Leading ad agencies, on their part, have started setting up micro teams to make blueprints for these parties, identifying influencers and YouTubers for communicating on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and developing separate strategies to target voters, even in small constituencies.
“This time, the process of communicating with voters will be much more complex and fragmented than in the previous years. While we are making separate strategies for mainstream media which include upfront messaging like achievements of the parties in the past five years, what is crucial is communicating with voters in hyper local cohorts,” an executive at a leading ad agency said, asking not to be named.
“We are doing this by identifying micro influencers and creating simplistic jingles, taglines or slogans in regional languages to resonate with this set of voters. These influencers need not have lakhs of followers.”
“We are talking to influencers even with a few thousand followers but who engage effectively with audiences, to talk to voters in hyper local clusters,” the executive said.
Total ad spends by leading political parties in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections are expected to double from 2019. According to the Centre for Media Studies, political parties spent nearly Rs 25,000 crore on publicity in 2019.”We had the opportunity to work with BJP in 2014 and 2019. If they want us to partner them in 2024, of course, we will be more than happy,” said Piyush Pandey, chairman, global creative and executive chairman, India, at Ogilvy. Pandey is set to move into an advisory role at Ogilvy India from January.People familiar with the developments said BJP has entrusted the initial spadework of finalising a shortlist of ad agencies to Rajya Sabha MP Arun Singh and BJP national secretary Rituraj Sinha. The party has started calling for pitches for various media. A senior BJP leader, who did not wish to be identified, told ET, “This is a long-drawn-out process. We have decided to split the accounts for different media and communication channels.”
This would be in addition to government-empanelled own ad agencies such as Directorate of Advertising & Visual Publicity (DAVP).
Kunal Lalani, managing director of Crayons Advertising, which specialises in political advertising, said: “Ad spending in 2024 elections would be significantly higher compared to the Lok Sabha elections of 2019. There are a lot of communication channels now, and there have been very significant changes in the overall advertising landscape since 2019.”
While political parties are looking towards ad agencies to work on a main theme and a slogan, they are likely to bank upon social media influencers. Congress gave a peek into this strategy when it preferred YouTubers like Shyam Meera Singh and Samdhish and digital platforms like Mooknayak for interviews of Rahul Gandhi during the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
According to people aware of the matter, AAP has been holding interactions with YouTubers and social media influencers to push its government’s education and health models. The fledgling party’s modus operandi has largely been using its vast network of volunteers to drive its messaging on social media.
Previously, ad agencies including Ogilvy, Crayons, McCann, Madison Word and Soho Square have been closely involved with political parties for poll campaigns. Congress has been using Designbox to manage its social media accounts.
