Music to watch ads by

commercials refusenik Jack White to write an original track, with a
similarly lofty theme, entitled Love is the Truth.

Most advertisers would give their eye teeth to find music to fit their
budget that inspires a generation of consumers. Some, like Coke, hope to
create their own enduring track; others choose an existing piece and
some will re-record an existing song.

Many put their faith in the same artist or even the same track. This
year, the iMac is just the latest in a long line of brands, including
Nokia's Nseries and Nissan's Almera, that have used music by Moby to
play against their ads. "The music lends itself to visuals - it is very
theatrical," Tracie London-Rowell, the director of film and TV
advertising at Universal Music UK, says.

And there is a string of advertisers that have picked Louis Armstrong's
What a Wonderful World - from Levi's to Estee Lauder to Microsoft. "If a
track works that well and it's perfect for the visuals, even the fact
that it's on another commercial won't put a client or agency off,"
London-Rowell adds.

Whichever way an advertiser picks, finding music is often complex, with
some artists easier to pin down than others. Signing White involved
blood, sweat, tears and, undoubtedly, large sums of money. Melanie
Johnson, the promotions manager at EMI Music Publishing, who worked on
the deal with Mother, says: "It took about a year of negotiations.
Persuading White even to consider having his work in an ad, let alone by
an enormous brand like Coke, was quite a coup."

Johnson also believes you should not consider any band or solo singer as
off the commercials radar entirely. "I would never write anyone off
completely," she says. "Things change over an artist's career." As if to
prove her point, shortly after slating White for selling out to Coke,
Noel Gallagher and Oasis accepted more than £1 million in a deal
with the US telecoms giant AT&T to use their track All Around the World
in an ad.

But accepting ad deals remains a sore point for many artists. Around the
same time as Oasis signed with AT&T, the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand
snubbed a deal they claim would have netted them more than £25
million to use their music in an unnamed ad campaign, saying the move
would have meant surrendering the band's "identity and integrity". The
same sensitivities clearly did not apply to ads for Tennent's lager in
Scotland, an MP3 player in Japan or mobile phones in Italy, all of which
have used the band's music in the past.

Unsurprisingly, most clients are not prepared to use their best
negotiators - or their marketing millions - to try to tempt stars such
as Franz Ferdinand or Coldplay to take their money. The vast majority of
commercials (some 80 or 90 per cent) settle for music from back
catalogues to go with their script, some of the most popular being
Rodgers and Hammerstein or old Motown songs. Recently, dance music has
taken a back seat to a swathe of folk music, with electronica still
popular.

But whether you are heading for the high ground or settling for
something less glamorous, there are specialists that will hold an
agency's hand from the search for inspiration through to the endless
paperwork. Publishers and record labels offer a search service and
advise on formalities. And increasingly, agencies are hiring their own
in-house talent.

Outfits such as Huge Music, based at WCRS, or TBWA\Stream are there to
make matching music to script more effective and efficient. Fiona
McBlane, who heads Huge, describes her aim as being "to make creatives
far more aware of what's out there and what's available to them, and to
make music far more of a priority".

Such outfits should, it is argued, be able to negotiate better
deals.

Generally, there are two sets of licensing fees - one for the publisher
of a track and one for the record label for the actual recording. For a
low-profile artist, this could come in at £30,000 to £40,000
for a pan-European campaign. The figures climb steadily from there: if
you want to pin down a track by The Beatles, you are unlikely to get
away with less than a seven-figure deal, plus money spent on middlemen
and lawyers.

Small wonder many decide against such an expensive and complicated
process

Sometimes, however, an association with a particular piece can work
better than an agency could have imagined. Clients such as Coke and
Levi's know that when music works in an ad, the results can be
spectacular.

Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Levi's entered advertising history with the
"launderette" TV ad featuring Nick Kamen and Marvin Gaye's I Heard it
Through the Grapevine. Another BBH ad, for Vodafone, worked its way into
the consciousness of a generation with the track Bohemian Like You by
the Dandy Warhols. "Every time you heard the song, you were reminded of
the ad," Richard Kirstein, the managing director of BBH's in-house music
division, Leap Music, says.

