There's an old story, supposedly from India, concerning some blind people and an elephant. Versions vary, but generally each person is allowed to touch only a tusk, a leg, the tail, the trunk, and so forth. Naturally, they come away with very different mental pictures of the whole elephant.
This is very much the situation when you consider any aspect of digital media penetration and usage around the globe. Not only are the media and technologies significantly different from market to market, but so are people's preferences and usage patterns -- driven by their vastly differing customs and culture. Even measurement of these matters is far from standardized (see sidebar).
As a result, there is no single, accurate answer to the questions: who is ahead, and who is behind, in digital media?
Fortunately, there are some benchmarks, anecdotal evidence, and generally accepted comparisons that advertisers can fruitfully absorb.
The IDI
A new International Telecommunication Union Information and Communication Technologies Development Index (often called the ICT Development Index, or simply the IDI) seeks to compare the penetration of digital technologies in 154 countries. The IDI combines 11 indicators, such as the number of households with a computer, the number of internet subscribers, and the internet literacy level, into a single measure related to ICT access and usage.
Outside the top 10, other countries with a strong IDI rating include high-income nations in Europe, Asia and North America. It may come as a surprise that the U.S. ranked at No. 17 according to 2007 data, and has dropped even lower according to the latest estimates. The lower end of the IDI scale is populated by less-developed countries, generally able to provide only limited access to ICT infrastructure, including fixed and mobile telephony, internet and broadband.
The Arab world has been relatively slow to roll out digital media technologies. For example, in Lebanon, war destroyed infrastructures and dragged the country into a serious digital media shortfall, while in Tunisia, public policy held the country back from providing extensive digital connections. In the United Arab Emirates, however, digital media penetration has increased from 35.1 percent in 2007 to 49.2 percent in 2008. Overall, one of the chief obstacles to digital media access in the Arab world remains government resistance to the free flow of information. Once digital media become available, though, patterns of internet usage in Arab countries are not significantly different from global patterns.
The ITU reports that nearly all nations have shown improvement in digital media deployment and usage during the past five years, with Eastern Europe ranking as the region showing fastest ICT growth. Several developing countries, though, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam, have also dramatically improved their IDI rating.
Singapore has recently become the most wired nation in the world, with 99.9 percent penetration of the internet, as of December, 2008. As a result of multiple internet subscriptions, it boasts a mobile phone penetration rate of 163 percent!
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