A Mars a day no longer helps you work, rest and play. GE stopped bringing good things to life after 22 years. Even Heinz is threatening to ditch its 36-year-old jingle, "Beanz meanz Heinz" in favor of something more timely and relevant.

No advertiser want to be viewed as passé and they're blaming the jingle for the cumbersome connotations of past slogans. As a result, many agencies have moved on. Accepting jingle-writing back into their lives would be a bit like reliving those gawky teenage years before they discovered Clearasil, contact lenses and the existence of cooler bands than Bon Jovi.

But, like the teenager lurking within us, jingles are a still-vital component of the ad industry's body of work.

"The jingle has always been part and parcel of pop culture," notes music producer Josh Rabinowitz, who penned ditties for JC Penney and MCI at music house tomandandy before moving to Y&R, NY. "Oftentimes when I work with pop artists, they say to me: 'You worked on that? I wish I wrote that!'"

"They are so brilliantly bad," says Jason Gaboriau, CD at Amalgamated, NY. "[But] they make me feel good". His favorite jingle du jour: "Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2", set to a reggae beat by Dan Williams Music, Nashville.

But while we're still crafting jingles, we're not allowed to call them that. For years, Chicago-based ASA Productions was content to be known as a jingle house. These days, "I don't use that nasty word in a presentation," says George Evans, EP. "You don't wanna say it in the hallway - they'll beat you up and take your lunch money." He recently reworked a Weezer song for a client. This, after all, is the newly acceptable face of jingle-writing.

Similarly, EMI Music Resources, NY, has writers "who source previously existing music that functions as a jingle", says John Melillo, VP of EMI Music Resources, NY. 'Sourced' work includes "Walking on Sunshine" for Fisher price, "You Can Have it All" for Northwest Airlines, and "Lovin' Each Day" for Busch Gardens.

This approach flies in the face of creativity, according to Jess Vacek, music librarian at Wieden + Kennedy, NY. "The jingle isn't dead; it's just in a coma," Vacek quips. "When the jingle wakes up and hears the countless instances of inserting a product name into a pre-existing song, [it] will probably want to crawl back into its hospital bed and bang its head against the IV pole until it regains unconsciousness."

A more creative route is to write short jingles with no music at all, and call them mnemonics. That's how LA's MusikVergnuegen scored its way to ad notoriety for the famous "Intel Inside" signature, written by founder Walter Werzowa in 1995 for an undisclosed sum of money and using just five musical notes. (Duracell did something similar at least a decade earlier.)

Marketing director Andrew Hall believes today's consumers are simply too audio-savvy to have much patience with old-style jingles. He says mnemonics are an effective way of encapsulating a brand. "Most of the major corporations out there have looked very seriously into their audio branding," Hall says. "It's an all-important part of their strategy when you have a media buy." The four-year-old company just finished a spot for Bud True, augmenting a client list that includes Ikea, BMW and JC Penney.