But the benefits of such an association are rarely one-sided, and the
Dandy Warhols also profited from the partnership. After a long period of
relative anonymity for the band, the single went into the top five on
the back of the ad. With the music industry experiencing falling sales
and looking to ads as an alternative revenue source, extra sales can be
an added bonus for bands on top of the usage fee.

McBlane points to the more recent example - Heartbeats, by Jose
Gonzalez, a folk track that clocked up huge sales around the world after
featuring on Fallon's Sony Bravia "balls" work. "The sheer volume of
record sales is a good example of a platform for a piece of music," she
says.

But does the music ever overpower the message? "You may have greater
sales of the track than the product it's advertising," McBlane says.
"But with exposure from radio play and TV, people automatically think of
the brand."

Cost and risks notwithstanding, many brands are prepared to pay the
money to use a particular track. And from Moby to Madonna, there are
still plenty of artists who remain happy to take the advertising
dollar.

ADLAND'S HOTTEST MELODY-MAKERS

1. MOBY

Every single track from Moby's 1999 album Play has appeared in at least
one commercial (and some in several) and, in total, his songs have been
licensed about 600 times for ads, TV and film, netting Moby some £10 million in the process. And if any more evidence of his liking for
all things advertising was necessary, he once organised a competition
for amateur filmmakers to produce a 30-second commercial against the US
president George Bush for broadcast on US TV.

2006 iMac God Moving Over

the Face of Waters

2005 Nokia N Series In My Heart

2003 Jaguar XJ Signs of Love

2002 Intel Pentium 4 We Are All

Made of Stars

2000 Maxwell House Honey

2000 Nissan Almera Find My Baby

2000 Adidas Memory Gospel

1999 Galaxy The Sky is Broken

1999 Rover 400 God Moving Over

the Face of Waters

1999 Renault Kangoo Run On

2. FATBOY SLIM

Even in previous incarnations, Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook, the former
bass player from The Housemartins) has always been popular with
advertisers: Happiness, a track released under the pseudonym Pizzaman,
was once used in an ad for Del Monte. As one of the few UK dance acts to
ever really crack the US market, his music has been used by brands on
both sides of the Atlantic and although his popularity peaked in the
late 90s, a number of car companies, including Ford and Seat, have
revisited his music in recent years.

2005 Seat Ibiza Sho Nuff

2005 Suzuki Swift The Rockafeller Skank

2002 Ford Fusion Love Life

2000 Mastercard Card Services Right Here, Right Now

2000 Rover 45 Going Out Of My Head

2000 IF finance Right Here, Right Now

1999 Sky Digital The Rockafeller Skank

1999 Adidas Right Here, Right Now

1999 Adidas Soul Surfing

3. MADONNA

One of the many A-list celebrities to wear the milk moustache in the
ongoing "got milk?" US TV ad campaign, Madonna seems to have got over
her early career reservations about allowing herself to be associated
with brands. As well as licensing her music for use, she starred in
person with Iggy Pop in a recent ad for the Motorola Rokr and also
appeared in one of the BMW Films, called Star (directed by her husband,
Guy Ritchie) in which she plays a bitchy pop celebrity.

2005 Motorola Rokr Hung Up

2003 Estee Lauder Beyond Paradise Love Profusion

2001 Gap Ray Of Light

2001 Microsoft Windows XP Ray Of Light

2000 Gap Dress You Up

1999 Max Factor Ray Of Light

1999 Peugeot 106 Open Your Heart

1999 Vauxhall Papa Don't Preach

4. THE KINKS

After years of relative obscurity, The Kinks (who released their first
single in 1964) enjoyed a period of renewed popularity during the
mid-90s, when they were hailed as a major influence on Britpop bands
such as Blur and Oasis - prompting members to release their
autobiographies and advertisers to revisit many of their famous
tracks.

