Two Indian national dailies, The Hindu and The Times of India, have published "talking advertisements." The ads for a Volkswagen campaign uses a light sensitive speaker that has been placed on the newspapers, which broadcasts audio as light falls on the device, Journalism.co.uk reported yesterday.

The audio broadcasts play in an endless loop until the reader closes the newspaper, Reuters pointed out. While taking ads and moving ads have been tried before, "this must be the first time daily newspapers of the size and reach of ToI and Hindu have done it at a time when American newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are just about coming to terms with the reality of advertisements on the front page," Sans Serif pointed out.

The talking ads are being done for two days in a row. The first ad is featured in the Madras edition of yesterday's Hindu and today on Times of India for Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi markets, according to Sans Serif. A light-sensitive speaker weighing not more than 10 to 15 grams is stuck on the extreme left panel of the Volkswagen ad found on the last page of the newspaper's.

While the collaboration of the national newspapers with Volkswagen created buzz and took advertising to a whole new level with audio integration on print, the campaign is believed to have cost 5 crore rupees to the company. "Twenty two lakh chips were specially sourced for the one time exercise. We have been working on this for the last six months in order to bring out the advertisement," Divya Gururaj, managing director of Mediacom, the media planning agency of Volkswagen was quoted by the EconomicTimes as saying.

Calling the ad "a democratisation of innovation," Lutz Kothe, head of marketing and PR at Volkswagen Group said that the ad reached "25 lakh households in New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai." Dealers of Volkswagen in smaller cities were given copies of the newspaper for distribution to prospective clients, HinduBusinessLine reported yesterday. Without getting specific about the costs involved and the logistical challenges posed such as sourcing the chip from Chinese vendors, attaching and printing the supplements much ahead of the release and hiring extra trucks for distribution of the newspapers, Kothe hinted that this was just the beginning of a 360 degree campaign to follow soon.