“There was a well in the rear courtyard of our house in Alwar. During vacations, all the children of the joint family would assemble by it in the early afternoon, draw water and splash around,” reminisces Narendra Jain, a retired IT professional, who has worked worldwide in an illustrious career spanning almost forty years. “The actual bath would only start when our mothers would yell at us to wind up fast – and the soap we used? Lifebuoy!”
He hums the jingle, a rage when broadcast – “Tandurusti ki raksha karta hai Lifebuoy, Lifebuoy hai jahan tandurusti hai wahan – Lifebuoy!” Such was the power of the jingle that when he was posted in the Middle East and would come back from field trips, all sweaty and dusty, he would find himself wishing he had a Lifebuoy to wash it off. So even to date, he uses a Lifebuoy hand wash and hand sanitizer.
The Lifebuoy ad was one of the most successful radio advertisements. It was also among the earliest since radio advertisements started in India in 1967.
The world over, though, the first radio ad broadcast was a jingle attributed to General Mills, whose catchy ditty was for “Wheaties – the best breakfast food in the land”. Listeners first heard it on Christmas Eve in 1926. It initially aired only in the Minneapolis–St Paul Market, but it was soon broadcast nationally. The resulting increase in sales established the “Wheaties” brand nationwide, and radio became an effective advertising medium.
Other advertisers quickly saw the value in having a radio ad, particularly a custom musical melody that conveyed the name of their product more uniquely and memorably than just having an announcer say it. As a result, over the past ninety years, many influential and memorable advertising campaigns have been based around radio ads, specifically jingles.
“I agree with your friend,” says Santosh Desai, the brand guru, author, consultant and veteran adman. “It was an iconic ad,” he smiles as he stops to hum the jingle of Lifebuoy. Then, he launches into a jingle hum medley “Vajradanti, Vajradanti, Vicco Vajradanti” and “Khushboodaar antiseptic cream Boroline”. They are still as popular.
“Do you see what was in common between them?” he asks.
“Music! Catchy music!” he answers his own question before we can reply. “Music is a big memory trigger. It can invoke both emotion and nostalgia.”
Santosh explains that the brand’s aural signature is an asset the jingle builds for the product or service. “The repeatability of the jingle, over and over again, ad nauseam, creates a reminder which the customer will not forget easily.”
“A good jingle has a familiar sound that the brain will store and recall,” explains Kala Iyer, who has created jingles and ads for over three decades from her recording studio in Delhi. “Likewise, if the song is annoying or disruptive, it can create a dissonance and the customer will hate your product.”
She continues, getting a little technical now, “It’s all thanks to a little thing called involuntary musical imagery (INMI). A lot of neuroscience goes into this. I’ll condense what you need to know in layman’s terms: when you hear a familiar piece of music, your brain floods with memories related to that tune. This is perfect for advertising your brand. Radio jingles are the only advertising method to get you hours of free airtime in your listeners’ brains. They’ll get stuck in their heads and when they hear bits of them again, they’ll instantly remember your ad and what you told them. It’s no surprise that a great radio jingle boosts brand recall so much.”
“Radio advertisements are not always jingles; many are spots,” clarifies Sujoy Sen, whose studio has produced jingles and spots for decades. He explains the difference between a spot and a jingle. “A spot is a kind of radio drama with dialogues while a jingle is a song and much more expensive to produce.” Sujoy has produced radio dramas and hundreds of radio spots over four decades. “While the jingle is light and frothy and is easy to remember for its catchy tune, the spot can have humour or dialogues which explain the product features,” he adds.
An advertising veteran, Rekha Nigam, concurs, “The radio spot should make the listener ‘see with their ears!’ The sound effects and the different voices create a sense of the visual.” She talks of a radio spot for the mosquito coil called Kachhua Chhaap. “There was a very effective radio spot with the two veteran comedians, Mukri and Tun Tun. I don’t remember the exact dialogues, but the crux was that for the suhaag raat, Mukri lifts the ghunghat and, on seeing a fat Tun Tun, shouts, ‘Bachao, Bachao!’”
The voice-over adds, “Machharon se bachao, phir ghunghat uthao; yeh lo Kachhua Chhaap.”
“I have forgotten the content, but the theme and the product have stayed in my mind,” she says, signifying a good spot’s impact.
Says a veteran broadcaster, “Despite radio’s massive reach, the introduction of the commercial into radio had to wait till 1967. The reason was probably because AIR initially did not even broadcast film songs and the commercialisation of literature and culture was anathema. So, the push for advertising and broadcasting films songs came from the same source – the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation, or Radio Ceylon, as it was then called. The iconic Binaca (later Cibaca) Geetmala proved to be a game-changer.”
Later, we will talk about how the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation took away listeners in droves from AIR and diverted them to the Binaca Geetmala, the first countdown show of Hindi film songs. It attracted listeners and did wonders for the toothpaste brand Binaca, which sponsored it. Such was the hold of the programme that when the company changed the brand name to Cibaca, it did not have to bat an eyelid to get the change across. All it had to do was change the programme’s name to Cibaca Geetmala and people accepted the new brand name. Such was the power of radio advertising! Besides, the colossal revenue generated by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation forced the Indian government to consider launching advertising on AIR.
Though the entertainment channel Vividh Bharati, playing film music, was started in 1957, it was not till ten years later that it broadcasted its first advertisement. We ask many radio veterans if they remember the first advertisement on AIR, but no one knows.
“Recording jingles and spots was a difficult job in those days,” says Deepa Roy, a veteran voice-over artiste. She has the distinction of having recorded jingles in twenty-three Indian languages and then proceeds to explain the process.
“The technology was such that the magnetic tape we recorded had only one track and editing was impossible. The music and the vocals were, therefore, recorded together. The entire crew of musicians and singers would assemble in the studios in the morning and patiently wait for the music director to create a tune. Then, until he got it right, we would hang around, often for half a day. Once he got the tune right, the entire recording would start and even if one of the accompanists missed a beat or the singer mispronounced even one word, the whole process would start all over again. It would take a day to complete just one jingle, but the process ensured that we produced a perfect output.”
The technology has since revolutionized and the background score is recorded separately. The track of this recording is played for the singer and often with the voice of the music director singing the song along on a separate track. The lead singer follows the voice and records a jingle in as little as an hour. Most professionals have mini studio setups at home and record without knowing who the accompanists are.
“This makes the process faster,” adds Deepa, “but it is very clinical and often, for days, I work alone with only the studio’s walls for company.”
When introduced in 1967, advertising on AIR took off in a big way. Sales units were set up in major metros and sold airtime for the local and repeater stations. Each radio station had a rate list based on the popularity of the programmes and the time slots were divided into prime and non-prime slots and rates were charged accordingly. Advertising was sold in ten-second slots with a maximum of 120 seconds allowed at one time. Sponsorships for entire programmes were also sold just the way Binaca Geetmala was. However, with the local radio station’s limited reach, rates were low and could only be sold for products with local appeal. Therefore, if an advertiser wanted to broadcast a spot or a jingle across the country, he had to submit separate proposals.
Sujoy explains that the agency had to send the script by post and get it approved. Then, they would do a demo or a rough cut and send it again. “Twelve copies of the final version had to be prepared and sent to twelve radio stations. Getting twelve approvals was time-consuming and frustrating; many advertisers wanting a pan-Indian presence shied away from AIR.”
Excerpted with permission from Akashvani: A Century of Stories from All India Radio, Vikrant Pande and Neelesh Kulkarni, HarperCollins India.
