How to hijack attention: Lessons from jingles, candy crush, and betting sites

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, I've got a thing I want to fill you in on.
And this is something I've been thinking about lately. And I think that you actually, you're going to bring more application to this topic than I am. And so it's my theory, but I want to hear how you would apply this idea that I have.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
All right, hit me.

**Sam Parr** (0:15)
So did you see that blonde haired woman? She had that song that was like, looking for a man in finance, six, four, whatever.
What was it?

**Shaan Puri** (0:24)
Blasphemy, six, five, bro.

**Sam Parr** (0:26)
Six, five is finance, six, five, yeah. Blue eyes or whatever.

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
Dude, have I seen that?
Has there been 10 minutes in my house where either me or my daughter is not singing that song? My four year old daughter, by the way, hits very different when your daughter says it, my dad hormones kicked in. And I was like, you ain't looking for, what are you looking for? You're looking for your Barbie, your toys. You're looking for Legos is what you're looking for.

**Sam Parr** (0:55)
There was really funny follow ups where people are like, let's do the math on that, by the way. How many men are six, five? It's like 0.1%. How many people live in New York City? How many have a trust fund? And it was like, you know, and they're single. It was like 20 people.

**Shaan Puri** (1:08)
There was like seven guys left.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. But that got me thinking.
And before I tell you exactly what it is, I have to ask you a question. Do you know your mother's or father's cell phone number by heart?

**Shaan Puri** (1:21)
I do not.

**Sam Parr** (1:23)
So for the life of me, I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I could tell you the area code, but I couldn't tell you her number, which is like a big deal.
However, how many commercials from the nineties do you remember?

**Shaan Puri** (1:35)
I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. I want my baby back.

**Sam Parr** (1:38)
Yeah, or Hot Pocket. Like you remember some of these songs?

**Shaan Puri** (1:41)
$5, $5.
We know what comes after that. I don't even have to have known you, right? You could be a complete stranger, but if I'm like $5, $5, the guy's gonna stay footlong at the end of that.

**Sam Parr** (1:53)
So I got really interested in jingles because I don't remember my wife's phone number. You don't remember your parents' phone numbers, but I can cite all these jingles. In fact, I follow Instagram accounts where it's like commercials from the 90s. The 90s, because that's when we were kids and for a lot of listeners, that was the heyday of these jingles and commercials.
And in my opinion, we need to bring that back. And I want to tell you, I'll give you a little bit, a short history of jingles.

**Shaan Puri** (2:21)
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**Sam Parr** (3:11)
So in the 90s, something like 15% of commercials had jingles. Now it's closer to 1%. So in the 20s, this company called General Mills came out with this thing called Wheaties, Wheaties Cereal.
And it wasn't that big of a hit early on. And so they were like, let's write a song about it and we're gonna create a commercial on the radio for Wheaties. And it's the first time that there was ever a dedicated commercial for a product.