The Power of Nostalgia in Marketing Remains Potent

Recently I’ve started to notice that a lot of my 3-year-old’s favorite TV shows are leaning into nostalgia. Hard. Not for the benefit of my 3-year-old of course, but for the millennial parents who are the ones picking and choosing what their kids are watching.

My daughter and I were watching Spidey and His Amazing Friends when the theme song started playing and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the music for this kids show felt oddly…familiar.

After a quick Google search, it turns out the theme song (and a lot of the soundtrack for that matter) is written and performed by none other than Patrick Stump, the front man of millennial royalty, Fall Out Boy.

That’s not the only one either.

On another Saturday afternoon my daughter was watching the recently released Iron Man and His Awesome Friends as I was typing away on my laptop. Hearing that theme song playing in the background can only be described as a sound that activated me like a sleeper agent. Cutting through my focus was the buttery golden voice of the one and only Mark Hoppus from Blink-182. 

These jingles could be chalked up as one-off instances or maybe just a couple of guys wanting to make something their own kids would enjoy.

Nope. No way this is anything other than a carefully crafted and explicit marketing strategy.

Simple Plan is probably the godfather of this trend, having done the What’s New Scooby-Doo? theme song back in 2002, but they are still reaping the benefits of that deep seeded nostalgia, having performed this live as recently as last year at Warped Tour!

Another unforgettable, piercing voice of millennial culture, Brendon Urie from Panic! at the Disco had to wait the full 1 hour and 43 minute runtime of Frozen 2 before jumping in with his version of the film’s theme song (and absolutely dusting the literal voice of Elsa herself, Idina Menzel).

In a world full of content, chaos, and noise, nostalgia feels familiar, fuzzy, and above all?

Safe.

So what better way to tap into that emotion than straight up micro dosing some of the fondest memories of millennial parents’ youth?

“This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”