L K Advani a la Obhama !!!!!

With the general election clouds gathering in the horizon, all political parties and their leaders are gearing up for the Mega Event. Historically the role of marketing in an election campaign inIndia has been quite minimal, especially when seen in the context of the US Presidential elections. But the advantages of the leveraging social media and technology to connect directly with people has not gone unnoticed and our political parties , their leaders are trying to ride on the technology wave especially to connect with the 100 million first-time voters who would start voting from this general election.

Though the attempt to connect to people directly is a very good idea on paper, but how does it get implemented is some thing which needs to be seen. All across the internet on most of the websites that one would visit regularly one can see the campaign of L K Adva

ni BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate . I was tempted to write more about it after I read Gaurav's post almost a month back, but resisted it. But the fact is that wherever you go on the net , blogs, websites you have the banner ads of  L K Advani's election campaign floating, estimated at 200 websites. So thought as the blog is supposed to share observations on what is happening the Indian market I thought I should share some of my thoughts with readers.

Starting with what is good about the whole campaign, the idea of having a well designed webpage, a blog and book are something which fits into what is needed to start a campaign like this. But there are a series of negatives which I have observed in the campaign,

Firstly,  I am pretty disappointed at the level of creativity, which can be seen from a 'We Can Do it' to a  'Its Possible' tag line in the banner ads , through this sort of campaign you would want to connect to the younger consumer who are net savvy and this is the best you could think of. How much time does it take to see the similarity ????

At the second level I also see the approach towards the campaign seems to be more of an extension of their mass marketing intrusive approach. With banners ads all over the net they are trying to do what a typical mass media guy will do buy all good spots on the TV and Radio and keep sending the same message over and over again, but that is where social media is different. Though the idea of creating a buzz is right but you cannot create buzz in a Blogsphere by forcing your presence across internet by putting banner ads all over, I see more negative fall out this than anything else... 

But hopefully from a marketer’s angle the campaign would improve with time and realization of how to operate in the internet domain would evolve, and will have more observations to write.