Did online advertising help or hurt our political parties?

For weeks before the elections, the online world was abuzz with reports of BJP ads turning up everywhere.

Bloggers saw these ads placed on their pages, visitors to even Pakistani websites saw these ads appear. There virtually wasn’t a single site where you did not come across an image of LK Advani with some message that positioned the 81-year old as a “strong and decisive leader”.

The Congress ran a muted campaign online, in contrast to BJP’s multi-crore extravaganza. There were occasional ads with the hand symbol that turned up on Yahoo and other sites, along with the usual Bollywood-style cutouts of all the main leaders.

Come the results, and a lot of pundits were extraordinarily surprised at the whitewash by the Congress. And the questions were raised, fast and furious, about the efficacy of online advertising, or whether it was useless in India and such.

Here’s what we think. We had an early sniff of the Congress landslide, when we did a limited straw poll on our clients’ site MyIdea.co.in back in early March 2009. The results then, across a little less than 1,000 respondents, pointed to a UPA win by a little more than a 5:3 ratio. Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that the final seat tally ended up in quite the same ratio.

We also took a look at the traffic to LK Advani’s site that the ads were directed to (lkadvani.in) and also to the Congress site (aicc.org.in). We used Google Trends and Vizisense data to see who was visiting each of these places — and how many of them were doing so. We did this before the results were announced.

One surprising result, considering BJP’s early start and massive online presence, was that it only showed about 25% more traffic (around 2,50,000 visitors a month) than the Congress site (with 2,00,000 visitors a month), which had relatively far less advertising.
Data also showed that the Congress site had caught up with the BJPs by the end of the election.

But looking deeper, we saw truly interesting patterns. The visitors to Advani’s site had a much-greater-than-normal propensity to be either over 60 years in age — and hence retired — or between 18 and 22 years and hence in college. Taking our mind back to the advertising of Advani as a “strong, decisive leader”, we wondered who it could have been aimed at.

The “strong man” premise has historically been one aimed at idealists, who believed a country was weak and needed a jolt of muscle at the top. Not surprisingly, to our mind, the age groups that resonated best with this message were the students and the retired folks — idealists in each sense, who were not “made pragmatic” by the pressures of working life.

In contrast, most working people, even the more affluent among this group, didn’t seem to have any such perception that the country was weak. Perhaps they had other issues, relating to the economy or stability — and the Congress tapped into those.

The site visit analysis to the AICC site showed exactly such trends. The bulk of the traffic reflected the Indian mainstream working class, with a bump towards the more affluent.

Anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of numbers can tell you that you cannot win an election by aiming at the under-22s and the over-60s. There are far too few of these people in this demographic to start with, and though they may be influential, they have relatively little economic power. To be a mainstream party, you have to aim for the big segments.

The Congress didn’t goof up here. They didn’t do anything remarkable — but they didn’t get it completely wrong either.

What this tells us is that this is not a failure of the online medium — but a failure of the creative minds behind the online advertising in the case of the BJP. The medium was right, but the strategy and creative were dead wrong. The Congress did both reasonably fairly, if not splashily.

People online are looking for solutions to economic problems, to save their jobs in the downturn and more. Putting an old man as the face of your campaign and rattling sabres did the opposite of what it was intended to do. The BJP campaign polarised the target audience. Some of the young bought the “strong man” theory. To the rest of us, it wasn’t a solution to any of our problems — and indeed it turned quite few of us off. We wanted economic problems solved — not someone who could likely take us to war with Pakistan over Kashmir, or Article 370.

What could the BJP have done right? Well, for starters, they had a formidable economic promise — fewer taxes, better business. They ignored this completely. They had a far-signed open source-centric IT manifesto. They ignored this too. By focusing on an irrelevancy (the alleged strength and decisiveness of an 81-year old man) they got the online eyeballs — but turned them off.

Doing an online campaign doesn’t mean you ignore the three key sides of communication. Media is only one component — getting the strategy and creative right are essential too. Better luck to the BJP the next time!

The writer is  founder and CEO, Pinstorm