MUMBAI: Radio Mirchi's got a game plan up its sleeves and has kickstarted it with a burst of advertising! It's been raining Radio Mirchi hoardings in Mumbai since the last few days and very surprisingly all of them are going ga-ga over their breakfast show Hello Mumbai (which airs from Monday to Saturday from 7 am to 11 am), and not about the radio station as a whole.

The print ad for Radio Mirchi's breakfast show Hello Mumbai
The outdoor campaign is localised in terms of the flavour, the Mumbai lingo and covers localised issues such as The Don Bosco school, the issue about no entry in discos for people under 21 years, the recent elections and more. Says Radio Mirchi COO Prashant Pandey, "Radio is all about being local and in Hello Mumbai we cover all the local parameters and how they affect the life of Mumbaiites. It is basically a celebrity talk show and we wanted to promote it and RJ Harsh. It is basically a brand building exercise."

McCann Erickson is the creative agency for Mirchi and has come up with creatives with the local flavour around the topics that are covered on the show. McCann creative director Ramanuj Shastry said, "Radio Mirchi wanted to promote their breakfast show because they believed that loyalty to the radio station comes from the breakfast shows. Also advertising on the station starts at the same time. So they wanted to promote their show via hoardings and print ads because the sampling happens in the morning."

"We made the ads keeping in mind the topics that were covered on the show and highlighted those points that would make sense in Mumbai," added Shastry.

Apart from Mumbai, Radio Mirchi also has stations in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Indore. The Delhi ad campaign is also set to kick off very soon although the exact date is not yet decided. Talking about the local flavour in Delhi and the ads that will be based on it, Shastry said, "At the end of the day it is the Radio Station that does the hard work and finds out what works where. So they will be telling us what works in Delhi and then we'll make the ads accordingly."

Elaborating on the same, Pandey said, "The campaign for Delhi will starting in a few days and will be suitably localised for the market." Mirchi has a lot of out-of-the-box strategies lined up for the advertising blitz around their new properties Ding Dong and Mr Hot Crackpot, but Pandey refused to divulge more on the same. However take a dig at rival Radio City, Pandey said, "We are not a soap based radio station and we do not believe in talking too much. We are a music station and will continue being just that."

All in all, a clear shift can be seen from brand advertising to programming advertising in the case of Radio Mirchi to get the viewers hooked on to the station for the crucial breakfast show and more through the day!