Advertising your way to power appears to be the desperate political strategy being practised by our main parties in the last week or so. The PPP has been celebrating Benazir Bhutto’s birthday by splashing her and the president’s face in every major newspaper for an all-purpose advertisement ranging from Benazir Income Support Programme to some party supporters thanking them for some development only the PPP workers know about. Not to be outdone, the other duo, Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif, became poster boys in all newspapers canvassing for the Azad Kashmir elections. The readers of newspapers must have felt cheated having paid for a newspaper with the front and back pages full of faces they are sick of seeing on TV day in and day out.
As usual, the focus of having an immature, tit-for-tat strategy has led them to do massive spending on advertising whose impact on image enhancement is negligible or nominal at most. Impact analysis is important for people who want a return on their hard earned money. When it is other people’s money with no accountability, a few million here or there with no particular objective is peanuts for leaders who have been accused of billions in corruption whenever in power.
Political advertising is a specialised area in today’s world. Politicians are marketed like Coke and Pepsi. Like these fast moving consumer goods, politicians are also reaching out to a mass market with advertising appeals to give them satisfaction for their needs and wants. In the US, political advertising has a higher budget than most consumer products. Campaigns are designed by professionals with each advertising appeal being measured for its effectiveness in changing voter preferences in favour of the party pitching these appeals. Where does all this money come from? Just like companies have a revenue percentage allocated for advertising for their products, political parties have a professional fund raising plan for sponsoring the huge marketing activities of the contesting parties. The Obama election campaign was the epitome of how to market yourself to power. The fundraising success, the use of non-traditional media, the use of positioning directly appealing to voter needs and the integration of all forms of communication with one media and one message has been quoted as historic in turning elections and political image building into a real science.
In the practice of old school politics (and everything pre-Obama was old school), those networks were relatively exclusive, reserved for dedicated activists, party stalwarts, talented political insiders, campaign operatives, and the wealthy and well connected. The normal fundraising strategy was to have dinners with celebrities and bigwigs supporting a candidate and having glamorous speeches and media coverage. Another major source of funding was industry. The industrialists would support a candidate whom they thought would favour their industries when in power. This lobby would be a major sponsor of vested interests and would make or break election campaigning. All these sources of funding, however, would be transparent and on record for scrutiny and political action committees of candidates would share the details of the funds publicly for any accountability on sources of funds. However, in Obama’s case the strategy was to be different in all aspects. He raised the highest amount of funds for any political campaign in the history of American campaigns and it was all based on a mass collection approach that targeted the individual rather than institutions. Obama’s use of online social networks opened up that political process to anyone who cared to join, made it easy to participate, and by doing so, created a fundraising machine that could practically print money. And the essential ingredient to this cash cow was micro-payments. The Obama campaign made it incredibly easy to contribute to the cause by allowing supporters to donate small amounts, $ 20 or even less, and also gave people the option of making these payments recurring. You could contribute $ 200 a month, which is much easier to do — and budget for — than writing a $ 2,300 lump sum payment, the maximum allowable individual contribution. By doing so, over time, the campaign turned small donors into maxed out donors. Thus, with minimum cost, as there was just a website to maintain, he was able to collect almost $ 250 million.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan elections are still a game of the rich and the corrupt. The humongous cost of elections are not funded through a professional fund collection campaign but a collection of the government leaders having access to public money and the feudal lords who by their power over the rural masses and backed up by the illegal machinery of the contesting parties force election results in their favour. For any ordinary person with the right credentials of merit and a will to serve the public, the cost of matching the billions poured out by the parties becomes a huge entry barrier. Thus, the perpetuation of the same system, same faces and same tactics has created a vicious circle of a downward spiral of a crumbling political structure. One may term the Obama example as not relevant to Pakistan; however, in many ways it is. We must remember that we are in a global era and the major factor that has made this world global is telecommunication and social networking. About 65 percent of Pakistanis now have a mobile and almost four million Pakistanis are now on Facebook. The profile of these young, aware and angry Pakistanis is just the type of donor base a newcomer would need to tap. For these subscribers donating Rs 100 or so would be absolutely feasible.
However, the major prerequisite of attracting these voters and donors is the credibility of the person or party asking for money. The typical politician image of a callous and corrupt individual is the biggest reason for making these people reluctant to part with any money at all. Thus, the opportunity for new faces in politics is there. The prerequisite is to establish trustworthiness in the eyes of the public. Once that is established, the generosity of this nation is indisputable.
The writer is a consultant and can be reached at [email protected]