Dadan Wijaksana, Jakarta – The results to date of the count in the legislative elections appear to more or less reflect the amount of work put in by the political parties during the campaign, and how much they forked out on advertising.
The absence of a sufficiently long campaign to allow so many unfamiliar parties and their candidates to properly introduce themselves to the public posed a major challenge for the advertising agencies hired by those parties that could afford them.
Data collected by the Institute for Studies on the Free Flow of Information (ISAI) showed that in the first two weeks of the campaign, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) was the most active advertiser on radio and TV.
The PDI-P topped the list of political advertisers on the country's 11 television stations with 1,268 spots, outnumbering the National Mandate Party (PAN) with 302 spots and the Concern for the Nation Functional Party (PKPB) with 252 spots, said ISAI researcher Agus Sudibyo.
The statistics show that the PDI-P slogan of "choose the white muzzle" (coblos moncong putih) was arguably the most popular ad, using the party's well-known symbol of a red bull with a white muzzle. Triawan Moenaf, chairman of Euro RSCG Partnership Adwork who produced the PDI-P ads, said that the frequency of the ads certainly helped, but it would not have reached the target if the messages had not been crafted "to suit the audience's appetites." On TV, Agus said that TVRI, Metro TV and SCTV were the three stations with the most party ads during that period, with 704, 476 and 434 spots respectively. These were followed by Indosiar (340 spots), TV7 (340), ANteve (332), RCTI (329), TPI (306), Lativi (263), Global TV (253) and TransTV (249).
Yet while the campaign period may have produced additional revenue for the TV stations, the difference between this and what they would have earned during normal periods was not that huge. "As everything is tightly regulated, the opportunities for additional revenue are pretty much limited," explained Triawan, also a member of Indonesia's Advertising Association.
The association's calculations show that even if a party ran as many ads as the regulations allowed in the broadcast and print media, the costs would have amounted to only some Rp 30 billion.
"And with only less than half of the parties booking ads, the combined revenues of the 11 TV stations, dozens of radio stations and newspapers would not even reach Rp 1 trillion," he said.
Whatever the case, the count currently underway will let the political parties know whether their media efforts and expenditure paid off, one way or the other.