CreativeLand Asia’s MTS “Internet Baby’ becomes India’s most viewed YouTube ad of all time

Creativeland Asia’s “Born for the Internet” television commercial has notched up over 23 million YouTube views in 206 countries in less than four months. The Indian ad is tipped to well at next week’s Cannes Lions Festival and was featured on Campaign Brief Asia in February this year.

To a soundtrack of Diana Ross’ ‘I’m Coming Out’, the The Indian market spot for Russian telecoms giant MTS Telecom shows a new-born baby take charge of his own birth; first by using the Internet to research how to cut his own umbilical cord before then putting out word of his arrival on the web. The spot was directed by Guy Shelmerdine from Smuggler Films.

This week, “MTS Internet Baby” surpassed Unilever’s Lifebuoy “Help a Child reach 5” as the most viewed Indian advertising spot of all time.

Creativeland Asia created the spot to launch MTS’s new 3Gplus network in India and to demonstrate how the network appeals to users “Born for the Internet”. Since launch, the spot has struck a chord among bloggers and the international media, with discussion centering on how the work amusingly illustrates a new generation of ‘digital native’ consumers that view Internet use as their birth right:    

The spot has provoked interesting debate on the future of internet and technology after screening on Indian television but was actually originally launched in an innovative way – via torrent seed. Instead of using a conventional ad launch strategy, they set out to directly engage with India’s digital natives by seeding the spot as a BitTorent file amongst the country’s most download-hungry online communities.

Web-savvy Indian fans of the ad then extensively shared it on social media and created a buzz days before the ad was launched on the brand’s official social channels. To date over 92,000 consumers have commented on the ad and shared it across Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr and parody videos of the spot including one based on a reversed version of the ad ‘baby goes into momma’s stomach’ has also become a surprise hit.

Some Indian consumers even went as far as modifying the format of the film to create a mobile version of the MTS ‘the Internet Baby’, so they could share it with friends and family on social platforms like WhatsApp. The ad has taken on a life of its own and become emblematic of India’s highly aspirational generation of young web users who are “Born for the Internet”.