High octave appeal

ADVERTISING: Reshammiya: you can run, you can hide, but you can't escape the name.

He's on the radio. He's on the TV screen. He's on the bus. He's in that car at the traffic crossing. He's in the air. He's in the recesses of your head.

Admit it.

And now he's in the ads too. Himesh Reshammiya, of course. The man who caught the vast Indian market's pulse "" as a music director "" with the soundtrack of Tere Naam (which repackaged classic raags for the globalisation era), and later let his own vocal chords lay on the charm.

Perhaps it was inevitable that brands would ride the same octaves in their quest for space inside the consumer's heart.

Yamaha Fazer has just put out a TV commercial which has a song from the film Kyun Ki. But the pioneer in using his music is Bajaj Platina, which is running a TV commercial that features his song Jhalak Dikhla Ja, from the movie Aksar, suggestive of a yearning for a glimpse of the Platina rider as he burns rubber down the road.

It's an interesting campaign not just for its music, but also its romantic interplay between a car user (the lady in the ad) and bike rider (the elusive "caped hero", ready to zip off into the night).

There's at least one other ad using Reshammiya music. Is something new stirring out there in the market?

It's hardly unexpected, says Jayshree Sundar, senior vice-president, Leo Burnett: "If the song is a popular one, then it helps the brand getting enormous recall."

In cluttered markets like mobikes, sound differentiation works all the better. Getting attention, after all, is half the challenge in advertising.

McCann's Santosh Desai agrees. "Advertising has relied on film songs for quite some time now," he says. It's all about brand association. And Platina has got the association it was looking for. "Well, you can't use a Mukesh song for a bike ad, right?"

So there you have it: a Himesh Reshammiya season that's still far from saturation.

But is this attachment sustainable over the years? "Songs will be used "" but Reshammiya songs, I am not quite sure," says Desai, hedging his bets on the longevity of the composer-singer's popularity.

"Considering the popularity of his songs," adds Sundar, "it doesn't seem the end of his songs as far as ads are concerned." Like it or not, there's no escape.