Yes! We Khan – Social Media Case Study Of Imran Khan Rally On December 25th, 2011

The highly successful Jalsa of 25^th December, 2011 organized by Pakistan Tehreek Insaf was a major social media milestone for Pakistan. By using a disruptive technology in early markets, PTI has upset the status quo, catapulting a man who did not look like a serious contender for government initially into the forefront of the race whilst engaging voters in fundamentally new ways.  This form of tech adoption has also ushered in a new relationship model between leaders and their supporters (especially young ones) with all political parties now announcing and jostling for the ‘youth vote’ with their youth wings. Perhaps in the future it will also serve to change expectations of ‘Citizens’ and ‘Leader’s’ roles in government.

Imran Khan’s campaign epitomizes the opportunities  to be gained using your ‘customers’ to amplify the effect using new technologies despite contending with established players that have far greater resources and legacy. At its most basic however it’s about good fundamentals. For a start it’s about selling a product which people want [an innate buzz]. Dr. Awab Alvi, the person responsible for PTI’s social media strategy said “We are just an interface to communicate the product to people online. People want to see, hear and want to interact with our brand and we use a medium to give them what they want. The buzz is nothing to do with us marketing the product. Fundamentally the product is a need of the time due to the country’s situation and people are looking for an alternative and Imran Khan is being seen as that alternative.”

Thus authenticity matters and If one looks at the competitive landscape in this context, Shahbaz Sharif and PML-N have recently spent an inordinate amount of money on social media trying to make up for lost ground, but the difference is again in the vision that Imran Khan sells and the ‘more of the same’ approach which is being used by PML-N. In social media one can’t just adopt a brand and expect people to buy into it without authenticity. The new ‘Khudari’ message (something which PML-N didn’t do in 20 years) thus will not work for their brand in this case.

Another one of the tenets of social media that holds true for PTI’s approach is “go to where your customers are.” PTI made it possible for people to participate where they want, how they want, using the tools and friendships they want. Whilst it’s a butt of jokes that most of Imran Khan’s base cannot even vote and that children under 18 are not relevant to be targeted because they can’t vote. However in this traditional thinking, political bigwigs forget that these same generations can talk [and inspire] and help to build a wave of change. Social media enables them to use lower or zero transaction costs to do it. It is these passionistas  who serve as the base for the party.

“There is a tremendous army working for the organization which responds to queries, reputation management, etc and to date NONE of the volunteers have ever been paid. When you have passionate people doing something they love… they believe in the change, in doing it as an end in itself and all they want from us has been the recognition of that aspect’, said Dr. Awab. ‘I tell them truly that it’s YOU whose done this for Pakistan and I mean it’. Faisal Kapadia, a blogger and activist at ‘DeadPan Thoughts’ describes the feeling as ‘It was a high that I’ve never felt before with an energy level not even found at a U2 concert’.

Social media use by PTI includes clarifying and defense of the party’s policies and actions, reputation management and killing of the rumor mill, engaging with voters, provide the imagery that give hope and provide for a catalyst of change. The key engines thus that propelled the social media movement forward for the organization included but were not limited to Imran Khan (Official) Channel and Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (Official Page) which are the Facebook channels responsible for organizing and mobilizing people for initiatives that support key processes whilst ‘We Want Imran Khan to Be The Next Prime Minister Of Pakistan’ and ‘Jagutho’ are initiatives for sharing viewpoints, helping supporters, volunteers and campaign workers to co-ordinate their offline and online activities.

Combined there are over 500,000 ‘fans’ of PTI & Imran Khan with over 50,000 plus active participants at any moment in time. These channels were the ones which provided the support needed during the Jalsa online and the figures below show the impact of these on the Jalsa and vice versa.

Constant engagement is key. Imran Khan campaigns and encourages users and artists to use the imagery they provide for their own purpose acknowledging and recognizing that they should give up control. The best creative developed Imran Khan addressing the Jalsa with the caption: ‘Hope Is Priceless… for everything else there’s Mastercard’. A big lesson for brands here is to ‘Make it easy for people to make you their own’. Let people act on their desire to get involved at a low transaction cost, and very visibly. This increases leverage.

PTI has also been present on Twitter with @Imran KhanPTI and @PTIOfficial channels. Twitter works since during the span of the Jalsa the PTI broke 11 global twitter trends within a 5 hour window and because of it reverberated across the 300 million strong community on the platform including ‘DilDilPakistan’ quickly being picked up across the region.

To understand its significance, one can take into account that as a baseline it takes a minimal of 500 active users and 1200-1900 tweets per hour to break a global trend. To dominate it as PTI did, it takes much more. Another platform which has been very successful for PTI has been the mobile 80022 which drives the membership for the party.  Utilizing this form of technology, PTI has their ‘army’ segmented via city, via constituencies and clumped by affinities which allows them to mobilize with great speed and effectiveness.

This informs people with SMS messages when an event such as the Jalsa is about to happen and asks for participation. Roman Urdu works better than English on the platform. In the future, this database form of marketing will serve its purpose for voter turnouts.

Other features enabled on mobile include mapping via SMS which was used to provide directions to nearest available pickup points for people and recently an iReport debut feature on the platform which was used to identify and resolve the problems that people were facing at the jalsa.

iReport holds the potential to be much much more. This is going to be a powerful form of Citizen Reporting platform and once properly activated will become a force for accountability in Pakistan as normal Pakistanis report their encounters on issues which PTI raises.

The jalsa also used an innovative platform of ‘Live Streaming’ the event globally to all those who could not be physically there. Using a 50 Mbps fiber connection, the event was streamed to over 35000 people at its peak LIVE across the globe.

The PTI Jalsa has broken new grounds in the marketing of politics and perhaps even for business. Marketing executives need to start focusing on what will happen when their stakeholders self-organize, mirror each other’s interests, magnify the interests into passions and make a lot of noise. This can change expectations fast. They should be aware of traditional thinking in their organizations so they can counter these. It must be remembered that all disruptive change always presents as a fringe activity at first. Thus marketers need to make it a priority to understand social media adoption milestones, so they don’t get caught by surprise. Some of the good lessons out of the Jalsa which marketers can learn from:

1. PTI strategy is to focus on selling leadership, not policies. Most political campaigns sell their candidates like products, replete with features and benefits (“policies” and “programs”). More profound, leadership and personal qualities and beliefs inspire more easily than policies.
2. Trust your stakeholders to discover and do the right thing. Smart organizations are becoming more cooperative by sharing “control.” Letting go energizes people to contribute in a meaningful manner.
3. Realize you cannot control the conversation and that’s okay.
4. The more transparent and collaborative, the stronger your organization will be as a competitor.
5. Think small. Industrial Economy marketing held that the only things worth watching were big numbers and big initiatives. Yet in the digital age, many many people doing small things can have a big impact when they are using digital social media because it affords so much leverage. Many small numbers can roll up to a big number. Many-to-many means geometric growth and acceleration.

