How brands are moving beyond jingles to remixed music in advertising

There was a time when you could tell a brand by its tune. Not its logo. Not its tagline. Its tune. The Lifebuoy rhythm, the Nirma chorus, the Nerolac melody: these were not just jingles. They were cultural handshakes between brand and audience, composed with a specific brief, a specific name woven in, and a specific emotional register that no other brand could claim. They were, in the truest sense of the word, owned.

That ownership is now up for debate. Increasingly, brands across categories are reaching into the archive, into Bollywood's back catalogue, into RD Burman's immortal library, into the cultural sediment of shared memory, and pulling out a song that already works, already stirs something, already has a head start. The brief has quietly shifted from ‘make something new’ to ‘make something familiar feel new’. And the industry is only just beginning to reckon with what that means.

According to the e4m-Madison Media Advertising Outlook 2024, Indian advertising spends crossed ₹1 lakh crore for the first time, with digital accounting for a significant and growing share. In a marketplace this large and noisy, every second of a consumer's attention is a scarce commodity. Music, perhaps more than any other element of a campaign, is the fastest route to that attention; and increasingly, brands are choosing the well-worn path over the freshly paved one.

The remix economy

The evidence is everywhere if you know where to listen. Lakshmipathy Bhat, brand communications advisor and former Vice President at FCB Ulka, noticed it almost by accident. "The other day, I saw an ad with the catchy 'Dil Chahta Hai' title track line. I did a check and realised it was for Maruti Victoris. Mahindra used Biddu's 'Boom Boom' for one of its EVs," he says, tracing a pattern that is hard to miss once you start looking.

The automobile category, a perennial big spender on brand-building, has become a particularly telling case study in the remix economy. Two of India's biggest carmakers, drawing on two very different songs, both arrive at the same strategic logic: borrow equity from music that already carries emotional weight. The songs do not need to be introduced to the audience. The audience already owns them. The brand needs to show up and claim adjacency.

Bhat frames this with a veteran's measured perspective. "The ad industry has long been using remixes or some version of popular Hindi film songs in their ads. RD Burman's work is a perpetual favourite." But he is equally clear-eyed about the trade-off. "The flip side of this route is that the jingle is not ownable by a brand. The song can overpower the brand and not aid in memorability, which a simple jingle with the brand name repeated did."

That observation leads directly to a harder question: if borrowed music cannot be owned, what happens when every brand is borrowing from the same shelf?

Sundeep Sehgal, Senior Vice President and Executive Creative Director at VML India, has watched this dynamic play out with mounting concern. "Remixed tracks are essentially a shortcut to attention,” he says, “They come with built-in recall, emotional familiarity, and cut through faster in a crowded, scroll-heavy environment, making them a safer bet than creating something new. But the more brands rely on the same nostalgia trick, the less effective it becomes. What once felt distinctive starts blending into the background. So, while they reduce risk in the short term, they can dilute originality and long-term brand recall over time."

The saturation argument is one the industry would do well to take seriously. Nostalgia, by definition, is a finite resource. There are only so many RD Burman compositions, only so many cultural touchstones that an entire generation holds in common. As more brands reach for the same shelf, the differentiation that made those songs powerful in the first place begins to erode. The borrowed memory starts to feel rented.

The attention economy argument

The brief in favour of the remix is not frivolous. It is, in fact, a fairly coherent response to a genuinely transformed media environment. Renu Somani Karwa, National Creative Director at Thought Blurb Communications, articulates it with precision. "Attention spans are shorter, content cycles are faster, and brands compete in a cluttered digital space. Familiar music cuts through instantly because it already carries emotional recall. The brand just has to claim its share of it."

This is not a small point. In the age of the six-second pre-roll, the skippable ad, and the endlessly scrollable feed, music that can trigger a response in the first beat (before the brain has fully registered what it is hearing) holds a structural advantage over music that must first establish itself. A remix does not ask for patience. It rewards recognition.

The numbers bear this out. A Nielsen Music study found that music in advertising can improve ad recall by up to 96% when the audience strongly likes the music. In the Indian context, where film music is not merely entertainment but a form of collective autobiographical memory, a well-chosen Bollywood track can compress years of relationship-building into a single campaign.

When nostalgia becomes strategy

Perhaps no recent campaign illustrates this dynamic as vividly as Coca-Cola's revival of Rimzim Jeera. Ronit Thakur, Founder of Be Rolling Media, a content and brand storytelling studio, watched it with the eyes of someone who understood exactly what was being attempted. "They took an iconic RD Burman track and reimagined 'Duniya Mein Logon Ko...' into a 'Jeeeeera' cue connection that you can't unhear. Nostalgia, yes, but made contemporary," he says.

What Thakur identifies is more than a clever executional choice. It is a strategic positioning built on cultural specificity. "While international beverage brands chase novelty, exotic fruits, and trendy ingredients, Rimzim is doing the opposite. They're reclaiming mainstream beverage space with familiarity — not because nostalgia sells, though it does — but because in India, taste carries cultural weight. Jeera isn't just a spice. It's comfort. It's home. It's authentically Indian."

The Rimzim campaign is instructive precisely because it was not just nostalgia for its own sake. The music choice was inseparable from the brand's identity argument. The song was not grafted onto the campaign; it was the campaign's thesis made audible.

Yet the case for original jingles is far from closed. Karwa is careful not to let the remix trend flatten a more nuanced reality. "It's not one-sided. From Shubhojit's Coca-Cola Pujo campaign to Hide & Seek's jingle by Clinton Cerejo, original music continues to prove its power, though the trend today is clearly skewed towards remixes."

Original, but evolved

The most productive framing, perhaps, is not remix versus original, but rather what original means in 2025. The long-form jingle of the Doordarshan era (60 seconds, multiple verses, a full melodic arc) is not what the industry is being asked to create. The format has changed. What brands like Parle-G and Cadbury are now investing in, Karwa suggests, is something more precisely engineered. "Instead of long melodies, brands are creating sharp musical hooks that travel easily across audiences, irrespective of age, gender or ethnicity."

The hook economy is, in many ways, a middle path. It retains the composition's originality while accommodating the brevity required for digital distribution. A two-second audio logo, if it is distinctive enough, can function as a brand identifier across every touchpoint: social media reels, OTT pre-rolls, podcast sponsorships, retail environments, in a way that a borrowed Bollywood track structurally cannot.

Karwa takes it further, noting a geographic dimension that reflects the broader evolution of Indian media. "Earlier, one Hindi jingle could speak to the entire country. But today, the landscape has shifted, and regional jingles are resonating just as strongly, often even more deeply." As regional OTT platforms multiply and vernacular digital content expands, the notion of a single national sonic identity for a mass brand is itself becoming a legacy idea. "In India, good music is always embraced, whether it comes from an ad, a film song, an album, a band or folklore," she adds. "If the music is memorable, audiences will embrace it, regardless of the format."

The challenge, of course, is that memorable and immediately familiar are very different briefs, and right now, the industry is, by and large, being handed the second one. Sehgal's parting argument is perhaps the most clarifying of all. "Nostalgia is easy. Originality is risky. And that's exactly why it matters. Remixes give you a head start, but they'll never make you unforgettable. The brands that truly last are the ones that create something of their own. Something that didn't exist before them. Original jingles are harder, slower, and braver. But if you get them right, you're not borrowing memory, you're planting it. And that's the difference between being liked for a moment and being remembered for years."