Mktg - Want your jingle to play in print?

Sapna Nair

Greeting cards with Happy Birthday tunes are a hit today. Very soon, there will be print advertisements that will play jingles and offer information about specific products. Pioneer Book Company, which publishes magazines such as Meri Saheli and New Woman, has come up with a concept that will make sound-enabled ads possible in magazines.

Lalit Pahwa, director, Pioneer, tells afaqs! that the audio feature can be enabled with the help of a prerecorded chip. The chip will be embedded in the page in such a way that when the reader comes to the page, the audio will start playing and will stop only when the page is turned.

“The objective is to grab attention, make the reader stop and take notice. It will create correlation between the television, radio and print media and up the recall of the brand,” Pahwa explains.

The idea struck him in 2007, and since then, he has been working on the logistics and on finetuning the concept, which is now registered. He believes that in today’s remote control equipped world, it is such innovations that will help grab attention. He says that the concept can be replicated in newspapers, trade magazines and inhouse journals, too.

Pioneer will not restrict the implementation of the concept to its brands alone. “There will be brands that may not fit the profile of our magazines. We are open to working with advertisers and other publications as well in a tri-party arrangement,” he adds. To simplify the process, Pioneer will require the advertiser to give it a CD with the audio to be embedded in the MP3 format.

The company has prepared a few thousand dummy copies to be circulated among the advertising and media fraternity to evoke curiosity and generate feedback. Currently, it is in talks with advertisers such as Unilever, LG and Coca-Cola.

Initially, the innovation will be limited to one per issue because the thickness of the magazine has to be maintained. “Since a different kind of thick paper is used for the concept, in order to hide the chip and maintain the pull of the page, more than one such ad will be difficult,” he explains. The overall cost of one such innovation is Rs 40 per copy. The music/audio can be replayed about 500 times.