The Fall of Jingles and the Loss of Sonic Memory
Washing powder Nirma is still remembered decades on. Why a media world built for muted, skippable video has made the jingle nearly extinct.
There was a period in Indian advertising when a good jingle could outlive the campaign that spawned it by decades. "Washing powder Nirma" is still recognisable to people who have never bought a bar of Nirma detergent in their lives. Vicco Vajradanti's jingle sold an ayurvedic toothpaste to a generation that could hum the tune before they could pronounce half the ingredients. Today, it is genuinely difficult to name a jingle from the last five years with anywhere near that kind of staying power, and the reason has less to do with worse songwriting than with how differently people now watch advertising.
Sound used to be guaranteed. Now it is optional.
A jingle only works if the audience is listening, and for most of Indian television history, that was a safe assumption. A household watching Doordarshan or a cable channel in a shared living room had the sound on by default, and a catchy, repeated musical hook was one of the most efficient ways to plant a brand name in memory across a country with wide variation in literacy and language. Today, a huge share of video advertising is watched on a phone, in public, on mute, with captions doing the work sound used to do. A brilliant jingle played to a muted screen achieves nothing, and that single behavioural shift has quietly ended sonic branding's status as a default advertising tool.
Short-form video rewards a different kind of memory
The formats that dominate attention now, feed-based short vertical video, are built around visual hooks and captions that work in the first two seconds, not a musical phrase that needs eight or ten seconds of repetition to lodge in memory. A jingle is, by nature, a slow-build device. It needs time and repetition across a media plan to become familiar, which was affordable when television spots ran for months on a handful of channels. It is much harder to justify in a media environment where a single piece of content might only be seen once, by an audience that could not name three ads they saw yesterday, jingle or otherwise.
A jingle is a promise that the audience will hear your ad more than once. Almost nothing in modern media planning can guarantee that anymore.
What has quietly replaced it
Sonic memory has not disappeared entirely so much as shrunk into smaller units: a short audio logo, a notification sound, a two second sting at the end of a video rather than a full musical verse and chorus. Some categories, particularly those built around apps and notifications, have found new sonic territory here, a specific sound effect standing in for what a jingle used to do, compressed into a fraction of a second because that is genuinely all the attention the format can reliably guarantee.
The cost of losing the format entirely
The brands that built lasting jingles decades ago are still, quietly, benefiting from that investment today, because a piece of music lodged in childhood memory does not require ongoing media spend to stay recalled the way a visual campaign does. The industry's shift away from jingles has traded that kind of durable, decades-long memory asset for content that is cheaper and faster to produce but rarely outlives the media budget spent to distribute it. Nobody is likely to build another "Washing powder Nirma" in the current media environment, not because nobody has the talent to write one, but because almost nothing about how audiences watch advertising today would let it be heard often enough to matter.