Cost guide
What radio advertising costs in Bengaluru
This city's traffic makes drive time longer and dearer than the rate card suggests, and its Kannada and English stations reach two different buyers.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Bengaluru radio is priced the way radio is priced everywhere: by station, band, spot length and how many spots run. What is different here is the commute those rates are built on. This city's peak is not an hour, it is a smear that starts before nine and has not finished by ten, then starts again at five and runs past eight. Drive time is longer here, which is why it costs more here, and it is the only part of the day worth arguing about.
The traffic is the product
Nobody in Bengaluru sits in a car for forty minutes by choice. Silk Board to Marathahalli, Hebbal to Whitefield, Kengeri towards Majestic, the Mysore Road stretch on a Monday morning. That is where the FM audience is, and it is a captive one. One evening of rain and the same journey doubles, which is a bad day for the city and a good one for a spot that is already booked.
The shift timings stretch the morning band. Offices on the Outer Ring Road start anywhere between nine and eleven, so the morning listening does not collapse at nine-thirty the way it does in a government town. Ask a station for the hour-by-hour split of its morning band rather than the block rate. The last hour of that block is not worth what the first hour is.
The metro cuts the other way. Every stretch of Namma Metro that opens takes car minutes off that corridor, and a commuter on the train has earphones in. Radio does not reach them. That does not make the medium useless here. It does mean the corridor your buyers use is a question to ask again this year, not one settled five years ago.
Two languages, two cities
An English station and a Kannada station in Bengaluru are not two versions of the same audience. They are two different cities using the same roads.
The English stations carry the professional who moved here for work, lives in Indiranagar, Koramangala, HSR or the Whitefield side, and has money for a considered purchase. That listener does not read a Kannada hoarding and is not reached by the Kannada spot at all.
The Kannada stations carry the families who have been here longer, in Rajajinagar, Vijayanagar, Basavanagudi, Yelahanka and around Peenya. They also carry the cab and auto drivers. That matters more than it sounds, because a passenger hears whatever the driver has on, and the driver is nearly always on a Kannada station. A jewellery showroom in Chickpet and a diagnostics chain speaking to families both belong there.
Two scripts follow. A Kannada version of an English spot is a fresh recording with its own artist, not a translation, and it costs what a recording costs. The one thing worth paying attention to is pronunciation. A spot cut in another city that says Kanakapura or Nagarbhavi wrongly tells every listener you are not from here, and there is no recovering from that inside ten seconds.
One showroom, or the whole city
This is the decision that changes whether radio makes sense at all, and a station will not raise it.
A city station charges you for the whole city. If you have one showroom in Jayanagar, you are paying for listeners in Yelahanka who will never cross town for you. You pay the same rate for them as for the ones two kilometres away. The offer has to be worth a drive before that maths works. A launch, a three-day clearance, an exchange offer on a big-ticket item: those pull people across Bengaluru. Ordinary trade does not.
If you sell across the city, the picture reverses. A builder with a project on Sarjapur Road. A hospital with branches in three directions. An appliance service that comes to the house. For these the city-wide reach is the thing being bought, and what a single showroom pays for as wastage is not wastage at all.
There is a middle path worth knowing about. Stations sell mentions and contests built around a single location. An RJ visiting your showroom on a Saturday reaches the city while putting the crowd at one address. It is priced per activity, not per ten seconds, and it is quoted separately.
What to get in writing here
| Ask for | Because |
|---|---|
| The morning and evening bands quoted separately | The evening block is the longer crawl in Bengaluru and should not be bundled with a weak afternoon |
| The hour-by-hour split inside each band | A block that runs to eleven is not worth its nine o'clock rate all the way through |
| Kannada and English schedules as two lines | They are two campaigns with two audiences, and only one of them may be yours |
| Where the bonus spots fall | Bonus time is the station's unsold time, and in this city that is the middle of the afternoon |
| What the audience estimate is based on, and for which months | Panel estimates are not counts, and the months matter when a metro stretch has just opened nearby |
| The RJ mention priced apart from the spots | Otherwise you cannot tell what either one cost |
What the spot has to get right in Bengaluru
Give a landmark, not an address. Nobody writes down a shop number at a signal. "Opposite the metro station on Mysore Road" or "behind the bus stand in Vijayanagar" is what a listener can hold in their head until they are free to search.
Then make sure the search lands. A listener hears the name on the way home and types it in that night, with half the words wrong. Your Google Business Profile has to be complete and your own brand name has to be covered on search during the flight weeks. This is the single most common leak in radio campaigns we are asked to review, and the fix is inexpensive.
When to spend it somewhere else
When your catchment is one or two localities. Hoardings on the arterial road, a Google Business Profile that is actually filled in, and hyperlocal digital will reach the same people more times for less money.
When you sell to industry. Peenya, Bommasandra, Jigani and Dabaspet are bought by going to see them, not by a spot on a city station.
When there is no date in the message. Radio works on deadlines. A camp, an opening, an admission window, a last day.
What to do next
Write down where your last fifty customers came from, by area. If most of them live within a few kilometres of your door, a city-wide station is the wrong shape of buy and the money belongs closer to home. If they come from all over Bengaluru, ask two stations for the evening band, in the right language, with the schedule written day by day.
We will do that reading with you in the free audit, at your place or at ours in Nagarbhavi. The enquiries the flight brings in are reported against the weeks before it went on air.