How Publicis helped PTI win Pakistan elections

The only case study on the media strategy behind the landslide win.

In a press release dated the 17th August 2018, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) offered a two weeks deadline to every political party, demanding the submission of documents revealing the expenditure and source of campaign financing. Conversations with Election Media Cell (EMC) leaders at Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) revealed that the media budgets (excluding rally expenditures) were $25 million, $15 million, and $4.7 million respectively. The remaining political parties declined meeting requests.

With media budgets representing a fifth of the ruling party and a third of the contender, the PTI EMC sought a strategy-first approach for its creative and media decisions, rather than a tactic-first approach, which was employed in the 2013 elections. By Q1 2018, the task of producing a creative communications strategy was awarded to a WPP agency [name withheld on request], while the task of execution was awarded in Q2 2018 to Brainchild, an affiliate of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), which handled digital media planning and buying for the PTI in the 2013 elections.

Speaking exclusively to Branding In Asia at the PM Secretariat in Islamabad, Faisal Javed, a core member of PTI since 1996, justified the decision to hire Brainchild on the basis of requiring insights driven media, dedicated resources, and a focus on results. As a leader of PTI’s EMC, he took the final decision on content and creativity. According to Farhan Khan, the COO of SMG in Pakistan, the media remit was awarded on the 5th of July 2018, just 20 days from the election day itself.

“Their audience was everyone, [aged] 18 and above,” said Khan. “Because with an ID card you are [an eligible] voter. Male and female, urban and rural. Since the 2013 elections, 18 million people moved from non-voting age to voting age.”

Challenges

Campaign Duration

The rules laid out by the ECP barred all political parties from running any TV, print, and radio campaigns from the 23rd of July, 2018 onwards. “We took the liberty of [the ECP] not having a clear policy on digital,” said Khan, adding that the ECP rules only barred above the line mediums from being used after the 23rd, without specifying the limitations around using digital mediums after the cutoff date.

“The message that had been building up towards the election day was that ‘get out and vote’ as well as ‘you have the power to change your destiny’ – we didn’t command our audience to vote for PTI, we simply phrased it as get out and vote,” said Imad Azhar, head of the EMC. “The point was to compel the voter to leave her or his house.”

The agnostic messaging after the cutoff date included thematic visuals of PTI, without a direct call to action directing viewers towards any specific party. Azhar admits they wanted to stay in the ECP’s good books while compelling eligible voters to step up.

Will They, Won’t They

During the media review that ultimately selected Brainchild, PTI’s media team shared concerns that the elections might be delayed. In response, Raihan Merchant, chairman of MHL Global, the parent company of Brainchild, offered a cost-benefit analysis approach. He recommended that PTI agree to book media slot spaces across TV channels, adding that if the campaign was delayed, they could always cancel bookings.

“It’s a win-win situation for both of us,” said Khan, recalling his conversation with PTI’s media team. “You don’t need to pay for the next three weeks and we make sure that once the other political parties will start, we will have to face drop rate issues.”

Regulator Rules

The Pakistan Broadcasters Association (PBA) and the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) enforced rules across all member TV networks which made it mandatory that political party be charged the rack rate, that is without the discounts enjoyed by commercial clients of media agencies. Adding to this, in light of instances of defaulted payments in earlier elections, the ECP made it mandatory that all political parties would pay the TV channels upfront, a practice that both media agencies and clients actively evade.

Trump Effect

“During the first part of the election campaign, Google, Facebook, and Twitter – all three of them were saying no to political advertising,” said Faisal Sheikh, director and head of digital of MHL Global. “When we went into execution there wasn’t that much of a restriction on Facebook. Google would not allow YouTube ads.”

Given the literacy rate, video and audiovisual campaigns were essential, with Sheikh in direct contact with Google throughout, eventually obtaining leeway on YouTube’s homepage mastheads, priced at $12,000 per day according to the rack rate.

Copycat Visuals

In an effort to sway voters away from PTI, a smattering of small political parties emerged with a voting symbol similar to the bat image used by PTI. Upstart parties used the symbol of a batsman and a bat & ball combination to sway the illiterate vote bank of PTI.

“We wrote to the ECP that this could cause confusion,” said Javed. “In the end, we had to live with it. So we had to advertise the bat more, pushing it on [TV] bumpers and there’s this song we used called ‘Remember the bat sign’ by Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi.”

The ECP regretted inertia early on, citing that being overwhelmed with clearance requests with limited resources led to the oversight. In light of this, Brainchild needed to incorporate the voting symbol of PTI in visual campaign creatives for rallies.