For PTI after a successful campaign, now on the Social Media Roadmap is to move on from ‘just defending ourselves’ to organization of the masses and translate the online activism to offline activism. “Right now it’s all Imran Khan’s draw but now we’ve seen potential we will be organizing leaders in colleges and universities. Jagutho is one of the initiatives which has created a ‘Responsible Citizen’ model which is organized around a mohalla basis which we hope to implement soon.”, said Dr. Alvi. “The Future is calling”.

 

From The Archives (2008) – Meet Generation NOW

Meet Generation NOW
Published Dawn, Aurora Magazine, September 2008

by Umair Mohsin

When Pavlov trained his lab dogs to salivate on the command of a ringing bell, he inadvertently set the world’s stage for over a century worth of conditioning-based consumer messaging. The resiliency of the current model (create associations – link to product – hammer – repeat) especially was cemented in the early decades of the 20th century, when characters such as J. B. Watson and Edward Bernays “proved” that when businesses rang the right bell the right number of times, they could conjure desire and action in their audience. Branding as we know it today was set in place with the same model applied to every region of the world including ours successfully.

One reason for this was that even as close at 20 years ago media outlets globally were inherently limited by geography and scope so consumers lacked broad exposure to alternative experiences and information. Such was even more of a characteristic of our part of the world where communities were even more localized. Thus alternative exposure was limited. Indeed, the responses to the most heavily marketed (which in the old days meant buying advertising on the 9’o clock PTV news) goods and services then seemed to prove that all customers could be conditioned to salivate on command regardless of demographical differences between segments.

Come the 90s and the markets still hadn’t developed to anything remotely like today’s. Political upheavals from General Zia’s era, localized communities and lack of or restricted access to any forms of information or alternative viewpoints than the approved versions ensured people’s knowledge was restricted. Music channels were starting to be beamed into the country but then they were mostly western (MTV / V) channels that were aired through satellite to the privileged few. The preferred jobs were CA, a Doctor or an Engineer. A new breed of technology was just starting to come into the country called the internet launched by a company called Digicom. Yet that too was inaccessible to the common man. Infact up to the year 2000, we still only had 133,900 internet users in totality. Available advertising media choices were still limited and the model still worked successfully.

The era of transformation was finally reached 10 years ago when everything began changing and in some cases all at once – Information, media, educational institutes and even books. New channels including cable were launched in a country which had been to date used to only watching what was aired by a monopoly. Telecom companies started operating. A global IT revolution was underway worldwide so everyone wanted to be in IT business in Pakistan too. A bigger & silent revolution underway however was hidden beneath the calm oceans of the demographic data. On the exterior of things there was still no clear differentiation between the youth audiences and other audiences. From the young consumers’ point of view however, the increasing information from multiple channels and mediums was morphing them from dogs into cats.

The opening of the 21st century became the boiling point for media fragmentation in Pakistan. This blossoming of media placed an unprecedented amount of information in the hands of customers, rendered geographic barriers moot and for the first time set up clear differentiations in the behavioral structures of the sub-population including now what’s being called the youth market. The advent of the Internet and wireless technologies like the mobile phone gave everyone access to information anytime and anywhere whilst the opening up of media markets to competition lead to what’s today’s increasingly fragmented, always-on media landscape. Young customers now had access to an unprecedented amount of information and could communicate any time and place they pleased.

Let’s stop here for a moment to understand the basic difference between cats and dogs. The prime difference is motivation. Let’s stereotype – a dog wants to please you, a cat couldn’t care less. Dogs are devoted, loving and selfless. Cats are aloof, indifferent, and self-indulgent. Dogs are social and act in ways that maintain and support the social order. Cats are solitary and act in ways that benefit themselves. A cat’s engagement with you lasts only as long as she wants it to last. A cat is not out to please you. Cats tend to see the world revolve around them. These describe the characteristics of our youth perfectly.  Young customers now resemble cats – notoriously self-motivated and generally not biddable. The ‘Brand’ is now defined in customers’ minds by their personal experiences with a particular product or service and not the advertising or marketing support and they are attentive only to the information that matters to them.

These emerging sub-markets are now starting to shatter marketer’s assumptions. Businesses have started finding out that they no longer control the strings – neither can they evoke desire nor elicit responses like they used to. These “bell ringers” who had grown accustomed over time, to the fact that their “dog’s” responses could be conditioned and, through certain repetitions influenced, are finding out that the youth is no longer passive. Empowered by knowledge the youth has started taking the steps to being in charge-much like cats. It is this sea change that’s got them them focused on what is relevant to them and start ignoring the rest.

“The main difference because of which the youth are now choosier is just the access of information. Everything else is the same. The youth for generations have always been demanding- such is their nature. Now however the range of their demands has increased and this is simply because of the knowledge they possess. Now it’s not what their parents give or can’t give, like it was in the 90s. These days even a kid has information about things which we never knew about when we were their age. Where before information was suppressed or released in chunks, now kids can search for anything. Thus they are more specific about what they want and are not dependent on their parent’s choices.”, said Asif Iqbal, CEO, Post Amazers.

Technology has changed the landscape and emerging media are now subdividing the masses into specialized audiences. The biggest challenge we face as marketers is the customer’s ability to assert control over the entire process. However, while emerging media and technology undermine the effectiveness of traditional mass-marketing models, they also create unprecedented opportunity for us to redefine and profit from how we communicate with customers.

Don’t Back A Cat Into A Corner

It’s a foregone conclusion that as media fragments, so does the “mass” in mass-marketing. Yet many marketers today still seem to think if their message can be broadcasted to the young consumers, they WILL listen to them. Most marketers look upon the new burgeoning media as vehicles for delivering messages to even larger audiences who (in their thinking) are predisposed to devour information at face value, respond accordingly and then constantly clamor for more. The current marketing philosophy seems to be to ring better& bigger bells for increasingly more dogs and because of it bells are ringing everywhere. Few marketers understand the full effect of blossoming media options on the current marketing models, however, and even fewer understand that the young customers don’t pant and whine anymore. Even worse, most of them find all that bell ringing annoying.

If defined than marketers will realize that there have been four major trends currently underway which will impact further & has been transforming this generation because of the transitional changes of the last 10 years. 1. Their lives have become almost completely digital. 2. They are taking a lot more stress AND are a lot more optimistic. 3. Everything’s about ‘US’ now and 4. They’re more socially aware & conscious.

1. Increased Connectivity

The youth have been turning away from old media channels and even most methods of advertising to embrace new media at a growing pace. A research undertaken by Google Pakistan estimates that 70% of the 14 Million online users spend now between 1 & 6 hours online DAILY. Yahoo! Pakistan cites that there are 2.64 million i-generation (under 25 years) Users on their networks whilst MSN cites that there are 1.8 million i-generation users on their networks. These numbers are expected to grow rapidly over the next 5 years. Despite repeated attempts an equivalency in telecom numbers couldn’t be determined, however estimates range from 14 Million to over 25 million mobile phone users.

