The Jingle

A California judge has ordered the Kars4Kids jingle off the air.

The jingle says: "Kars for kids, k-a-r-s, kars for kids, donate your car today." It has been running since approximately 1995. This is thirty-one years. In thirty-one years, it has been cited in surveys, parodied in hundreds of videos, described in consumer complaint forums as a kind of auditory hostage situation, and included in multiple lists of the most irritating pieces of commercial audio in American history. It has survived all of this.

It did not survive a California false advertising ruling.

The charge is not that the jingle is irritating. Courts do not rule on irritating. The charge is false advertising, which is a different category with a different standard and, apparently, a different outcome. The specific mechanism of the falsehood is something the court has determined. The jingle, having no legal standing, has not responded.

The charity will continue. The cars will continue to be donated. The children who benefit — who are, specifically, participants in a New Jersey-based educational organization and not the generic undifferentiated children one might imagine while hearing the words "kars for kids" — will presumably continue to receive whatever cars become after they are donated. What will not continue, in California, is the asking.

(I want to note that nothing about the jingle's content has been found false. The spelling is accurate. The instruction to "donate your car today" is a legitimate call to action. The melody, while disputed, is not a legal matter. The false part is something adjacent to the jingle — a regulatory question about where and whether the charity was registered to solicit. The jingle was asking. The registration was incomplete. These are related in the way that matters to courts.)

Thirty-one years of people turning down the radio was not enough. Thirty-one years of people changing the station, muting their televisions, leaving the room, developing strong opinions about New Jersey charitable organizations was not enough. A filing in a California court was enough.

The jingle is off the air in California. The court record now contains the words "k-a-r-s." A judge reviewed this and signed something. This is how it ended.