The struggle to win votes in the Philippines remains largely an in-person affair, where politicians routinely get mobbed by supporters. Social distancing, after all, is a brand-new concept to the typical Filipino. With the coronavirus on the loose, however, things have to be drastically different. For starters, the precautionary measures we are now very familiar with—social distancing, the wearing of face coverings, and frequent hand hygiene—will inevitably put a damper on traditional forms of in-person campaigning.
Political rallies and other mass gatherings will most likely be officially discouraged. In those few cases where they are held—assuming that people aren’t too scared to go to begin with—they will have to conform to social distancing guidelines. Political parades and caravans will probably also be officially discouraged.
About the only thing that will survive the transition to a new normal of political campaigning will be posters and banners. And with recent amendments to the law increasing the spending limit of candidates, it is inevitable that posters and banners—already a perennial problem to police—will be even more widely used and abused. But these traditional paper posters might just be getting some competition in 2022 as a bill, currently pending in Congress seeks the legitimization of the use of billboards—like the kind you now see lining Edsa—for political campaigning.
Coming from more than 15 years of haranguing politicians and political parties for using posters in excess of the mandated maximum dimensions, the thought of seeing propaganda plastered across these massive billboards made me worry at first. But the more I studied the arguments in favor of the idea, the more I came to realize that there was a good point being made. Apparently, as the proposal’s author put it, “the amount of contracting or leasing a billboard space is substantially lower compared to advertisement in radio or television or newspaper.” If that were so—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—then billboards do have the potential to be more easily accessible to a political candidate with limited funds.
Of course, if billboards are legitimized for election propaganda purposes, it is highly probable that it won’t remain cheap for very long. To begin with, billboards are an inherently scarce resource; the number of available billboards is far lower than the number of candidates who might want to use them. The competition caused by this scarcity will drive up the cost of using the billboards, making it likely that they will quickly be priced out of the reach of candidates with small budgets, defeating the laudable objectives of the proposal.
Apart from printed campaign materials, however, the inescapable fact is that all other traditional avenues of campaigning are shrinking. And with broadcast advertising still costing as much as it does, we can expect that more political parties and candidates will be resorting to the use of social media and teleconferencing.
Social media and teleconferencing
Social media has been around for quite some time now, and it has proven to be a powerful tool for political campaigns. But social media’s greatest strength has, up to this point, been its ability to effectively mobilize partisans. Both in 2016 and in 2019, rallies were organized and coordinated using social-media platforms. And recently, apps that focus on sharing ultra-short videos have gotten tremendous success as a means of capturing the attention of the public.
As effective as these platforms are, however, they address only one aspect of campaigning: the need to build name and face recall. Communicating anything of substance is a challenge, to say the least, when you’re on a platform designed precisely to take advantage of short attention spans. This is where teleconferencing comes into its own.
Prior to the pandemic, teleconferencing wasn’t really something that ordinary people would be aware of. The pandemic has changed that. With television stations and employers everywhere resorting to online apps that offer seamless teleconferencing to get around quarantine restrictions to productivity, words like Teams and Zoom are quickly becoming part of the popular lexicon. It is almost a certainty that this popularity will receive an even greater boost once the campaigns start in earnest.
The ability to address large groups of people remotely—one teleconferencing service claims its meetings can include up to thousand participants—and still retain direct interaction with the audience is a game changer. And it’s cheap too. There is absolutely no question about it: the combined the mobilizing power of social media and the ability to have meaningful conversations via teleconferencing will define the new normal of election campaigns.