2006 IBM I'm Not Like Everybody Else

2004 Carphone Warehouse Days

2004 HP Picture Book

2003 Fred Perry I'm Not Like Everybody Else

2001 BT (Surf the Net) You Really Got Me

2000 Gap You Really Got Me

2000 Sainsbury's All Day and All of the Night

1999 Golden Wonder You Really Got Me

1999 Pretty Polly All Day and All of the Night

1999 Sony Handicam Days

1999 Weetabix Lola

1997 Barclays Tired of Waiting for You

1996 Yellow Pages Days

5. SIR ELTON JOHN

Sir Elton John seems to have nothing at all against the advertising
industry - in fact, his partner, David Furnish, used to work at Ogilvy.
Three years ago, Sir Elton appeared in a TV and poster campaign for Sky
promoting both its football coverage and his soon-to-be-released single
Are You Ready For Love?, and in February 2005, he starred with Stephen
Fry in a series of 3G ads by Mother for Orange. Later that same year, he
signed a deal with Cadbury Dairy Milk to create a lifesize chocolate
Elton for display at Madame Tussauds.

2003 Sky Are You Ready For Love?

2001 Royal Mail I Want Love

2000 Beechams Flu Plus I'm Still Standing

1999 NSPCC Sorry Seems To Be The

Hardest Word

1999 Microsoft Rocket Man

1999 Magic 105.4 Rocket Man

6. ROBBIE WILLIAMS

Although his music has not historically been as popular with advertisers
as some artists', Robbie Williams makes it into the top ten on the
strength of a number of innovative tie-ups with brands. In 2005, he
signed a deal with T-Mobile that saw it launch a special-edition W800i
mobile phone featuring an exclusive and previously unreleased track,
Don't Stop Talking (the tie-up also saw him appear in an ad for the
brand's Web 'n' Walk service).

He has also netted a reported £2 million, which he later donated
to charity, for fronting a worldwide campaign for Pepsi. As part of the
push, he wrote a new song called United, which was made available to
fans in exchange for ring-pulls from Pepsi cans.

2003 Vodafone Sexed Up

2000 Sega Dreamcast She's the One

1999 Sega Dreamcast Let Me Entertain You

1998 Christie's Cancer Appeal Angel

7. THE BEACH BOYS

One of the most influential bands in pop history, The Beach Boys have
benefited from advertising since they first broke on to the UK music
scene in the 60s, when the Rolling Stones took out an ad in the music
press urging people to buy The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album.
Coincidentally, the album itself was written by the head Beach Boy,
Brian Wilson, and a young advertising copywriter called Tony Asher.

2003 Hyundai Getz In My Room

2002 Gap (Chess) Hang Onto Your Ego

2002 Evian Wouldn't It Be Nice

2001 Nationwide (Transformation) Surfin' USA

2000 Tetley I Get Around

2000 American Express Blue Card God Only Knows

1999 Midland Sloop John B

1998 BT Good Vibrations

1998 Babybel Barbara Ann

1998 BT I Get Around

8. DANDY WARHOLS

The most commonly cited example of how the use of music in advertising
can be of mutual benefit to both brand and artist, Bohemian Like You
revived the Dandy Warhols' fortunes by entering the top five after it
was used in an ad for Vodafone. The band used the money to buy part of a
city block in their hometown of Portland, Oregon, which they converted
into film and music studios and which they also used as a place to hold
parties.

2004 Barclaycard The Creep Out

2003 Sky One We Used To Be Friends

2002 Nissan Godless

2001 Vodafone Bohemian Like You

2000 Gap Boys Better

9. MASSIVE ATTACK

As well as licensing their tracks, members of Massive Attack will also
produce music specially created for an ad campaign: in 2003, Nellee
Hooper created the track for Levi's "swap" ad, which featured models
with the heads of mice. Particularly popular with brands in the late
90s, the band recently made its advertising comeback in this year's
"gorgeous" commercial for Jaguar.

2006 Jaguar (Gorgeous) Two Rocks And A Cup Of Water

2000 Morgan Stanley Card Services Heat Miser

2000 Emporio Armani Angel

1999 Mazda Protection

1998 RAC Safe From Harm

1997 Adidas Predator Angel

10. AIR

Formed in 1995, the French duo Air's brand of electronica is popular
with advertisers for the same reason Moby's music is: it is
easy-to-listen-to background music that does not take over from the
brand message - something that has led to the band being dismissed as
"advertising fodder" by some of their harsher critics.

2004 Orange (Try) Alpha Beta Gaga

2004 Sony Dirty Trip

2004 BT Alone In Kyoto

2004 Nissan Surfing on a Rocket

2003 Clark's Brakes On

2002 Levi's Playground Love