Measurement Limitations

“I can gauge [the impact of] digital, but not radio,” said Khan. “I can tell you the media KPI’s for TV, but we had no research on our three-week TV campaign to precisely ascertain top of mind impact. The dynamics of a political campaign is totally different from that of a brand campaign. An ad of Ariel will play on TV with the product shot, attributes in the voiceover, with a call to action. In PTI’s campaign, the call to action was ‘now Imran Khan, the stamp on the bat’, which was the line to remind people of the voting symbol.”

Khan said that unlike a commercial brand campaign, media agencies have fewer parameters to gauge for a political campaign, because creative and media planning on brands looks into the frequency of product shots, color schemes, and ensuring the celebrity is wearing brand colors.

Creative Strategy

According to Azhar and Javed, unforeseen circumstances from outside forces meant that tactical and responsive creatives had to be created on the fly. As such, reactive creatives needed to be produced in-house and repackaged by dedicated teams of Brainchild.

“[WPP creative agency, name withheld] is an international agency,” said Azhar. “They can pull research from the world over, understand how to change behaviors, and they presented an international mindset to the table.”

Azhar claims the WPP agency had the point of view to position the party in a manner that appeals to the most enlightened, modern, and educated local & expatriate audiences with a stake in the elections. In light of this, Azhar’s team felt that 90% of the content needed to be created from scratch on an ad hoc basis, based on footage generated during rallies and as responses to competitor activities. Javed said that [WPP creative agency, name withheld] work was impressive and could have worked with an approach for a brand-based campaign. He said that for a political campaign, which needs a responsive creative strategy, a grounded strategy wasn’t practical.

Strategy

According to Javed, the PTI media budget was PKR 492.9 million (US$4.7 million as of 1st July 2018), split between TV (89.6%), digital (8.3%), and radio (2.1%).

“We didn’t propose newspaper for their campaign,” said Khan. “Historically it’s like 20, 25 percent of the [media] investment goes on newspapers. We know the readership is going down and we have a literacy problem anyway, so we thought there is no point spending heavy amounts on newspapers.”

Fast Leadership

After winning the account, Brainchild formed teams across Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad that were dedicated to PTI. Khan sent two members of his production team to the Islamabad office in order to package rally footage in time for digital rollouts, extending the shelf life of the speeches made. The footage was also repackaged as 30-second TVC’s, across 45 TV channels, along with refreshed media plans.

“Our team, myself, and Raihan, during these three weekends [of the election campaign], we were in the office,” said Khan. “Every day it was like 12 am, 1 is we were going home, including me and Raihan as well.”

Sentiment Tracking

Khan hired a tracking company for sentiment analysis on a 24-hour basis, tasked to analyze media coverage and media appearances of PTI representatives.

This team would track the amount of time a PTI representative invited on a talk show earned to speak and communicate her or his point, while also gauging how well the representative navigated topical concerns on air.

“When Reham Khan’s book came out, Geo TV was the first to air the interview with Muneer Farooqi,” said Khan. “So the analysis was applied accordingly.”

The tracking company informed Khan that 87% to 95% of the sentiments pertaining to Imran Khan were positive.

Breaking Clutter

Speaking exclusively to Branding In Asia at the PM Secretariat in Islamabad, Iftikhar Durrani, the head of PTI’s Central Media Department (CMD), said that PTI had a unique selling proposition based on results.

According to Durrani, the communications strategy focused on new issues and promises kept, some of which the competing parties failed to deliver when they were in power.

“Having been in power in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa [KPK] region, we focused on successes in the province and ensured rallies communicated the promised to deliver the same across the country,” said Durrani. “In contrast, competing parties focused on resolving problems that they had failed to deliver on when in power.”

Early Birds

By rolling out its media campaign first, PTI gained an advantage in high frequency.

“We pushed PTI to start as the first election campaign, which they were reluctant to do because the uncertainty was that there might be a chance that the elections would be delayed,” said Khan, adding that the first-mover advantage played a vital role in PTI winning the elections due to an early share of voice.

By booking TV spaces in advance, Khan claims the drop rate for PTI’s ads was below 10%, adding that this meant that other parties with bigger budgets had higher drop rates, gaining higher priority and visibility.

“For P&G and Mondelēz, if it’s a regular campaign, if I have ten spots dropped I can replan it next month,” said Khan. “But here it does or die, so we had no room for risk.”