These technologies are changing our youth into a generation of multi-tasking users, not used to missing a beat and always connected with the world around them. They have been freed from their traditionally passive role as receivers of marketing communications. Whilst in the past, marketers presented the view they wanted customers to see; today the customer chooses the angle from which they want to view the product. These angles of engagement reflect different motivations and different buying modes, and occur at different stages in the buying decision process. This growing abundance of alternative information resources give the young much greater control over the information search and acquisition process, and allows them to literally become active participants of the marketing process.

“The Web is a democratizing force as the world’s largest global brain. It educates everyone on the pros and cons of every product, service, and even person. An educated person doesn’t react well to the traditional ‘art of manipulation’ that most marketers attempt to employ in their campaigns. As a matter of fact, it makes them angry and defensive”, said Faisal Tamana, GM, The Musik.

What marketers need to understand is that for teens, it’s all about how technology is meeting their needs — to stay connected, express themselves, etc. Teenagers are subject to need for social validation. Despite technology advancements, the motivation to socialize hasn’t changed since time immemorial. Instead, it’s been dramatically enhanced and enriched with the explosion of digital communication platforms and social networks online.

“Kids and young people don’t love the technology itself — they just love how it enables them to communicate all the time, express themselves and be entertained. Under the age of 14, kids generally use the phone as a toy. After 14, the mobile phone quickly becomes a means of self-expression and communication,”, said Ehmer Kirmani, CEO, Media Idee. “Even if we look at the power of online communication tools, like instant messengers [8.6 million users] or social networking sites, which enables young people to communicate both privately and with multiple friends, we’ll find that they mostly use the features like winks, emoticons, etc. to add to the fun of chatting and allow them to express themselves more deeply,”, he continued.

“You can get your own e-identity now at 8. That possession is for life and you’re famous because of that ID. This is what makes them an individual at such an early stage.  Twinkle is the personality not Ayesha. [Marketers have to learn to] talk to that Twinkle and not Ayesha. She logs in from a CyberCafe in Lalo-khet. Online she is a different personality which is not the same personality as she is at home where she might not even be allowed to talk to her cousin or neighbors. Once on the net, however, she can talk to anyone she wants anywhere in the world and she’ll do it in ways that Ayesha will never.” said Iqbal.

2. Lots More Stress & Lots More Optimistic

The current youth says that their stress levels are “high” or “very high”.  They feel the world is now a more complicated place to live in today. However, they are optimistic about their future believing they can personally achieve anything they set their minds to.

“What’s happening in Pakistan. .. the interpretation of religion and way we enforce that on our youth, is putting them in very difficult situations. On one hand they have access to all this information about the world. When they look outside their window, however, the world is a different place. They don’t find that lifestyle around them. This is one of the reasons why there’s so much brain drainage. The youth especially from the Middle class has the tendency to make choices and wants to get somewhere. There is increasing frustration as they see less opportunities here than elsewhere in the world. That is why they involve less in group activities and go deeper into their own personal worlds.”, said Asif Iqbal.

3. Socially Conscious

Unlike previous generations, ethnic divisions are no longer a concern to the youth, especially for the middle class. Those ethnic divisions were fostered because to become a govt. employee there were quota systems. This is not present anymore since there are so many professions to choose from now. Thus the validity of the reasons that propped up the ethnic boundaries has reduced. Govt. bodies themselves are becoming privatized and the politics are slowly changing. So these people are changing along with themselves. They’re opening up to ideas and the world and want to make a difference. The new global campaign for the Greening of the Earth is already having a positive effect in the upper echelons of society and over time it is spreading to the masses as well.

It’s all about Us

The youth are driving a shift from a “me” culture to a “we” culture where the opinions of the group drive consumer trends, preferences and behaviors. Even though they want to stand out and express their individuality, young people strive to feel connected with each other.  They are looking for shared experiences and constant communication with a diverse group of people. The youth constantly seeks ways to put their stamp on products and have their voice heard.  It is a way of showing the ‘outside world’ who they are and what they value.

“This is the most versatile generation has never been born in Pakistan.  Youth is more about themselves now”, said Iqbal.

“We have to learn to talk in their language and that is not what we are advertising with right now. There are few cheering moment in their life. The cricket team and hockey team has failed them, music has failed them, squash is almost finished. They don’t’ have heroes like Miandad, Imran Khan, Jehangir or Jansher Khan anymore. You have to create those idols again. The biggest problem in our advertising is role models.  They can’t relate to Shoaib Akhtar. They can’t relate to Qadir Khan and because of our lack of understanding of talent management we’re literally creating and destroying personalities. This is a problem for our youth. Who do they identify with then.” said Iqbal.

Times have changed—and so must we. Nobody could have foreseen the challenges today’s marketers would face. Twenty years ago, getting through to customers was only a little tougher than filling a thimble with a fire hose. Then multi-tasking, instant-messaging, e-mailing, cell phoning, emoticoning , always on, web-searching, blogging, gaming, customers we now need to reach did not exist. Clearly we are moving through a time of irrevocable change that has profound implications for businesses large and small. We need to reinvent the way we market to consumers. Within it we’ll need to remember that cats don’t bark.

 

From The Archives (2008) – Online Marketing & Kids

Online Marketing & Kids
Published Dawn, Aurora Magazine, September, 2008

by Umair Mohsin

Imagine a giant commercial that kids can enter, where they can talk and play with products and brand mascots / characters, a commercial that gives marketers access to a plethora of information about individual kids who interacted with their brand, including knowing their inner-most dreams and desires. This is the power of the immersive worlds that marketers can create on the World Wide Web, a medium which is fast becoming an important marketing tool in Pakistan.

Current kids (age under 12) in Pakistan are becoming the first totally wired generation of our country, especially the ‘millennials’ (children born in or after year 2000), for whom the internet and mobile technologies have always been there. Increasingly because of this factor the difference between online, digital and offline medium is fast disappearing. Trouble arises however when one wants to estimate the number of kids online. According to the latest figures released by PTA the total number of Internet subscribers crossed 3.5 million and total number of users crossed the 17 million mark in December 2007. The growth rates in telecom and broadband that our country is going through has put us in the top 10 fastest growing countries in Asia – 8.861% growth in internet users between year 2000 & 2007 alone. However specific data related to kids or their online usage is still not available from any agency. At best, we can guesstimate the size of the users by looking at the statistics from various websites and initiatives undertaken in Pakistan. The biggest success story of online marketing to kids is P&G and Commander Safeguard. The total number of kids who registered themselves for access to Commander Safeguard’s online material on the website http://www.commandersafeguard.com numbered two million whilst it was on the air. A more recent data is that of miniclips.com, an international website on which approx. three million impressions are generated monthly by a Pakistani audience aged between 7-15 years of age. Also recently Badar Khushnood, Country Consultant Google Pakistan on his personal website/blog @ www.badar.com.pk estimated that around 5% of the Pakistani users online are less than 20 years of age. It’s hard to gauge which figure represents the truest picture, but it can be safely assumed however that the number of users in Pakistan below the age of 12 in Pakistan has crossed the millionth mark.

