Jingles on the highway

Wherever you go, the ads will now follow you. Imagine waiting for a bus at an inter-State terminus and hearing a jingle waft out of the public address system. Or driving down a highway, and finding that wayside eateries are offering product samplings of all kinds of brands.

In Maharashtra, 80 bus stations and several food joints on the expressways are already doing this.

Take a drive down from Mumbai to Pune and if you stop at the food mall near Khopoli, you might see LCD screens beaming ads of online travel firm Make My Trip. Billboards at the eatery scream out messages highlighting the ease with which you can book bus tickets on the travel portal. For Make My Trip, which recently launched its online bus booking services, the highway was an obvious location to introduce the concept to potential users.

For good measure, a jingle promoting the bus booking service plays out on a public address system. The traveller stopping to grab a bite at the eatery cannot but escape listening to the ad.

Pune-based agency Vritti i-Media is behind this 360-degree activation for Make My Trip at the food mall. As Veerendra Jamdade, CEO and Director Technical at Vritti points out, with 25 lakh highway travellers on the Bombay-Pune road, it's a beautiful location for the portal to reach out to its target segment. According to him, 60 per cent of these travellers are bus users.

The campaign will run for two months on the highway. Every day a thousand-plus inter-city and inter-state buses stop at 11 prominent eateries on the route — and all of them have been sewn up to promote the brand.

“It's guaranteed listening by passengers as the ad jingle is smartly placed on the public address system just after the bus departure announcement,” says Jamdade.

Make My Trip is not the only one.  Mercedes Benz, HUL's Annapurna salt, Parle G biscuits are all playing out their jingles on the Bombay-Pune Highway. Last month, Mercedes Benz stationed one of its cars at the Food Mall here so that highway passengers could stop and take a look at it.

The heaviest advertisers on the highways and bus stations so far are property developers, car loan givers and banks such as SBI, says Jamdade.

Bus stations at places at pilgrim centres Shirdi and Pandharpur are ideal locations for brands to play out their jingles. “These are bus stations where 40,000-plus visitors transit and it's a good place for advertisers to reach out to a big captive crowd,” he says.

Jamdade says the jingles created for the public address system are different in quality from radio jingles as the ambience is different. “This has to be created for a noisy ambience and a public environment,” he explains. The PA systems are all hooked up through a computerised network to the agency's office in Pune, from where it is remotely controlled.

“This is completely automated, the electronic hardware at the stations and highway eateries are connected through the Internet to our control room,” he says. Although the ground staff at the venues run it, the agency can monitor what's going on from the control room.

While the PA system runs for 24 hours at the bus stations, the jingles can be played out only between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. A fixed royalty is paid to the Maharashtra State Transport Corporation for the use of the PA system. As for the dhabas on the highways, the payment system can vary from royalty to revenue-sharing models.

“A few of the eateries have decided to invest with us in this and opted for a revenue sharing model,” says Jamdade.

According to him, for advertisers, the cost of using PA systems work out far more economical than radio — till now the traditional medium to reach out to non-urban audiences.

He points to the award that the Maharashtra state agriculture department won for innovative advertising through public address systems. The department mingled crop advisories for farmers with informative jingles. Studies have shown higher brand recall when jingles are aired on PA systems, he claims.

Moving on, Vritti will be expanding the service to a few other States. And the Railways too are a potentially powerful medium.

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