Lowe Lintas & Partners India and Google hold the hands of women to help them get on the internet

Reports show that only 1/3rd of the total Internet population in India are women and this gap is expected to grow with growth in Internet users. In Nov 2013, Google India launched Helping Women Get Online with the objective of reducing the Internet population gender gap in India. Earlier this year, Google India launched the digital leg of the HWGO campaign to encourage Internet users to step up and help a women get on the Internet and understand how she can use the web to get ahead in life.

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The Internet has completely transformed the way we live our lives. Everyday people are discovering new opportunities and finding newer and better ways of doing things on the web to get ahead in life. #TogetherOnline by Lowe Lintas & Partners India is an effort to empower women in India with the knowledge of Internet and how they can use it do different things in their daily lives. To take this concept further, Google India along with Lowe Lintas Delhi conceptualized a film to inspire young, Internet-savvy people to help their mothers explore a whole new world – that of the Internet. The film highlights the innocent fear of the first day of stepping into a new world.

Commenting on the new campaign, Sandeep Menon – Director, Marketing, Google India said, “While there is low awareness about the benefits of Internet amongst women in India, but there are many who want to get online to succeed in life. We’re working with various partners to help spread awareness about the benefits of being online amongst women. And today, we’ve launched a new film to inspire young digital natives to bring their mothers online. There are large number of educated women in India with internet access in their households, but they still do not use the internet. We are making an appeal to their children to hold their mom’s hand as she discovers a new world online.”

The film is based on a relationship between a mother and a daughter and captures the moment of realization of how at times our parents really need our support to learn and discover new things. Busy youngsters don’t have the time or energy to teach or guide their mothers when it comes to something as alien as the digital world. The only way to connect to them was to tap into an idea that could move them. The task was to capture the correct emotion that would drive young people to give back whatever they could to their mothers. This insight was used as the key trigger. A kid’s first days at school has an emotional similarity with mother’s first days on the Internet – the nervousness, the hesitation, the alien environment, it’s the same. This realisation forms the basic premise of the script.

Sharing his perspective on the thought process, Amer Jaleel, National Creative Director, Lowe Lintas + Partners said, “We wanted to encourage hand-holding. Our target is the internet-savvy young, who often get easily discouraged when they have to take someone through the basics of online. The barrier is this thought that runs through our heads – ‘Mom don’t worry, tumse nahi hoga, I’ll come and do it’. We wanted to present the reward of not giving up, going through with the teaching and converting them into independent onliners.”

Adding to this, Shayondeep Pal, Executive Creative Director, Lowe Lintas Delhi said, “Busy youngsters don’t have the time or energy to teach or guide their mothers when it comes to something as alien as the digital world. The only way to connect to them was to tap into an idea that could move them. The task was to capture the correct emotion that would drive young people to give back whatever they could to their mothers. We thought the trigger could be this. A kid’s first days at school had an emotional similarity with mother’s first days on the Internet – the nervousness, the hesitation, the alien environment, it’s the same. This realization is the basic premise of the script.”

Commenting on the campaign, Naveen Gaur, President, Lowe Lintas said, “#TogetherOnline is the first campaign from our association with Google and soon you will see a lot more work in the coming months on various other projects. This campaign gave us a unique opportunity to present mother-daughter relationship in a really different way. It’s beautiful to see how roles are reversed as we grow up and as our parents grow old. They need as much support and patience from us as we demanded out of them when we were young. I hope that we manage to motivate the younger generation to spend some time with their mothers and help them break the barrier of initiation into this somewhat intimidating world of Internet.”

Credits –

Producer: Prafull Sharma, Azad Anesh