This is important for marketers because with kids influencing the purchase of billions of Rupees worth of products (see Aurora Article – Meet Generation NOW & Whose Afraid Of New Media), this audience is clearly an important part of the marketing mix. Kids may not have the spending power of adults but there is little doubt about their ability to influence purchases through ‘Pester Power’.  It can also be easily assumed that kids with the most access to the net also belong to the SEC classes with the highest spending power.

To date there are few examples of online marketing initiatives aimed at kids in Pakistan which one can use to identify best practices or key learning however one of the most-oft repeated tactics that marketers have employed in targeting kids online is to combine advertising with entertainment. Traditional advertisements don’t work on the Internet, so advertisers seamlessly blend advertising content with games and / or other activities. This engages children interactively, allowing them to react to the content provided by the marketer and participate in online environments. This branded entertainment, particularly games (also called advergames), have thus become the tool of choice for marketers.

For children, an “advergaming” website can be more than a place to play and to explore. As a form of mediated communication, it departs in significant ways from television, the medium advertisers have traditionally used to reach children and which engages children only as passive consumers. The adver-gaming medium is much more powerful than that. Online games can provide a more highly involving and entertaining brand experience than is possible with conventional media. We can even characterized these as “virtual amusement parks”, where there are no natural breaks between commercial and non-commercial content typical of television which allows kids to escape the core marketed message with the single press of a button. Here the message is the experience.

At a more fundamental level, marketers have also used the immersive world to serve as a central organizing platform for an entire integrated marketing communications program. It can and has been used to create synergies among various brand building programs so that the total impact is greater than it would otherwise be. Internet here is not displacing television viewing but rather supplementing it. Children already are doing more “media multi-tasking” or using multiple types of media simultaneously which gives marketers an ideal opportunity to ensure that the core message is heard across all mediums. This best example of this is the recent Energile campaign.

Unilever has shown a leadership stance in this, utilizing both of the tactics successfully with the launch of http://www.energilefootball.com. This initiative was made part of the Energile Youth Football Championship (EYFC) 2008 which heralded the beginning of Energile’s commitment to football in Pakistan. Partnering with brands such as Nike and Karachi United FC, the aim was to set up at a grassroots level, a forum where the best young talent of the country can showcase their talent. Aside from other features, the site utilizes an ‘adver-game’ highlighting its core energy message and the football platform. Unilever’s integrated this campaign further by developing ‘Energile Football’, a mobile game that can be downloaded by consumers in Pakistan. This game was recently promoted through SMS and internet advertising, and allowed consumers to post their hi-scores through fugumobile’s (developers) proprietary Game Tournament platform. High scorers were then eligible to win prizes from Energile. So far Unilever has kept mum about the results of the initiative but looks set to grow it further.

From a historical perspective this is nothing new. Companies creating branded content to appeal to kids is as old as the first days of television. However what is different in these virtual worlds that changes the equation for brand marketers is that a child’s interaction and emotional engagement is very high. Young consumers have to seek out desired content and interact with it in some way. This is an inherently active process: surfing through a website demands a continuing series of decisions and actions. It is this feature that distinguishes the Internet from a more passive medium like television. Rather than capturing children’s attention for 30 seconds, the advertiser may now actively engage children for several minutes and maybe more.

Beyond its power to create brand engagement, however, the Internet also has several additional advantages from a marketer’s perspective. First, it is a cost-effective way to deliver a brand message. While the cost to air a television commercial ranges from approximately Rs. 0.60 per thousand viewers (depending on channel, time slot, frequency, budget, etc), there are no media distribution costs once a website has been created. Once development costs are spread across the number of users interacting with the site, the cost per thousand will be significantly decreased and will continue to do so as the site expands. So there are real economic efficiencies to be gained.

Secondly, the technology of the Internet also provides audience tracking capabilities. While it can be difficult for a marketer to gauge the impact of a television commercial, the Internet allows a much more precise assessment via measures such as the number of visitors, time spent on a site, repeat visits, etc. Traditional marketing tools such as diaries or even people meters may give advertisers a general idea of their audience profile, in terms of age and maybe gender but individual children are anonymous. Internet marketers on the other hand are able to collect data about specific users, through the use of online registration forms, quizzes and surveys.

Thirdly, TV advertisers purchase time slots between TV shows, which they select because they hope their product or service will appeal to the same audience the programs attract. On the Internet, brands create their own programming. They build entire online environments to create associations with their own products, to establish brand loyalty, and to collect information about their present and future customers. Just some of the methods that can be used by advertisers to involve kids with their products include the creation of virtual environments that make kids feel as if they are entering an actual place, friendly cartoon mascots that encourage kids to identify with the brand, interactive games and activities like coloring pages, quizzes featuring brand-name products and their characters, downloadable screensavers or email “postcards” that can be sent to other kids, clubs that kids can join or contests they can enter to win prizes. Even the prizes that are offered can feature product logos, slogans or characters.

One thing is changing for sure however because of which marketers in Pakistan cannot afford to maintain the status quo. Thanks to the online medium, creating a clear profile of your kid’s audience is no longer a straight-forward marketing exercise that falls into simple categories. The only common denominator that exists in this group is the fact that they’re all kids. The similarities stop there. Kids often have one type of image at home and a totally different image online (Please see Aurora Article “Cats Don’t Bark“ published) and marketers will need to learn how to cater to both.  One brand which maybe regarded as totally cool in say a kid’s school maybe regarded as the opposite in a virtual world. This is simply because online dynamics are different, since the audience is behaving under different conditions. Their identities are changed with perhaps totally different friends and thus they have different needs. Thus they may adopt completely different attitudes towards brands that will appear contradictory.

Thus it is essential that the link between the product, brand values, online & offline marketing vehicles and relevance is clear at all times. Relevance itself will have two dimensions. First in relation to the particular personality segment you are addressing, and second, to your core brand values. If you don’t fulfill both aspects, it’s more likely you’ll end up tuned out and turned off.

There have been exercises by many marketers who have tried to enter this medium but without an understanding of its dynamics. They’ve felt the need to break through by creating a really disruptive experience for their target users. This is a world where the audience does not like to be disrupted however and no one hates it more than our kid’s audience. A disruptive advertising experience in their space is equivalent to creating a bad brand experience. They want respect and will only respect those brands that show them that.

