We’ve all experienced the barrage of political ads on the television celebrating the vision of one or the other national parties/coalition. If you’ve somehow managed to miss these then you’ve definitely been bombarded with pop-ups or screen captures of such campaigns on the Internet. I know I have, more than I’d care to admit. While I’m sure every conscientious voter would want to know the fundamental facts and form a view on parties or individuals before they cast their votes, isn’t there a plethora of information already available?

With the elections around the corner, political debates are the staple of every new channel across regions and languages. We may not necessarily know if these channels are endorsed by political parties and are pushing their agenda. But it would be fair to say that most of them appear to be unbiased. Or at least they don’t appear to be brazenly supporting political parties.

Catch phrases On such programmes there are representations from different political alliances and we get a fairly good idea of what they stand for. Why is there a need to go to town and hijack airwaves and flood the Internet? What is exactly at play here? Have political parties finally understood the power of branding and consumer marketing? And more importantly, does this kind of advertising even work?

Let’s look at a few instances. The first election ‘slogan’ was ‘ Garibi Hatao ’ (abolish poverty) coined by Indira Gandhi in the early seventies. It might seem a very simple idea today, but it espoused a vision that was attractive to the larger constituents it targeted. The media did the rest. Doordarshan was still in its infancy and even if we assume that some of the print media houses were particularly favourable to the Congress dispensation, we have to concede that it was a powerful message that fired the imagination of the people. And non-paid media was there to take the message across. No advertising funding. No creative interruptions. Just a plain old campaign slogan.

The true era of political advertising began in 1984 (coincidence?) when Rajiv Gandhi brought in an advertising agency to handle the advertising campaign for the general elections after the death of Indira Gandhi. When the Congress swept the elections, the agency was acclaimed for its ‘brilliant’ campaign. Five years later it was blamed for its horribly negative campaign (‘Mr Clean’) over Bofors. Isn’t this an over simplification? No one would have bet against Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress in the wave of sympathy that extended to the family after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. And one would have been pretty sure that the Bofors scandal, which was the first publicly discussed corruption scandal in the country, would claim its pound of flesh. Advertising might not have had any role to play in the fortunes of the Congress but it still ended up getting a bad reputation.

In 1996 the Congress’ campaign revolved around the ‘Gandhi’ brand name and the sacrifices made by the family and BJP’s campaign was all about patriotism. The 1996 election results did not favour any one political alignment. Still no clue about what works, leave alone how it works!

In the late '90s BJP marketed brand ‘Atal’ to the Congress’ ‘Gandhi’ brand. The jury is still out on who really benefitted from their respective ad campaigns. But it is the 2004 elections that most marketing pundits have an opinion about. A track record of good economic growth ensured that the BJP came out with the ‘India Shining’ campaign. The target group was wide and the State-run Doordarshan was used for its wide reach. On-ground activations were undertaken in the form of yatras across the country. And 2004 was the year when the concept of the ‘aam aadmi’ was introduced by the Congress, with its simple promise – Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath (Congress’ loyalty rests with the common man). Congress believed that the much talked about prosperity had continued to elude the common man. Before the votes were cast most experts believed that the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign was a good strategy, and the reasons for this were that India had posed impressive growth rates in the years preceding the elections and social indices were seeing an upward trend.

Many pundits thought that the campaign ‘reflected the mood of the nation’. We all know how well that went for the BJP. After the results the campaign was made out to be the very reason for defeat! Similarly the Congress’ campaign hasn’t registered on the radar at all. But after an electoral victory everyone (including the Congress) claimed that it was a brilliant strategy and thus the ‘Aam Aadmi’ became a recurring political narrative.

Reality check According to a report, no one is quite sure why the BJP lost in 2004 and why the Congress won. But since we all like a semblance of closure, advertising becomes a convenient place to fall back on.

So how does one really know what is going to work? Or how? The quick answer: no one knows.

The Indian voter is a very complex target group. Especially for national parties who have to appeal to a very-wide range of audiences. There are complex issues of religion, caste, the rural-urban divide, groups and sub-groups, geographies, linguistics, gender etc. It is very difficult to find the ‘single-minded proposition’ for this target group, unless the most relevant message can be simplified for the entire group. This is where ‘Garibi Hatao’ worked so well. One simply couldn’t argue against it. And the 70s voter believed in Indira Gandhi to deliver on it.

One could argue that national parties are not really building brands by advertising. The effects they want to create are transitory in nature. Just till the date of the elections. And that media frequency would ensure that message repetition seeps into the psyche, even if for a short term: If something is said often enough, the mind would inevitably succumb, accepting the message as part of reality.

But when we think of the long lines of voters that wait to cast their votes in these elections, in the heat of summer for long hours, often putting their lives at risk in certain areas, we know that there is nothing passive about their commitment. Can a political advertising campaign really buy that kind of commitment? I think not.

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