India smiling, are you smiling too?


Honey, I shrunk the other world!

Are you urban?

Advertising thrives on simplistic and emphatic theories. One such long-standing theory is segmentation . Advertising professionals are trained to look at the market place as a combination of various groups of human beings. Each of these groups are unique in the psychographic traits they display. This process allows professionals to mass-customise their messages. Interestingly, till the launch of Cable and Satellite (c&s) television in the early 1990s, mass media in this country didn't allow advertising messages to be truly segmented. Even a true-blue urbanite living in the southern most tip of Bombay (now Mumbai) would be exposed to messages going out to villagers in Abinashpur in central West Bengal. The urbanite would be watching the Sunday feature film on Doordarshan, just as his fellow countryman from Abinashpur would. Both would consume a toothpowder commercial that would talk about the special needs of personal hygiene in rural areas. Or, for that matter, rural community development needs through the classic