For kids more and more “Going on the Internet” is ceasing to be something special and unique simply because now it’s always there and becoming an inherent part of their lives. They are increasingly immersed in the “digital” lifestyle and in the future this will change the world of marketing, technology and communications. The challenge is for marketers to understand that not only their media but their whole world is now fragmenting. Life for today’s kids increasingly resembles one of those ubiquitous blogs that go up every second: random, breathless and intensely personal. To market to this dynamic population, companies will need to tap into platforms well beyond traditional media such as broadband video, immersive environments, mobile marketing and maybe even instant messaging.

Thus marketers should start to engrain themselves in kids’ interactive lives. Youth marketing currently is already flushed with sponsored events, games, contests and ringtone promotions yet today’s teens are more sophisticated, demanding and powerful consumers than their parents ever were. Tomorrow’s teens will be even more so because they’ve been wired from the day they were born and it will take a lot more to appeal to them. That’s why it’s very important to learn to live in their world from now.

 

From The Archives (2008) – Marketing 2.0

Marketing 2.0
Published Dawn, Aurora, Jul 2008

by Umair Mohsin

What is the future of advertising? Simply there isn’t any. At least not as we know it. Trever Edwards, the vice president of Nike in October, 2007, sounded the death knell for the traditional ways of how we advertise, when he said “We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive, we’re in the business of connecting with consumers”.

Worldwide, the trends are the same. In the US, the country’s third-largest advertiser (General Motors) is getting ready to shift fully half of its $3 billion budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next 3 years. P&G Canada, has vowed to boost online spending from 3% of its media budget to as much as 20% for the company’s fiscal year that starts July 1. How soon before P&G Pakistan will follow suit? Research shows that 65% of all marketing spend in Asia in 2007 had no effect on the consumer. Yet still 70% of all Asian marketers are not tracking the effectiveness of their spending, many simply because they don’t know how to.

Yet as more and more consumers integrate digital technology into their daily lives, they are also increasingly exercising control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world.  Already the integration of technology (multi-screen media consumption) is changing how we look at consumers. No longer are marketers describing consumption of content as being off-line and online or traditional and new but where and how the media is being consumed. The demarcation lines between old and new media have officially been eliminated. TV is increasingly being described as “lean back” interaction, as users are typically relaxing in the living room environment with a remote control in one hand. This is in contrast to the similarly slick marketing devised descriptor of the more active, personal computer-oriented “lean forward” experience of a keyboard, mouse and monitor especially used with gaming & consoles. The third form of media consumption is ‘On-The-Go’ with services such as Mobile TV provided by Telenor, digital outdoor & POS (such as 3M Vikuiti in Pakistan) or gaming gadgets like Sony PSP leading the way. It doesn’t end here however. Technology does not change any form of content or its inherent linearity but it is shifting how we control the viewing of that content. DVRs are allowing users to time shift content. iTV such as PTCL Smart already allows on-demand media and interaction directly. Thus even in Pakistan, we have the hyper-fragmentation of the audience and more and more advertising will now have to become integrated across multiple platforms of the ‘Digital Lifestyle’ if it is to work. This is the underpinning of the rise of Marketing 2.0.

Simply put if the web 2.0 is the network as a platform, spanning across all connected devices like PCs, mobiles, gaming consoles, etc, than Marketing 2.0 is about those platforms that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of these platforms. This is very different from the old school forms of marketing, especially since the old schools were not of an interactive nature.

The oldest marketing model was Transactional (communicate what it is and what it does) in its nature. The value was created by what the company was offering and consumers were passive buyers waiting to be targeted with offers. The role of the marketer was ‘to define & create value for firms’, whilst interaction with customers then meant researches or surveys of consumer’s habits.

In the second chapter of marketing, we were bombarded with the ‘Relationship marketing’ model whereby ‘maximizing the lifetime value of the consumer’ was the end goal of marketing. Firms focused to attract, develop and retain the most profitable consumer segments over the maximum number of years.

The new marketing 2.0 model is very different. With the rise of technology and gadgets, consumers have now became Pro-sumers, active participants in the marketing’s value creation. The 2.0 version is about creating ‘Tribes’ or Identification (Who you are) through experiences. This has been brought about through a confluence of a number of trends like participation (from consumer to creator), personalization & collaboration (from pushing content to pulling content), democratization of market access (from a few big advertisers to a lot of little ones) and richer online apps (from desktop apps to the internet cloud & rich media). The role of marketing 2.0 is ‘to engage customers in defining and co-creating value’ through Active Dialogue. Value is ‘maximizing the co-created experiences’.

What it means for marketers is that consumers are no longer at the end of the marketing process. They now refuse to just consume what the marketers throw at them and want to be an inherently part of the marketing process – being part of the conversation. Infact many consumers are becoming vendors themselves of products and even of media in some cases – the role of the traditional agency. Even in Pakistan, opinion formers are popping up in the most unexpected of places with blogs especially becoming very powerful in shaping consumer responses (google ‘PTCL Broadband’ or ‘Link Dot Net Problems’ for an idea). Borders between advertising and PR is blurring.

New marketing buzzwords like Engagement & Excitement are already following on the heels of this revolution, becoming the new mantra, whilst traditional metrics such as Reach & Frequency can no longer cater to measuring the quality of engagement and excitement that is now needed for marketing to these attention deficient consumers. With the beginning of the end of mass media, Advertisers already are starting to demand more individual-specific and involvement based measurements, putting increasing pressure on the traditional mass-market model. Already in Pakistan, the Marcom Mix is shifting from Exposure To Engagement through new formats such as branded entertainment featuring reality based shows (Princess of Pantene, Lux Style Awards, etc), branded adver-games (GilletteChampions.com), branded portals (Tapal’s chillkaro.com), branded talk shows (Nido Taare Humaray), branded game shows, On-ground activations and more. In light of this trend, I predict that the majority of advertising revenue will shift from impression-based formats to impact-based formats within the next five years.

With hyper-fragmentation, the PPC (Price Per Contact) Cost is also rising over time, so more and more marketers are demanding optimized media and sales based results. Expect the 2.0 terms like ROI, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Conversion, Sales Funnel Consideration and Stickiness to enter our marketers jargon soon.

One of the keys to successful marketing in the 2.0 age is hooking into the Zeitgeist e.g. in Pakistan, over the last 12 months, Facebook has been the fastest growing search term on Google, a testament to the numbers of users from Pakistan joining the ‘Social Networking’ revolution, whilst the 2^nd & 3^rd Top most searched terms this year have been Urdu (showing how much people would value content in their language online) & Yahoo! respectively. The 6^th most searched term is ‘games’ and 8^th is wall-papers. Goal.com is the 97^th most popular site in Pakistan, lending credence to the revival of soccer in Pakistan. I don’t know how many marketers have noticed these insights. With the way things are going however, in the near future it’s not difficult to imagine, the marketer managing the impact of his campaign through a “dashboard” that delivers real-time metrics and analysis across all of their advertising platforms. Gone are the days of “hoping” advertising works. Marketing 2.0 is and will be a world where the marketer has full control of the effectiveness of their marketing spends.

