As they say: "There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch," But, can you get something for nothing? Advertisers seem to think so. College students spend some USD 198 billion per year, according to pundits, so it's no wonder marketers are going to new lengths to reach them. The rise of this trend can be attributed to:

• An all-out war for saturated consumers ' attention, including various handout and sampling techniques.
• The online world with costs that are close to zero for distributing anything that's digital, forcing producers to come up with new business models/services, which are often purely ad-driven.
• The ever-decreasing cost of physical production makes it easier to offer nearly free goods in the offline world too. In fact, many goods have actually become insanely cheap.
• The avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry young members of GENERATION I.
• C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, making transactions cash-neutral.
• An emerging recycling culture.

Free for All

And all of the above is fueling consumers' expectations to get online and offline stuff for free. The most visible commercial manifestations are businesses offering goods, services and experiences to consumers for free and making their money from advertising. Word of mouth now travels the world instantly, making every new product launch globally in a flash, and turning every new brand into a potential global player.

There is no such escape for anything that can be digitized: it needs to be rolled out around the world in one go, as consumers anywhere may hear about it within hours, then want to watch it, listen to it, read it, and won't hesitate to download pirated versions if you make them wait too long.

It's a fact - EVERYBODY loves free stuff, so is no wonder companies are searching for ever more ingenious ways to stuff us with (almost) free products and services.

The Future of Business

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for a swarm of bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero cost. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa. Practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to free; at least as far as clients are concerned. Just check these new ways marketers have concocted to entice our younger generation:

• The Shadow Notebook is a five-subject notebook that gets cobranded with participating colleges and universities across the US and distributed by the school at the start of each semester. The university's logo appears on the cover, and pages of school-related maps and information get included within. Thirteen four-color, full-page advertisements act as subject dividers giving advertisers the means to engage students while they are a captive audience in the learning environment. Students, naturally, carry the notebooks with them throughout the day over the course of the semester, which from the advertiser's perspective amounts to 96 impressions over a four-month period. So far, about 700,000 notebooks have been distributed to college students at campuses nationwide.
• An innovative Japanese company is offering university students free photocopies. This is made possible by printing ads on the back of the copy paper, which is slightly thicker than normal to prevent ads from shining through. For JPY 400,000, advertisers can have their message printed on 10,000 sheets of paper. Tadacopy machines have been placed at a few dozen campuses, and are a big hit with students.
• Advertisers competing for the much desired attention of the college-aged set now have another opportunity to get their ads in the hands of students-and hold their interest for up to 90 minutes. FreeHand Advertising distributes free note-taking paper to students on their way to class. Each page is branded with the same type of horizontal ad you see on websites, only these are visible for at least the duration of a college lecture, and longer if students refer back to their notes (as they should).
• Blyk targets 16- to 24-year-olds with its free mobile phone service, which includes 217 texts and 43 minutes every month. In exchange, of course, they get advertising-up to 6 messages sent to their phones each day. Britain's youth don't seem to mind, though-Blyk reached 100,000-member target six months ahead of schedule. Response rates to the ads in question have also achieved a whopping average of 29 percent-far surpassing the norm, which tends to hover in the single digits.