For the first time in human history, living in a city is the norm; more people live in cities than live in the countryside. The MegaCity is the very embodiment of the teeming metropolis, with all of the opportunities and challenges that such a situation can imply. How are people coping with these challenges? How are they maximising the opportunities that Megacities offer? What is life like in the melting pot both for those moving in, and for those already there? And what of the future? Demographers agree that the world's biggest cities of twenty or fifty years from now will be quite different from those of today - Isn't it possible that many of the future solutions dealing with life among tens of millions will come from such cities rather than the traditional sources of creative product development.
Jakarta has experienced huge gains in urban and economic development over the last ten years. The megacity now houses a substantial and affluent middle class with lifestyles in line with those of the Asian tigers. Their reading habits and value to advertisers have been monitored by Survey Research Indonesia for many years through the Media Index and Asian Profile services. But achieving the identification, contact and cooperation of this segment has become increasingly difficult due to a combination of the growth of condominia and gated housing, more time spent away from the home (not least owing to the traffic jams) and a correspondingly greater value placed on leisure time. Failure to tackle these issues would inevitably result in under-reporting of the TRUE size and profile of this segment. Over the last two years, SRI has developed and tested a range of innovative procedures designed to identify and correctly represent this market and has incorporated a number of these in its media measurement services to the benefit of media owners and advertisers alike.