Make hay while the country messages

Throw your head a few months back… there was this ‘new 7 wonders of the world program’ that had hit the scene in India asking every single Indian citizen to vote for the Taj Mahal. Every galli ka kutta with the slightest iota of patriotism was asked to vote for his nation. Every single liner on the ‘motherland’ and ‘bhaarat maata’ was being hurled by the radio, news channels, and the likes. The media was in a rampage with all the TV channels giving consistent flashy ‘ticker ads’ to vote for the Taj Mahal literally begging us to save our ‘heritage’. All you had to do was to type in a message and send it to those 4 digit numbers so that even you could be a part of ‘making history’…

And thus began probably one of the biggest agglomerated marketing effort by the media houses of India. Now before I go ahead and make you realize how we were duped by the media houses and how we quite stupidly helped them make money while we satisfied our conscience by voting for the Taj, let me give you some background on some technicalities of the voting system.

Firstly, the voting system was majorly accepted through sms and an online voting system. There was unlimited number of votes that any person could cast. Thus scientifically the voting system is void completely. Also, the voting system has large dependencies on access to cell phone service or the internet. And lastly, the decision HAD to be skewed since every country doesn’t have the same population size. Surely you don’t expect Indians to vote for the Christ Redeemer in Brazil…! I mean this one is a no brainier… we’re the second largest population in the world; we had to win! Even if 1/10^th of the Indian population cast a vote it would be equivalent to the entire population of Brazil! And given the amount of cell phone proliferation that has happened in the recent times, I don’t think India was at a disadvantage by having a very low internet penetration. And lastly, the entire campaign of the new 7 wonders was a complete private initiative without any international organization backing. In fact, UNESCO issued a statement saying that they were not involved in any way in the ‘new 7 wonders’ campaign.

However, the media houses took this opportunity and turned it completely into a business opportunity. Here’s how. Every news channel has a dedicated sms number for all its services. For instance Star TV has its own private number, 7827. So when Star News urges to cast a vote for the Taj, it would give the number 7827. CNN-IBN might have its own, Zee News its own etc. etc… Each of these 4 digit numbers are provided by cellular service providers like Bharti-Airtel and BSNL to the media houses. So whenever you send a message to these 4-digit numbers you’re charged Rs.3 per message. Out of the 3 rupees, 1 rupee goes to the service provider and the remainder 2 rupees to the owner of the number (the media houses in this case).

Imagine a country with a population of more than 1.1 billion with a high cell phone penetration rate casting votes on these 4 digit numbers. Just think of the revenues the media houses might have raked in just by urging bumbling nitwits like us to cast votes using their numbers.

Was it really a question of preserving the ‘heritage’ and maintaining integrity and all that sentimental crap or was it a pure business opportunity? Your take…