How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle

How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle

Correction: April 9, 2024

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the year that “Magic” became a hit. While the song was released in 1974, it reached the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975, not 1974. The error was repeated in the headline.

In February 2023, David Paton, guitar case in hand, strode across the most famous pedestrian walkway in rock history and into London’s Abbey Road Studios.

Paton was no stranger to the rooms where the Beatles changed the course of popular music: His 1970s pop-rock band Pilot recorded two albums there. In his second life, as an in-demand studio and touring musician for the likes of Kate Bush and Elton John, he clocked numerous sessions with the prog-rock outfit the Alan Parsons Project, whose namesake produced Pilot’s signature hit, “Magic.” He even spent some time there with his boyhood hero, Paul McCartney, singing backup vocals on Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre.”

Paton had come to London to record a new version of “Magic.” “It was a great thrill to be back at Abbey Road, singing my song,” he said in a recent video interview from his home studio in Edinburgh, an array of guitars displayed behind him. The track’s stair-step chorus — “Oh, oh, oh/it’s MAAA-gic” — could test Paton’s vocal range even back in 1974, and again a year later, when the song became a worldwide hit, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“It’s just about the enjoyment of life,” he said. “About waking up in the morning, you know? I was 22 when I wrote it.” Now he was 73, and unsure if he could still reach those high notes. But Paton took his place in front of the Abbey Road microphone and confidently sang that indelible hook, only with the word “magic” swapped out for something less ephemeral and more pharmaceutical: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic.”

[Video: Watch on YouTube.]

As television viewers are all too aware, that altered chorus from “Magic” serves as the advertising jingle for the Type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic. Since the product arrived in 2018, the bowdlerized version of “Magic” — first rerecorded by work-for-hire musicians, and then re-rerecorded by Paton at Abbey Road — has taken its place alongside such classics of the form as Subway’s “Five Dollar Foot Long” and McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” as marvels of marketing ingenuity.

“It’s an earworm all right,” said David Allan, a professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University and the author of “This Note’s for You,” a book about music and advertising. “You can’t get it out of your head.”

Those three seconds of AM-radio bliss — “It’s just a first, a third and a fifth note,” Paton modestly explained — have played a pivotal role in the Ozempic story. Its parent company, Novo Nordisk, has now become Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market cap of nearly $570 billion.

Ozempic, of course, has become much more than a diabetes drug: Its “off label” use to treat obesity has sparked a “weight-loss revolution,” as Oprah Winfrey called it in her March TV special dedicated to an emerging group of diabetes and anti-obesity medications. Buttressed by an ad spend of $120 million over just the first seven months of 2023, according to MediaRadar, Ozempic’s Q rating is such that the brand now stands in for an entire category of product, as Viagra does for erectile dysfunction drugs. On the March 30 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” the comedian Ramy Youssef appeared in a spoof commercial for “Ozempic for Ramadan” that featured the familiar “Oh, oh, oh” of “Magic.”

[Video: Watch on YouTube.]

This Ozempic boom is due in no small part to the jingle, which helped turn a byzantine mash-up of syllables into a brand patients would request from doctors by name. Jeremy Shepler, who headed the Ozempic launch in the United States for Novo Nordisk, had previously enjoyed success deploying music in a commercial for a new-to-market nasal spray, and knew he wanted to find a song that worked both mnemonically and emotionally.

“The first song I came up with was by New Kids on the Block, the one that goes ‘Oh oh oh oh oh’,” he sang, referring to “You Got It (The Right Stuff).” “But New Kids was a bit too young,” he said. “The average age of our patient was between 50 and 55. Then it came to me: ‘Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic.’”

That snippet of a chorus not only seared the “O” in Ozempic into consumers’ temporal lobes, but its cheerfulness sold the promise of the drug: to “help people get back to a level of health when their life was bright and their future was optimistic,” said Jeff Rothstein, chief executive of CultHealth, the ad agency for Ozempic. Also, baby boomers exposed to the jingle would subconsciously hear the missing word “magic,” which, said Shepler, helped reinforce the drug’s transformative quality.

Novo licensed the song from Sony Music Publishing, and Rothstein hired a music production house to record the brand-specific version of “Magic.” When they tested a rough version of the commercial, “It was the highest scoring ad we’d ever seen,” Shepler said.