The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies will redefine how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. There is no question that the future of advertising & marketing will look radically different from its past. As advertising budgets shift to new formats and shape the future advertising market, control of marketing revenues and power will hinge on four key market drivers: attention, creativity, measures and advertising inventories. Whether agencies in Pakistan will be able to cope, I do not know.

Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – will get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation to incorporate these new realities of life – the trends toward creative populism, personalized measurements, interactivity, open inventory platforms and greater consumer control. This means that many of the skills and capabilities that were the mainstay of success in the past will need refinement, transformation or even outright replacement.

The printing press did for communication what the Internet is doing for marketing. Both changed the medium of mass communication and both revolutionized the way things get done. Digital technology is slowly but surely reaching critical mass in Pakistan and already we are beginning to see a merging of the “old” and the “new” ways. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power. For both incumbents and new players, it is imperative to plan for multiple consumer futures, craft agile strategies and build new capabilities before advertising as we know it disappears. Here’s some food for thought for those who still want to cling to the old ways of advertising. Our kids are already growing up with the ability to watch pretty much what they want when they want. As they get older, do you think they’re going to accept anything less than that?

 

Google Wave – First Look

Published Dawn Scitech, November 22nd, 2009

What Is Google Wave?

Announced by Google at the Google I/O conference in May, 2009, Google Wave is a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It was designed with a strong real-time collaboration focus in mind and that mixed with real time spellchecker and translator extensions makes it a next-gen platform. But will the wave leave us gasping for breath as we surf cyber-space better than before or will it crash and burn. As one of the lucky 100,000 global users who were given the invites, we decided to take a closer look?

The Need For The Wave

Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what the Wave is. Google calls it a cross between conversation and document that allows users to do with one tool what they currently do with many people discussing and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. It works in a Web browser on the desktop or on mobile phones, like Apple’s iPhone or Google Android devices.

Google Wave is powerful because it is a product, a platform, and a protocol simultaneously. Just as Ajax technology blurred the identity of Web sites by allowing content to be embedded on any Web site, Wave blurs the distinctions between communications modes and between content creation applications.

A New Web

The Wave has been centered around the key fundamentals Google is focusing on with HTML 5: The canvas element, the video element, geo-location, App Cache and Database and Web Workers. Integrating Web Workers capability especially is a great move because it allows a developer to run background processes outside of the browser so it doesn’t slow to a crawl whilst running very rich apps. Web Workers will help turn the browser into a more full-fledged launch pad for the next generation of web apps and wave is leading the way.

The Wave Experience

Writing a wave is a lot like typing text into Gmail, Google Docs, blog posting. To the left of the right-hand column featuring the discussion, there’s an in-box with other Waves and to the left of that, there’s a navigation pane atop a list of contacts that looks very similar to Gmail’s layout.

Instead of a typical “I send you a message, you receive it and you reply” type of exchange, however Wave encapsulates conversations between people and shows real-time responses in line, more like threaded comments than individual messages. If you and I are having a conversation in Wave, you see me type out my responses, typos and all, as I pound out a reply. To respond to my note, just click below the last message and extend the thread. This is taking the functionality of editing in groups on Google Docs, one step further, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows that this group-edit can be tricky. The wave however offers a nice UI and real-time edit updates to ensure that even a few people editing something in a wave don’t step all over each other. When someone is editing something, you see their name outlined by a brightly colored box next to the edits they are making in real-time. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos and Google maps. Other example of things you can share in Wave include games, event invitations and more. If you get confused, you can just use the Playback feature to jump around and see the edits. You also have the ability to ping somebody and have a 1-1 conversation in the middle of any wave or in a dedicated side exchange.

Wave As A Web Communication Tool

Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web. If e.g. you have a blog, than as a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. These visitors to your blog could even join in directly right from your blog and all the information would be placed right into the original wave. This functionality can be extended to any kind of site.

The Crash Report

With such powerful integrated features, you can imagine the Achilles heel of Google Wave is that it’s very very noisy. New waves can pop into your in boxes from anywhere, anyone and anytime. So while you may initiate one conversation, you could be dragged into another one that already has 60 entries and then Twave (Twitter Entries) can follow suit just as you’re getting accustomed. If you are in enough active threads, even the playback button doesn’t help and the act of watching each one can be time consuming and an enormous task. Also staying on top of all active waves can be a tremendous challenge. It’s like having multiple chat windows open. You cannot reply to all people simultaneously.

Meanwhile, until Google Wave is integrated into GMail or other Google services, checking your Wave becomes yet another place to go so you’re not missing conversations directed your way. So for somebody like me, who has a personal e-mail address, a work e-mail address, a GMail address, and e-mail addresses for company clients, Wave is yet another inbox and place to go to check in.

Our conclusion…

Wave has the makings of a killer app, like e-mail before it but it will take time and patience to learn the technology and get the noise in control. Small teams will definitely use the Wave for real-time collaboration as its very nature offers an opportunity to further eliminate distance and improve information exchanges. If you’re diving into this new technology, expect to exert a lot of energy to stay on top of it, because messaging just got accelerated and when at work, it will take incredible discipline to control the power of the wave.

 

Green Computing – How Green Is Your Computer?

How Green Is Your Computer?
Published Dawn, Images, July 13th, 2009

These days it’s hard to move anywhere without being urged to make ‘green’ changes in your lifestyle. To answer these consumer trends, computer manufacturers worldwide have embarked to align business concerns with the broader issue of greening the environment. There is

HP MINI 110

cause for concern. IT’s CO2 emissions have been estimated to be at 2 percent of the world’s total, thus the entire community is waking up to the challenge of sustainable development.

At the manufacturing level, leading firms such as HP especially are improving their processes, accounting for environmental impact, operational impact and end-of-life impact for their full range of products. They try to do this by minimizing harm ‘before’ use by employing cleaner, leaner sourcing and manufacturing techniques, by designing products that consume less energy and materials ‘during’ use and helping with reuse and recycling ‘after’ use. This is why the new devices (esp. based on Intel Atom Chipsets) are highly energy efficient and form factors across the board have been reduced greatly.

HP Thin Clients

Corporations too are joining this trend, as being green serves the twin advantages of catering to consumer sentiments and business profitability. One way businesses are becoming greener e.g. are via using ‘thin-clients’. This is a setup where you have a low-power device on your desktop instead of a PC Processor box and all the work takes place at a central server or data center. This can take a lot of hassle out of desktop computing (and resulting maintenance, upkeep, etc), increases security (since all updates are at the center), is economical and requires minimal upgrades, since the average life-span of such a setup is around 8 years.

