Imagine this. You’ve had a long, unforgiving day at work. There’s a two-hour crawl ahead of you, bumper to bumper. You sink into the comfort of your car, turn the key, and the radio comes alive. Your favourite song plays. For three or four minutes, the stress melts away. Your mood lifts. Suddenly, the drive home doesn’t feel so long. You’re reminded why you’re heading back in the first place.
That moment is not nostalgia. It’s neuroscience.
Sound creates what we call sonic memory—one of the most powerful and underutilised tools in advertising today. Audio is processed faster than visuals or text and travels straight to the emotional centres of the brain. A short jingle, a familiar tone, or a trusted voice doesn’t need your eyes or your full attention. It slips in quietly, repeats itself, and stays there—ready to be recalled instantly, across contexts. Radio is how memory travels with you.
This is why radio continues to matter far more than we give it credit for.
Between 2010 and 2026, roughly 40.8 million new cars have been added to Indian roads. That’s almost 40 million additional daily listening environments—private, uninterrupted, and emotionally primed. For brands, these aren’t just vehicles; they’re moving media rooms.
And yet, after spending two decades in this industry, I’m still asked the same question at seminars and agency tables: “Who even listens to radio today?”
It’s usually asked in rooms where the real objective is to trim budgets, not to grow impact.
The truth is simple. Radio is, and has always been, the common person’s medium. It cuts across age, income, language, and geography. There’s no awkwardness, no learning curve, no entry fee. You don’t need a subscription, a smartphone, or bandwidth to belong. And as private FM news programming arrives later this year, radio’s relevance is only set to grow.
Yes, radio has advertising. Streaming apps do too. However, radio does not say ‘to go ad-free, hey consumer, pay us XXX amount per month’. Everyone gets the ads! Not everyone can—or should have to—pay for access to information and entertainment. And radio upholds that equality quietly.
What radio never compromised on, even through its roughest years, was content quality. World-class presenters. Celebrity-led shows. Iconic jingles for marketers. Timely, effective public service announcements. Programming that adapts daily to the mahaul. Radio’s real advantage lies in speed and customisation. It’s cost-effective for quick turnarounds, but it has never been a low-effort medium. Radio stations have always been hotbeds of creativity, sharpening minds and voices.
Some of the country’s most recognisable talents were shaped by radio corridors—people like Hrishi Kay, who still brings world-class conversations to mornings, or comedy and content powerhouses like Zakir Khan, Prajakta Koli, and Danish Sait who first went on-air with this medium.
This cricket season, we continue our partnership—now in its third year—with Virender Sehwag. The unfiltered, bindaas Sehwag you hear on radio simply doesn’t exist elsewhere. He, like countless others, has said the same thing: radio brings you closer to your audience because they truly get to know you, the person behind the star.
That’s radio’s quiet superpower. It allows celebrities to be real. It lets you hear your favourite star live—and moments later, your local corporator discussing broken roads. Sometimes those worlds collide, with celebrities demanding better infrastructure alongside listeners. After all, Bachchan gets stuck in traffic too!
Radio, that way, has been both local and premium, intimate yet massive.
What the medium needs now isn’t reinvention—it’s a shift in nazariya. A new way of seeing. If advertisers fail to recognise the scale, intimacy, and memory-making power of this mammoth medium, they aren’t saving money. They’re missing opportunity.
And in today’s attention economy, that’s the most expensive mistake of all.
