Election In The Digital Age: How Digital Advertisements Are Changing The Face Of The Indian Elections

With the election campaign in full swing, the fever pitch is at an all-time high. While the familiar election speeches, rallies, posters, and door-to-door campaigns are still happening, 2019 is seeing a new kind of campaign - the election being fought on the digital space.

While digital media had been around for some time and so did digital advertisements but it is only of late the political parties have realised how important it is and how influential it can be.

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We had a glimpse of a digital political campaign in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP, which was one of the first political parties to integrate Social Media into their propaganda machinery used it to their advantage, while the other parties were left clueless.

Many analysts had credited BJP's big win in part to its high impact media campaign, a large part of which was played out on digital media platforms.

Five years down the line, almost all mainstream political parties have realized the importance of social media and joined the bandwagon and have set up their own IT cells.

With another election season around, the volume of digital advertisements is at an all-time high.

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AD S Rawat, secretary general of the ASSOCHAM had indicated that in 2014, 30% of poll expenditure by political parties was towards advertising & publicity, and is roughly estimated at Rs 15,000 crore.

It is estimated that in 2019, cutting across party lines around 40 percent of the poll expenditure will spend on digital platforms including social media.

This is just the beginning. India is witnessing an explosion of digital ads and digital first election campaigns.

"2014 was the beginning of what we can call as a digital election campaign in India. Both BJP and Congress tried it, but BJP was better in utilizing the platforms to target voters and the results were pretty evident," Ashish Shah, Founder, and CEO, Vertoz a New York-based programmatic advertising company said.

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According to him, political parties in India have evolved to use targeted ads on digital platforms just like any company would do.

"It is like direct marketing. The political parties can now reach directly to their voters and influence their voting habits through targeted ads. This makes their campaign more to the point and direct," he explained.

What is increasingly happening in India is micro targeting and programmatic advertising, where user data is used to target specific groups, like geography.

"Geo-targeting is area specific. It will be dealing with local issues, on which the voters can connect immediately," Shah said.

But a digital campaign has its own downsides too. Especially among the less-sophisticated population who take whatever they see on Facebook and WhatsApp for gospel truth. India was facing the problem of 'fake news' on a scale that has never been seen in history. Most of these distorted facts and news often spread like wildfire on social media and only a handful of them will ever bother to cross-check what they receive.

It had reached a point where WhatsApp had to put out ads on TV and newspapers warning people against 'fake news'.

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"We do have a fake news problem in India. That is mostly because our audience is still evolving. A majority of the people are new to the internet, social media and the world of smartphones. So this is part of the learning curve. But eventually, people will evolve to recognise fake ones from the real ones," Shah said.

Another major issue with digital ads is the issue of credibility - especially after the episode involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

The massive breach of data from 50 million Facebook users, which was then used for targeted ads during the US Presidential elections is still fresh in the minds of people.

A recent study had shown that nearly 40 percent of users had negative views about Facebook following the scandal.

Shah, however, said it won't impact the campaign in India.

"Political parties are aware of what happened with Cambridge Analytica. So political parties will be more careful in choosing the agencies to carry out the campaign on their behalf. Also, Cambridge Analytica was a one-off incident. They exploited a glitch in the Facebook API to gather user data of people using their app and also those in their friends' list. Since then the glitch has been fixed and laws regarding data protection have become more stringent."

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With social media being one of the biggest camping tools, this time around the model code of conduct has included guidelines of digital ads too.

According to the new MCC, social networks are expected to only accept political advertisements certified by the EC beforehand. Additionally, they're expected to share any and all details of who's funding political ads with the EC. Political parties are also expected to adhere to the "silence period" online as well. This is when parties are prohibited from advertising or campaigning for 48 hours before the polls.

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