Ask anyone above thirty to finish the line “Washing powder Nirma…” and watch how fast the rest comes out, unprompted, often with a small smile. Ask the same person what ad they saw on television last night, and there is a good chance they will draw a blank. This is not a coincidence, and it is not really about the ads being better back then. It is about what was happening inside our brains when we first heard them.
Psychologists call it the reminiscence bump. Decades of memory research show that people, across cultures, recall a disproportionate number of memories from their adolescence and early twenties compared to any other period of their lives. Studies place the peak of this effect for music somewhere in the mid-teens, meaning a jingle heard at that age has a far better shot at lodging permanently in memory than one heard at forty. Nirma, Amul, Vicco Turmeric, all became embedded in Indian minds not simply because they were catchy, but because an entire generation encountered them at precisely the age when memory is at its stickiest.
There is a reason it works even more strongly for jingles than for plain visuals or slogans. Music activates memory differently from other kinds of information. A tune recruits several parts of the brain at once, the areas responsible for rhythm, emotion and personal memory, which is why a few notes of “Vicco Turmeric, nahi cosmetic” can instantly pull up where you were sitting, who you were with, even what the room looked like. Researchers describe this as the difference between knowing a fact and reliving a moment. Old jingles do the second one.
Repetition mattered too, though in a way that is easy to underestimate today. In the Doordarshan era, there were only one or two channels, and the same handful of advertisements played night after night, for years. A jingle was not competing with a thousand other pieces of content for attention. It was, for a stretch of childhood, one of the only things on air. That kind of unbroken repetition, at a formative age, is nearly impossible to recreate in a world of scrolling feeds and skippable ads, no matter how good the new ad is.
Emotion is the other half of the story. Research on advertising recall has repeatedly found that people remember content better when they are in a positive mood while encountering it, and nostalgia itself produces exactly that kind of mood. It buffers against stress and loneliness and gives people a sense of continuity, a feeling that their past and present are connected. When a brand’s old jingle plays, it is not just reminding you of a product. It is quietly reminding you of a version of your life that already felt settled, because you already know how that story turned out.
This is precisely why companies keep bringing old campaigns back rather than only inventing new ones. When Reliance revived Campa Cola in 2023, decades after the original brand had faded from Indian shelves, the appeal was not a superior new formula. It was that an entire generation who grew up with the name still associated it with summer afternoons and family gatherings, and their children were curious enough to want to taste the story their parents kept telling. Fevicol has spent years reworking its old advertising language into new formats rather than abandoning it, because the phrase “stick like Fevicol” already does work that a brand-new tagline would take another decade to earn.
There is also a quieter, more surprising layer to this. Research on what scientists call the cascading reminiscence bump has found that younger people often form strong emotional attachments to music and cultural references from before they were even born, largely because their parents kept those references alive at home. It is a pattern that could plausibly explain why someone in their twenties today still recognises an old Amul jingle despite never having lived through the decade it came from. Nostalgia, it turns out, does not require personal memory. Being raised inside someone else’s memory is often enough.
None of this means new advertising cannot work, or that jingles are the only path to being remembered. It simply means that new campaigns are competing against decades of accumulated emotional weight, formed at an age when the brain was uniquely built to hold on to things, and reinforced over years by nothing else on air fighting for the same attention. That is a very high bar for any new sixty-second film to clear on day one.
So the next time a brand quietly reuses an old tune, or an ad from your childhood resurfaces on your feed and you find yourself unexpectedly moved, know that this is not marketing tricking you. It is marketing correctly identifying that your brain already did most of the work, thirty years ago.
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