Does This Ice Cream Ad Sound Too Much Like The White Stripes?

Updated:

March 4, 2010 7:08 pm

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The White Stripes’ Jack White likes Coke, enough to write a jingle about it. But does he like European ice cream bars enough to let them borrow the Stripes’ sound?

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This new commercial for Magnum ice cream bars (which, if you’ve never had one, are wicked good) sounds suspiciously like the Stripes’ 2005 song “My Doorbell.” It might be the simple piano and drums arrangement, or the chord progression, or maybe it’s the way the vocalist does an uncanny Jack White impersonation. There’s even a bit of “Conquest” fanfare right at the beginning, via the horns in the intro.

Tom Waits successfully sued Frito Lay in the late ’80s when they got a sound-alike to impersonate him in a television commercial. Ironically, the jingle sounded like Waits’ song “Step Right Up,” which lampoons false advertising. Check out the Magnum commercial and “My Doorbell” below.