JERRY MOUSE GOES BINARY

"I plus Pod, IPod, lap plus top, laptop, cell plus phone, cell phone…"
-Chorus in children's voices in a radio ad for an NGO that ran this Christmas.

Move aside Mary with your little lamb. Here are the new nursery rhymes that will define the world the new generations are going to live in. The five-year plus is already living a life of and with technology. And technology is not a clever trick you learn to master but actually simpler than ABC as it follows simply logic.

The post liberators as M.G. Parameswaran, Executive Director and CEO (Mumbai) of FCB-Ulka Advertising, calls them, are the under 20s who were born or barely gained consciousness at the same time that India started its long journey of liberalisation. This generation has come to see a world that has no queues for ration or vehicles, a generation that truly believes that the world is its oyster.
Take Ambika Nayak, 9 years and her friend Hridaya A. 8, as examples. While Ambika wants a Discman for the New Year, Hridaya has just received a bunch of CDs for Christmas. Both have expressed a strong desire to have their own cell phones. When they spend time together they often surf the Internet, have become members on certain sites and keep in touch on e-mail. They also search the Internet for information for projects and play online games.
Says Ranjeetha Menon, Vice President, OgilvyOne, Director, IBM Brand Services, “ For the urban Indian youth of today, the mobile phone is an extension of them and a sizeable chunk of their life is spent online.” According to a recent study conducted by the Internet And Mobile association of India (IAMAI) in April 2005, a full 55 per cent of the total respondents (half of them under 25) polled shopped online. The rest had visited an online shopping site at least once and most of them are aware that they can buy online.
Just how much technology is the Indian youth using? India currently has over 75 million subscribers and is adding on approximately 5 million more each month. There are over a million broadband connections. A billion text messages are sent out every month. 45 million SMSes were sent to select the Indian Idol. That is 50 times the votes won by any Indian politician. And the phenomenon is not just urban. Over 1,00,000 tickets are booked every month on the Indian railways website making it the website with the highest online transactions in India.
So we have a new generation growing up who consume media significantly differently and whose comfort with the digital world is real and growing. And marketers have to understand that. The global brands are already leading the pack. Before hitting TV, Pepsi’s most recent commercial first ran as a three-part “webisode” for a week on Yahoo! From a mere 80 advertisers, MSN has over 150 in just six months of the launch of its Desk Top TV. Media Turf's CEO, V Ramani explains: "For advertisers, the Internet is fast evolving from a fancy add-on to an essential part of the media mix."
To further grow this space and make it a mass media channel for advertisers, MSN India and NDTV Media, media marketing and consulting company have come together. Says Rajnish R, head of marketing & strategic business initiatives-MSN India, "We are trying to make buying online extremely simple, easy and cheap for the advertisers than it is on print or television." Shubho Ray, president IAMAI predicts, "There will be a robust, double-digit growth for online advertising volumes. In the next three years, we will see a major evolution in the way marketers use online media and we will soon track it by cross media research and events," he adds. According to Siddharth Rao, CEO of Webchutney, an online solutions company, "Online ad spends today account for 1 to 10 percent of total budgets. This may appear small but is a marked change since even last year."
In fact, we are already poised to enter the second phase of Internet usage. If the early years belonged to e-mailing, chatting and probably e-commerce, then, according to Alok Kejriwal, CEO, contests2win, “Searching, gaming and networking will drive the resurgence of the Internet”. “What’s interesting is that the content here is increasingly being created by consumers themselves if you look at wikipedia.org or myspace.com or the most happening youth video portal, youtube.com

This growing generation is more involved in defining the content that it consumes, be it an iPod or a video portal. This is a generation that is building online communities. Talking to them will mean reaching to them from within this content. The cues are out there. In a recent survey, otherwise demanding teens said they were okay with in-game ads. Menon says, she and her ilk are no longer talking of websites, banners and landing pages but rather of search engine marketing and optimization, blog marketing, community building, pod-casting, etc

The penetration of technological goods and services (for all Indian youth) varies between 10 per cent for mobile phones to a mere 0.7 per cent for video cameras. This is yet far from saturated. Urban India shows more than double the reach while these goods and services reach nearly three times the youth in the top eight metros. It is the right time to begin to establish contact with this age group. And reap as the consumption grows.

(Published in the Hindustan Times in the business section)