by a singer's vocal warm-up, the nascent song was turned into a track co-written by Pharrell Williams (though other sources point to Pusha T as the true songwriter) and performed by Justin Timberlake. It was also released before the McDonald's campaign, which turned out to be a canny move when the song charted and set the stage for the 2003 debut of the jingle (performed, at least in some places, by Timberlake himself). The result? A worldwide sales increase of more than $1.8 billion and one of the longest-lasting, most earwormy commercial jingles in fast-food history.

Okay, the whole "five-dollar footlong" Subway promotion may not have panned out in the long term. Sure, the catchy jingle and screaming deal merited a lot of attention back in 2008, when both were first introduced, earning the company a dizzying estimated $3.8 billion. Only, franchisees all too often got hosed, as rising food prices made handing over a footlong sandwich for a fiver painful — or, utterly unsustainable, as their budgets showed. The promotion faded away around 2012, but that jingle has still been haunting our brains ever since we first heard it.

Who created an earworm so catchy it helped Subway rake in billions? Ad agency MMB came up with the hook and tune, engineered to mention the "five-dollar" concept as many times as possible. To call this a jingle is perhaps charitable, as it's more of a lightly tonal chant over elevator music. Yet, with so much money in the bank and visibility (not to mention staying power — can anyone of a certain age deny they're muttering it to themselves right now?), no one can argue against the reality of its earning power. And, given how its other headlining commercial series featured the now-jailed Jared Fogle, Subway may prefer you to remember the five-dollar footlong campaign anyway. 

Folgers may not be considered top-tier coffee — hardly anything that comes in a giant can is deemed gourmet — but its jingle is both a classic of the genre and one that had the company skipping its caffeinated, cash-laden way to the bank. It's hard to find an overall accounting of how much the song has made since its 1984 debut, but when the ownership of its royalties was auctioned off in 2021, the listing by Royalty Exchange noted it brought in just over $38,000 in the decade prior. The winning bid was $90,500, earning the rather mysterious John C. the right to future royalties from the iconic jingle.

We really do mean iconic, as the tune is not just older than many of you reading right now, but has been covered by such music luminaries as Aretha Franklin and Randy Travis. It's appeared in various forms in a diverse array of commercials over the decades, from 2009's "Coming Home" (which has had an odd second life as internet commentators have reinterpreted its brief but strangely memorable plot) to a 2026 mashup track that combines Folgers with pretty much all of the music genres you can think of. Presumably, John C. is on the way to making his investment back already, so long as we all forget whatever it was Paul Stanley was doing when his Folgers song joined the ranks of the worst rock commercial jingles.

"I'd like to buy the world a Coke" is a nice-enough sentiment, but the 1971 jingle of the same name was so powerful it made its way into everyone's brain — and surely turned a pretty nice profit. However, it was an exceedingly expensive commercial, requiring $250,000 to make (over $2 million today and well over the original budget of $100,000). It turned out to be worth every penny, with a deluge of fan letters to Coca-Cola and play requests to radio stations – yes, for a commercial.

In fact, it was re-recorded as a pop single, with the references to Coca-Cola scrubbed from the lyrics, but with Coca-Cola still benefiting. A group of studio vocalists named themselves the Hillside Singers, in reference to the ad, and released "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)." Weeks later, music director Billy Davis convinced the New Seekers — the original group they'd wanted — to cut their own track. 

The Hillside Singers' version charted at No. 13 in the U.S., while the New Seekers' take broke the top 10. Coca-Cola donated the first $80,000 in royalties to UNICEF, indicating it performed well enough that tens of thousands in donations weren't such a worry for the company. Surely, its enduring status as an iconic commercial for a major company strongly hints that it performed quite well indeed.