Election campaigning has gone social. Political parties and candidates are now being marketed as brands and the target market is the voter. Gone are the days when campaigning meant door-to-door campaigning or congregation of huge numbers of people at rallies, it’s all about precision marketing and engagement to catch the attention of the voter, in the language that they speak and the medium that they consume, all to influence the voter’s decision on election day.
Enter the world of targeting using AI and ML tools. It’s so sophisticated that messages are tailor-made and delivered based on location and demographics. AI is also used to study voting patterns and target rival candidates and also non-voters, who could be influenced by precision campaign marketing.
It’s now all gone digital, and behind this sophisticated campaign strategy are an array of digital marketing experts who are targeting voters based on class, caste, religion, and other social groups.
What has changed?
The emergence of social media tools along with the proliferation of internet users has changed the nature of election campaign marketing. In 2014, according to the World Bank data, internet penetration was only 13.5 percent. However, the latest figures issued by a marketing agency say that close to 50 percent of India’s population are internet users.
In actual numbers, India has over 759 million active internet users which provides a platform for political parties and influencers to move online and woo the electorate.
Second, the new young voter is politically indifferent, especially in urban areas and the easiest way to tap them is by infiltrating their social media feeds, as they are inclined to watch and consume media online. They are not the ones who will attend campaign rallies, as they feel it’s an unproductive exercise.
Campaign managers use tools such as social media channels and also influencers who have a sizeable following from the state level to the village level. Many of them are also disguised as social messages to drive home the message.
Digital tools are also used as new voters disillusioned with the political environment need a lot of cajoling to make them come to the polling booth, and digital assets play a key role in influencing them. We have observed that such micro-targeting has led to an increase in voter turnout in the last few elections.
How is all this done?
Step 1
When working with political parties, we first build AI-based geo-tagged real-time survey with real-time dashboards for a political party or candidate to gauge their interests and also to understand their state of mind as elections are held every five years and voting preferences can change. This is done constituency-wise and state-wise. Thereafter the political party or candidate can see the responses of the voters in real-time and once the report is generated the digital strategies and other direct engagement strategies are built around the feedback received from voters. This is further segregated into groupings based on local interests and community interests as they may diverge at times.
Step 2
The next step is to build an app for a party or candidate by integrating booth-level data to target individual voters This is an additional tool besides using National Apps built by leading political parties as booth-level data is not updated on a real-time basis. The unique App built for the party or the candidate will fill the gaps in the National App and the accuracy level of the booth-level data would substantially go up.
Engagement: Direct
Engagement with the voters is at two levels, first would be direct engagement, which includes the party or candidate’s representatives regularly meeting voters six months in advance of the elections and engaging them by showcasing the development activity undertaken by the party and the candidate on a daily basis and gauge the pulse.
Engagement: Indirect
Second is indirect engagement, where social media handles are extensively used to showcase the good work done by the party and candidates.
When it comes to generating multiple posts, AI tools come in handy for generating posts in multiple languages and also posting simultaneously on multiple platforms at high frequency. This is done at a granular interval to target each and every segment of the voter base depending on social groups and economic criteria.
There are generative AI tools for generating content in multiple languages simultaneously and it also generates visual content and auto search-based and content-based posts.
AI-generated more than one million posts can be posted with 100% human posting for effective communication of the messages from the party and the individual candidate and can do real-time monitoring of engagement on these posts and impact analysis can be submitted real-time.
Sridhar Seshadri is Co-Founder, Spotflock—AI Driven platform. Views expressed are personal.