Precision targeting

With the digital budget increased ten-fold compared to 2013, PTI demanded precision targeting and the elimination of incorrect impressions. The digital team under Sheikh created 22 geo segments to ensure that audiences with competing for belief systems were not seeing ads targeted at constituencies. Using Designated Market Areas (DMAS) on Facebook, Brainchild was able to limit ad delivery within a one-mile radius, with limited spillover.

“Per our analysis for TV, we learned that prime time is from 6 pm to 12 am for all channels, be it entertainment or news,” said Khan. “In one hour [of programming], there are four breaks. So we booked the first and last spot.”

This means that Brainchild booked ad slots that would play PTI commercials before a show would go on air and have another PTI ad play when the show would go on a break. Khan says that market research shows that when people switch channels to avoid ads, they tend to come back to their intended programming in time to see the ad before the program is back and they tend to switch away from the channel 15 to 20 seconds after an ad starts.

Damage Control

“We not only looked at media placements but also some of the editorials,” said Saud Umar, associate director of Brainchild Communications in Islamabad. “Through our relationship, through the relationships with the channels with some of the anchors and media houses, we played our role in influencing that.”

This was especially applied in discouraging coverage of “Reham Khan”, authored by the former wife of Imran Khan, the chairman of PTI. Umar asserts that the relationships Brainchild and PTI’s EMC had with the media channels led to the damage being contained, with only two channels out of 55 covering the book and its contents.

“So it’s not just the media placement that we had because I think media placement anyone could do, but it’s also the choices out of those placements and the editorial check we had to do,” said Umar. “There were a lot of times where simultaneous rallies would take place, so a PML-N leader would be giving an address near a PTI leader. So we made sure the coverage was directed at PTI.”

Blitzkrieg Tactics

“Tabdeeli aa nahi rahi, tabdeeli aagayi hai” is the PTI tagline and translates to “Change is coming, change is here.” On TV, the tagline was placed on sponsored time checks, with customized messages played.

“Radio we started very late and the idea was that its a medium for hammering the message,” said Khan. “So we ran PTI’s songs a week before the elections. We also used the PTI tagline for time checks [on TV] for instance ‘it’s time to change, tabdeeli aa nahi rahi, tabdeeli aagayi hai’ so it goes very well.”

Sheikh admits that Twitter was also employed as a war zone that diverted resources of competing political parties onto the platform into firefighting mode. Per his observation it worked, citing the lack of presence of competing parties on Google on the same scale.

“We had taken up video positions on local news streaming sites,” said Sheikh. “So we were running pre-rolls like crazy, all the TVCs being pulled off the air was going online. We got the PTI Twitter account whitelisted for political advertising.”

Impact

Sheikh claims that PTI’s online campaign reached half of Pakistan’s Facebook users. Since the 2013 election, 18 million people went from non-voting age to voting age, which Sheikh says made up the population that sided with PTI.

“A lot of the younger crowd has now migrated to Instagram, so they are getting more expensive to reach on Facebook,” said Sheikh. “86% engagement was on mobile sources, 14% on tablets, and desktops. Costs starting jumping after the 21st [of July]. The frequency was about ten on social media, on YouTube we did three mastheads for PTI.”

The week of the elections, Sheikh utilized YouTube mastheads, utilized on the 21st July, 24th July, and on the election day. This delivered 63 million, 64 million, and 71.6 million impressions, with over 5% click-through rates resulting in over 1 million views in 24 hours.

The elections were held on the 25th of July 2018, with 31.82% of the popular vote going to PTI, resulting in a 14.9 percentage point swing.

“The people of the KPK province have never re-elected a party that didn’t deliver,” said Durrani. “This time they came back, it was a wipeout.”

With a $4.7 million media budget, the party invested $0.278 per vote. In contrast, PML-N spent $1.93 per vote while the PPP spent $2.166 per vote. Imran Khan, the chairman of the PTI, became the 22nd prime minister of Pakistan and assumed office on the 18th of August 2018.

“We are very proud that the political party that we campaign for had won,” said Khan. “The appreciation from PTI was huge as well, they treated us as partners, instead of as vendors.”

CREDITS

Client: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf
Faisal Javed, Creative & Content
Iftikhar Durrani, Head of PTI’s Central Media Department (CMD)
Yousaf Baig Mirza, Media Consultant
Imad Azhar, Head of PTI’s Election Media Cell (EMC)

Media Agency: Brainchild Communications Pakistan, an affiliate of SMG (Pakistan)
Raihan Merchant, Chairman
Farhan Khan, Chief Operating Officer
Faisal Sheikh, Director, and Head of Digital
Saud Umar Khan, Associate Director