You’re probably reading this on your tablet. For sure, you’re also checking WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about that summer vacation you are going on with your family later this month. Will your mobile service work out there, hmm?

How long has it been since you last looked at your device? Or one of the social networking websites? Thirty seconds? Five minutes?

Now, how long has it been since you met your best friend in the flesh and chatted with her? Three months? Six? And when you finally did, did you put your phone away? Did she?

Quite the likely scenario, considering that a quarter of the world’s population is likely to have smartphones by 2016, as digital marketing and media firm eMarketer says. India is one of the fast-growing markets for smartphones, and no wonder. According to an IAMAI report, there were 159 million mobile users in India in October 2014, a growth of 45 per cent from October 2013. IAMAI’s Digital Bharat report says 58,000 new users get connected to a social network every day, and that India is the second largest market for social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. People and their phones seem to be inseparable.

And that’s a phenomenon marketers are reflecting in their advertising this year, urging customers to step back and think. In the last couple of months, there have been as many as four high-profile campaigns that have been exhorting consumers to take a break from their gadgets.

Durex, the sexual health brand, recently launched a video claiming a technological breakthrough in mobile phone technology that would help tech-obsessed couples improve their sex lives. It was teasing the viewer – the technology, it ultimately revealed, was the ‘Off’ button.

The video’s huge success and research by Durham University about the ruinous impact of technology on relationships prompted it to develop an app that syncs phones “to sleep together, so we can too”, as a press release from the brand puts it. At agreed times, or by spontaneous agreement, the app will simply mask couples’ phones’ home screen, effectively putting the handsets to sleep and removing all distractions.

It’s not just an advertising pitch, keeping people away from their gadgets could be good for business too if the time spent off them turns into time spent on burgers and soap.

Internet on tap Says Kedar Teny, Director - Marketing & Digital, McDonald’s India West & South: “There was a time when the mobile phone and the Net coexisted. Today, the internet is on the mobile phone, on tap. Nowadays, most of us are laughing on WhatsApp, and not in each others’ company.”

McDonald’s has launched a campaign ‘KuchPal offline @ McDonald’s’ (note the name) where it exhorts customers to take a break from their devices and revel in the company of family and friends at their restaurants. To tie the campaign to the spirit of sharing in the non-virtual world that it is advocating, the chain has launched a sharing pack too for people visiting in groups.

For Cinthol, whose Alive is Offline campaign went viral across 198 countries and crossed 53 lakh views in just five-six weeks, it’s not a trend, says Sunil Kataria, Business Head, India and SAARC. “We stand for ‘Life is Awesome’ and are all about living life to the full and exploring it to the hilt. There’s too much of social media today” and so the line rounding off the campaign reminds you that ‘The world is more beautiful than the world wide web’. Customers can download Cinthol’s caller tunes like the one telling you the user is taking a shower at a waterfall and so cannot be contacted now.

Connected – and not Prajato Guha Thakurta, Executive Creative Director, Leo Burnett, who handled the McDonald’s campaign, says the connectedness is a menace “threatening the fabric of society”. While everyone is connected through media, they are still disconnected. Asking teenagers to disconnect from their devices is like asking them to break up with their girlfriend. “A message of total switch off would have been rejected, we’re asking them to switch off just for a bit,” he says. This is the first time McDonald’s is striking up a conversation that is not about price points, “almost McDonald’s Version 2.0, pardon the use of an online phrase”, he quips.

There are a couple of global campaigns taking a similar approach. ‘Meet Me at Starbucks’ reminds you that “good things happen when we get together”.

The campaign is a series of videos featuring customers at Starbucks outlets across several countries. Each video tells the story of people who meet there, talk and discover and understand others better.

“Today we have a million ways of reaching out to each other, but nothing comes close to physically meeting someone for that personal moment of connection. When we meet we get closer, we give more joy and we connect better,” says Manmeet Vohra, Director – Marketing and Category, Tata Starbucks. Positioning Starbucks as a ‘social space’ which ‘anchors the community’ is the larger plan.

New habits die hard? Now these companies may hope that after seeing their ads, you will give your phones a rest and spend some time together at their stores making real and deeper connections.

You well might, for a little while. But note this: Travel website Yatra.com’s survey released in April found that even as 83 per cent of the respondents plan a 5-15-day-long summer break, 55 per cent of the respondents say they will check their work mails and calls at least once a day. Around 17 per cent will be hooked to their phones throughout the holiday.

Plus there’s the FOMO factor: Fear Of Missing Out on what’s happening to your friends and family - as well as wanting to make people jealous with their holiday updates are other reasons to stay connected, a TripAdvisor study in the US discovered.

It’s an OCD world - obsessively, compulsively, digitally narcissistic, it’s a fairly new and compelling craze, and it shows no signs of letting up.

No wonder none of these marketers are taking their pitch seriously enough to go so far as to leave digital media out of their campaigns!

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