Another area enterprises are addressing is their servers. It has been estimated that worldwide most servers never run beyond 30% of their capacity and though more powerful than desktop machines, this is not utilizing them for their full potential. To address this challenge, virtualization software has been introduced which allows centers to double the amount of work done by the same servers. This allows businesses to halve the total number of devices and decrease environmental impact as well.

Green IT is also taking place at home e.g. a standard PC can consume around 350 watts (that’s ~1800 watts for 6 hours usage daily @ a minimal Rs. 7.5 per KW). With increasing awareness & electricity prices, consumers are now investing in products which use

HP All-In-One PC

less power, give off less heat and are recyclable or made of renewable materials like bamboo. These include new forms such as netbooks, ‘All In One PCs’, Ultra-portables and ECO PCs (less than 100 Watts consumption). There’s also a side benefit to this. Unlike traditional devices, these products fit anywhere in the home.

 

Net Result – Mobility Computing In Pakistan

Net Result
Published Dawn, Sci-tech, Jul 5th, 2009

Pakistan was recently host to two occurrences that herald an oncoming revolution in how we will compute and communicate with our world. One was the launch of the new line of HP MINI Netbooks (just recently announced in May at the ‘Touch the Future, Now’ conference in Beijing) which aim to bring in a new level of portability & operability to the Pakistani user. The other was the launch of the Nokia flagship Nokia N97 ‘Mobile Computer’. Both products are trying to satisfy the same need “to have something small, portable, and inexpensive (mostly) with you that is always connected” to the Internet.

HP MINI 110

Netbook PCs are miniature versions of notebooks that keep cost to a minimum. The new ones come with 10.1 inch screens, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HD and enough power to hit a sweet spot for both consumer and business users. Their main attraction is their low price (less than PKR 30,000), followed by full QWERTY keyboards that approach (if not quite match) standard laptop arrangements, whilst their portability and ability to run most common applications mean that many people can leave a heavier notebook behind.

On the other hand, Smartphones, defined as phones which run complete operating system software and provide a standardized interface and platform, have offered mobile office applications for years including tasks such as document editing, e-mail, and web browsing. These now promise to usher in an era of mass-personalization, adjusting to the world around us, helping stay us consistently connected to the people and things that matter most.

The battle for the supremacy of being the new client-side interface to the web thus begins soon as netbooks and smartphones start replacing traditional PCs in homes and offices. Here let us the clarify what’s the fuss about towards becoming the most popular device to connect to the net – the device with the highest number of users will attract application developers from both consumer & business segments, gaming companies, advertising revenue, entertainment content, data pipes, etc. It will thus create the digital ecosystem around which we will work, live and play and massive markets & revenues for the companies which own these devices.

This however is not an easy task. The Pakistani data market is still in infancy stages. We have less than 300,000 broadband connections, whilst on the mobile side, voice still accounts for over 92% of the revenues of local mobile operators and data services are currently growing at only 2% per year. Combine this with low literacy, lack of local content development, lack of broadband awareness campaigns, QOS levels and provision of low interest loans for purchase of computers and these affect the development of mobile computing in the country adversely. Even in face of these adversities however, desk-bound PCs stand to lose their dominance as the main access point for the net –fast, since all the trends point to a mobile environment dominating our part of the world and soon.

The first trend is the push by wireless broadband companies and mobile network operators. The WiMax companies hope to provide ubiquitous coverage throughout Pakistan as close as 2011, whilst a leading company is already thinking of adding net-books plans to their existing offerings, plunging the cost of a netbook further. Mobile carriers are also actively pushing for consumers to start using data plans, driving rates to as low as Rs. 500 per month for unlimited data usage.

Secondly as compared to the current total of 5 million PCs not all which are net enabled, there are around 5 million phones in Pakistan which are EDGE/GPRS enabled and these are growing at a brisk pace as income levels across Pakistan rise, whilst cost of hardware falls. Local operators are now expecting their revenues from data to grow, as the subscriber’s appetite for mobile based content has been increasing every year. Going beyond a ring tone, wallpaper, SMS or a theme, they are now on a look out for great content and applications. One challenge which currently restricts this from taking off however is the absence of standards.

Originally uploaded by romainguy

Optimizing mobile applications for different OS and broad range of mobile devices with varying screen sizes and versions remains the biggest problem for both the mobile content developers and distributers. However, an upcoming step taken in this direction is the new Google’s Android platform that unites the players of mobile ecosystem such as wireless operators, handset manufacturers and developers all at one place. Android’s software stack will provide developers a complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and innovative applications for the mobile consumers. It’s noticing this trend that Nokia has made Symbian Open Source and hopes to counter Google’s influence in the manner.

Thirdly, SMEs, the over 1 million small companies in Pakistan, are starting to push the trend towards cloud and mobile computing, unlocking increases in productivity that a mobile revolution promises. These businesses desire the benefits of enterprise solutions to grow further, but simply can’t afford the custom-based solutions common to large companies because there aren’t enough users to spread the cost of developing proprietary apps. However, provide a smart-phone with a built in web-browser like ‘Opera’ to each of the employees and suddenly cost-effective mobile applications are very much possible for the sales force, field employees, in store employees, for fleet management purposes, finance, operations management and more. With the power of the full web available today and with business apps and web front-ends for ERP, CRM and other business critical systems on a mobile phone, the flexibility and the economies to propel Pakistani small businesses into the digital age are very much possible. Similarly, by deploying a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) technology — which runs the local machine’s desktop from a remote server – businesses can use a netbook for everything, including accessing content stored on other machines, thereby decreasing the costs of IT hardware and improving productivity no end.

HP Mini 110 - White

Fourthly, we have seen the digital convergence in our country which is bringing together the separate worlds of audio, video, data and voice communication services, giving control of the entertainment and media content to the consumer. Already today (to a limited extent) we can access the services and content (e-mail, television) using different terminals over different types of networks. Thus the borders between fixed-line and wireless mobile networks are disappearing.

Looking five years out, with netbooks continuing to improve in quality with better graphics abilities, these will move towards true laptops in features whilst connected to faster data networks whilst smart phones dominating the landscape will marry the best features and capabilities of the computing and communications worlds, which will transform the user experience, bringing incredible changes to what we call our life.

 

m-Health – The Next Frontier Of Medicine In Pakistan

Health Care For The Next Billion People

by Umair Mohsin
Published Daily Dawn – Sunday, May 24th, 2009

CAN new technologies help to tackle the health problems of the world’s poorest people? It seems such a silly question. After all, the public-health systems in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America are rudimentary at best. With many villages having no clean water or basic sanitation, let alone reliable access to clinics and doctors, modern wizardry like molecular diagnostics and digital medical records seem irrelevant.

Not only this, such nations which also include Pakistan also face infrastructural, awareness & resource crunches including non availability of timely medical information or guidance, lack of mass awareness of various issues, accessibility, lack of basic facilities, lack of regulation which leads to quackery & fake medicines, lack of affordable health care, lack of monitoring & feedback mechanisms. Epidemics and a shortage of healthcare workers also continue to present grave challenges for the government and health providers.