As the spot first began airing in 2018 (direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is allowed only in the United States and New Zealand), Paton wasn’t even aware that “Magic” had been licensed for the advert. “I learned about it through Facebook,” he said. “Fans would write me, ‘I’m hearing “Magic” every 20 minutes on my TV’.”

Paton and Billy Lyall, his Pilot bandmate who died in 1989 at age 36, share a co-writing credit on “Magic,” and split the revenue generated by the composition with Sony Publishing. (Songs generate multiple income streams, some based on the performance or master recording, some based on the songwriting. In this case, since the original recording of “Magic” was not used by Novo Nordisk, Pilot’s record label, Warner Music Group, was not involved.)

As is common practice in the music industry, Sony was not obligated to receive permission from the songwriters to license the song. Not that Paton minded: Three music-industry executives, asked separately to assess the value of the Ozempic deal, said it was most likely worth seven figures to Paton. (Paton, Sony Music Publishing and Novo Nordisk all declined to discuss financial terms of the deal.)

The Ozempic commercial “is another example of why classic, iconic music catalogs are great investments,” said Jon Singer, chairman of Spirit Music Group, a music publishing company with a repertoire that includes songs by the Who, Chicago, Toto and T. Rex.

“Music as an asset can have multiple lives,” added Billy Mann, a Grammy-nominated songwriter and longtime publishing executive. “There’s a ‘comfort food’ feeling of nostalgia that hit songs can trigger. They’re time machines.”

In the Spotify era, older songs have spiked in value, as consumers repeatedly press play on the songs of their youth. For artists, those fractions of a penny eventually add up, and that has helped create a gold rush for veteran acts looking to sell their music catalogs. “There’s a finite number of songs that have proven to be iconic for 40 or 50 years,” said Bill Werde, the director of the Bandier music business program at Syracuse University and the author of the industry newsletter “Full Rate No Cap.” “Those songs have special value on the marketplace.”

[Video: Watch on YouTube.]

Licensing a song for a commercial may be seen by some as antithetical to the countercultural spirit of rock ’n’ roll. “There have always been protectors of the flame who, when certain songs get used in certain moments, aggressively clutch their pearls,” Werde said. “But there’s very little evidence that this has ever harmed any artist.” He pointed to the Beatles licensing their utopian “All You Need Is Love” to Luvs diapers in 2007 as perhaps the most egregious example of an advertiser co-opting a song’s original meaning. “But no one really cared. It was Ob-la-di. Life goes on.”

Simon Allaway, 52, an Ozempic user and Chicago-based computer programmer and musician, loves the “Magic” spot. “I can’t help but sing along to it,” he said. “It’s a perfect fit with the product.” Another user wrote in a message-board post that whenever she injects herself, her father sings “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic.”

“Magic” has been leased plenty of times before, for a Coca-Cola commercial — “I actually sang ‘Coke, Coke, Coke, it’s Magic’ back in the ’70s,” Paton recalled — for the 2005 Disney film “Herbie: Fully Loaded” and as the musical bed for Flo Rida’s 2009 single, also called “Magic,” to name a few. “People always want to use the song in some way or the other,” Paton said.

Asked if he was bothered by his song’s association with what turned out to be a lightning-rod product, he smiled and shook his head. “I was delighted! I’m a songwriter. I want to sell my music. A lot of people don’t know the name Pilot, but they know the Ozempic song.”

For musicians, the success of the Ozempic commercial could be a harbinger of big checks to come. Pharmaceutical companies have seemingly unlimited budgets to promote their wares: according to the media analytics firm Guideline, pharma surpassed tech and auto in 2023 to become the second largest industry for ad spending, behind only consumer packaged goods.

Already, Lady Gaga is a spokesperson for Pfizer’s migraine medication Nurtec ODT; Cyndi Lauper lends her distinct Brooklyn accent to a commercial for Cosentyx, which treats plaque psoriasis; John Legend and Charlie Puth pitch Pfizer’s Covid vaccine and boosters. The Jackson 5’s “ABC” propels ads for Trelegy (used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), while commercials for the heart drug Entresto are soundtracked by Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On.”

But those spots haven’t embedded themselves into pop culture the way “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic” has.

“In contemporary advertising, campaigns tend to have pretty short shelf lives,” CultHealth’s Rothstein said. “Two, three years, tops. Yet ‘Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic’ continues to endure. You can do all the market research in the world, and never end up with something like this.”