Cost guide
What radio advertising costs, and what moves it
The station and the time band set the rate. How many times one listener hears you in a week decides whether the money did anything.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A radio quotation is built from five things: the station, the city, the time band, the length of the spot, and how many spots run. The first four set the rate on the card. The fifth decides whether the campaign did anything at all. Most owners negotiate hard on the first four and then let the fifth be decided by whatever budget is left, which is how a campaign ends up audible to nobody. Before you compare two packages, work out how many times one listener will hear you in one week.
What the station is actually selling
Radio time is sold in ten-second units. A twenty or thirty-second read is priced as a multiple of that unit with a loading on top, so length costs more than it looks on the card. A package is quoted as so many spots a day, for so many days, inside a band the station names.
The band is the whole negotiation. Morning and evening drive time carry the car radio, the cab and the auto. Mid-morning and afternoon carry a much smaller and more scattered audience, and that is where a station places the spots it has not sold.
Then there is how the placement is written. Run of station means the station decides where your spot falls, and it decides in its own interest. A fixed position inside a named programme costs more and is worth asking for when the show is the reason you bought the station. Get whichever one you agreed written into the schedule before you pay.
The six things that move the number
- The station, not the city. Two stations in the same city are priced far apart because one has the listeners advertisers want at eight in the morning. A Kannada station and an English station in Bengaluru are different products, not two versions of one.
- The time band. Drive time carries a large multiple of the afternoon rate for the same ten seconds. Every other lever on this list is smaller than this one.
- The number of spots and the length of the flight. Radio has no visual residue. A hoarding stands there whether anyone looks or not; a spot exists for ten seconds and then does not. Frequency is the product.
- Spot length. Ten seconds for a name, an offer and a number said twice. Twenty or thirty when the thing genuinely needs explaining, such as a scheme with a condition attached.
- The season. Festival weeks, the admission window, an election period and the run-up to a long weekend are all priced above a plain week in August. Book the crowded weeks earlier and expect less movement on rate.
- What else is attached. Contests, an RJ visiting your showroom, a mention inside a show, an outside broadcast van. These are sold beside the spots and priced on a different basis.
Why one week of drive time beats a month spread thin
Take the same number of spots and put them two ways.
Spread across the whole broadcast day for four weeks, they reach a large number of people once each. A person who hears a name once while parking the car does not remember it by evening. That budget bought reach, and radio does very little with reach alone.
Put the same spots into morning drive time on one station across six days. The same commuter hears it on Monday, again on Tuesday, again on Thursday. The third time is when the name gets remembered, and it gets remembered because the same person is in the same traffic at the same time every working day. That is the argument for buying the band rather than the month.
This is also why splitting a small budget across three stations is the most expensive mistake in radio. Depth on the station your buyer listens to beats being present on all of them.
RJ mentions are a different product
A spot is produced audio the station plays. An RJ mention is the presenter saying it in their own words inside their show, and it is priced per mention rather than per ten seconds. The morning presenter costs more than the afternoon one, for the same reason drive time costs more.
What you are buying is the presenter's credibility, which is why it works for a restaurant opening or a clinic's camp and does nothing for a technical product. Three things go in the agreement before you pay: how many mentions, inside which show, and what may and may not be said. The RJ will not read a script word for word, and should not, so the brief carries the points rather than the sentences.
Mentions are usually sold bundled with spots. Ask for the two priced separately, or you cannot tell what either one cost.
What a radio quotation must break out
| Line it must show | Why |
|---|---|
| Spots per day, by band, by date | This is the campaign. A total spot count with no band against it tells you nothing |
| Paid spots against bonus spots | Bonus time is unsold time. Knowing which is which changes what you are buying |
| Rate per ten-second unit, and the loading for longer reads | The only way to compare two stations on the same basis |
| Placement basis: run of station, or fixed inside a named show | Decides whether your morning spots stay in the morning |
| Production, if the station is making the audio | Bundled production comes with the station's voice, music and template |
| Taxes, and what is payable before the first spot airs | Media invoices carry GST and most stations want payment in advance |
What arrives after the quotation
The audio. Station-produced audio is cheap, and it sounds like the two ads either side of it. A spot produced on your own, with your own voice artist, is a separate cost that comes back every time the offer changes.
The second language. A Kannada version of an English spot is a fresh recording, not a translation, and it needs its own artist and its own booking.
The search cover. Radio sends people to Google, two days later, with half the name. If nobody is bidding on your own brand name during the flight weeks, the enquiry your spot created arrives at a competitor. Budget for it alongside the media, not after it.
When radio is the wrong buy
When you sell to one trade in one industrial estate. Forty phone calls will do more than a city-wide station, at a fraction of the money.
When there is nothing to say this month. Radio suits a dated thing: an opening, a camp, a clearance, an admission deadline. With no date and no offer, the spot is a name repeated to people who have no reason to act.
When the budget covers a thin schedule. A handful of spots is money gone. Take the same amount to one locality, on hoardings or hyperlocal digital, and it buys frequency you can actually see.
When you need to know who enquired. Radio has no report that names a listener. We put a number on air that appears nowhere else and count the calls to it, and that is as close to proof as this medium gets.
What to do next
Take the package in front of you and rewrite it as a calendar: which days, which hours, how many spots. If the seller cannot fill that calendar in, you are being sold a total rather than a campaign.
For example, a clinic in Rajajinagar announcing a weekend camp needs six days on one Kannada station in the morning band, not four weeks scattered across two. That judgement is the whole job, and it comes before any rate is discussed. We do that in the free audit, and the enquiries the flight produces go into the monthly report against the weeks before it started.