Yet increasingly, the ubiquitous & increasingly smarter mobile phone is becoming the de facto choice for providing access to quality health care even for the world’s most remote and resource poor environments and there is a growing body of evidence that is demonstrating the potential of mobile communications to radically improve healthcare services. The field of mHealth – the transmitting & enabling of various eHealth data contents & services using wireless technologies – is set to boom.

The Case For m-Health
Pakistan spends less than one percent of its GNP on health in public sector which is one of the lowest in the world. Healthy people are a prerequisite for economic and social development and building nations on weak foundations is hard e.g. the infant mortality rate of live births is still high for a country at the stage where Pakistan is. The major killers in children are pneumonia and diarrhea, whilst the complication of pregnancy in women of child bearing age is very common. For those who survive malaria, tuberculosis and drug abuse continue to be a potential threat, whilst communicable, infectious and parasitic diseases remain to be a severe burden. Less than 43% of women have proper antenatal care, whilst only 15% receive post-natal care. 38% of the women are undernourished. We are plagued by inadequate primary health care, high rates of population growth, prevalence of communicable diseases, lack of awareness, managerial deficiencies, inadequacy of funding and trained manpower and centralized administrative and financial powers.

Thus the mobile communication explosion has the potential to improve health service delivery on a massive scale. With low-cost handsets and the penetration of mobile phone networks into the most remote regions of our country, tens of millions of citizens that never had regular access to a fixed-line telephone or computer now use mobile devices as daily tools for communication (80 million mobile connections to around 7 million WLL & fixed lines). This growing ubiquity of mobile phones is a central element in the promise of mobile technologies for health. For example, mobile technology can support increasingly inclusive health systems by enabling health workers to provide real-time health information and diagnoses in rural and marginalized areas where health services are often scarce or absent altogether. Among those who had previously been left behind by the ‘digital divide,’ millions now have access to reliable technology.

m-Health Projects In Pakistan
Though the mHealth field is still in its early stages, it has already begun to transform health delivery. Projects throughout the developing world are demonstrating concrete benefits, including:
• Increased access to healthcare and health-related information, particularly for hard-to-reach populations
• Improved ability to diagnose and track diseases
• Timelier, more actionable public health information
• Expanded access to ongoing medical education and training for health workers

In Pakistan, there are a host of companies working in this area, two amongst them are Healthline & Phonecast.

Health-Line: Communication and Training for Healthcare Workers
An acute shortage of healthcare workers is a major challenge facing our country’s health sectors. Community health workers in developing countries are often trained only for a few months before they begin providing health services, and have a great need to access updated and reliable health information. Training new cadres of health professionals and empowering current workers, as well as connecting health workers with sources of information via mobile technology is a strong basis for empowerment, as it provides the support they need to perform their functions effectively and self-sufficiently.

The HealthLine project’s goal is to specifically target this need. They have designed an information access system specifically for such health workers, which they can call any time, toll-free, from any cell phone or landline. Through a spoken conversation with the system in their native language, they are able to learn more and/or fill in any health information gaps that they may have. This in turn enables them to provide better health services to their community. HealthLine is a collaborative research project involving Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), Agha Khan University (Karachi, Pakistan) and the Health & Nutrition Development Society (Karachi, Pakistan).

PhoneCast’s CallDOC – Diagnostics and Treatment Support
Diagnostics and treatment support are vitally important in healthcare—misdiagnosis or the inability to diagnose a condition could have serious, even fatal, ramifications. Given that upto70% of the health cases in Pakistan can be handled with first-level support, CallDoc in partnership with Pakistan Medical Association, has taken the step and their applications in this area are designed to provide diagnosis and treatment advice to remote patients through wireless access to medical staff and a subsequent connection to professional health workers certified by PMA. CallDoc’s diagnostic and treatment applications use the phone as a point-of-care device. Health workers will leads the patient through a step-by step diagnostic process. Once data are entered into the system, remote medical professionals can diagnose the illness and prescribe treatment or recommend the patient to a PMA certified doctor close by.

CallDoc is a 24/7 Tele-health information and consultancy service thus patients are able to receive treatment in their villages and homes, averting the need for expensive hospital visits, which are beyond reach for many. As pilot CallDoc is working with John Hopkins and USAID on their Pakistan Initiative for Mothercare And Newborn ( PAIMAN) headed by its Chief of Party Dr Nabeela Ali, by operating a 13 district support through a combination of mhealth and e- health based Call Center from Karachi for 13 districts to provide first level support and referral for Maternal and Newborn deaths and complications. This operation is first of its kind for a bid to save the death of 37,000 young mothers every year during the pregnancy related issues and to prevent the severe complications among the 400,000 mothers every year during their pregnancy stages. CallDoc project is also being supported through initiatives by Asian Development Bank and Ministry of Finance.

Mr. Abdullah Butt, CEO of PhoneCast Said “ By eliminating the need for patient travel, our applications have the potential to dramatically increase access to care. Our network will provide basic, affordable, timely and genuine first level medical support and referral to the nearest health facility on figure tip of millions of Pakistanis through mhealth for achieving the millennium goal objectives, which has not been possible since the inception of Pakistan”, we are working on setting up the largest mhealth facility in Pakistan very shortly, through a combination of multimedia based telemedicine and mobile technology platform.

M-Health Future:
A recent report funded by the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, two charities, documented more than four dozen projects in m-health across the developing world in Education & Awareness, Remote Data Collection, Disease & Outbreak Epidemic Tracking and Remote Monitoring.

In Uganda, Text to Change uses an SMS-based quiz to raise awareness among phone users about HIV/AIDS that brought a 40% increase in the number of people getting tested. A study in Thailand in 2007 showed that compliance with a drug regimen to tackle TB jumped to over 90% when patients were sent daily text reminders to take their pills on time.

The field of mHealth is at an inflection point. With dozens of projects implemented and proven benefits, all trends indicate that investment will continue and mHealth projects will serve an ever wider range of constituents in the years ahead. At the same time, technological innovations will bring enhanced benefits, particularly in the areas of data collection, patient monitoring, and remote diagnostic and treatment support, where application development is already proceeding at breakneck speed.

So should the poor be given access to new technology? Bill Gates was one of the people who used to be on the side of the skeptics. Nearly a decade ago, he delivered a speech at a conference on technology for the developing world, inveighing against the idea that modern technologies like satellite communications links, solar power and internet-enabled computers could magically improve the lives of the poorest. Did they have any idea, he asked his listeners, what it meant to live on less than $1 a day? “You’re just buying food, you’re trying to stay alive.” His decade’s experience with his foundation’s work in public health seemed to have changed his mind however about what is good for the developing world. He now says that “poor people absolutely deserve better technology.”