Momentum

Make no mistake about it, this presidential campaign will be a long and grueling one.

The main reason for this is that the least popular candidate happens to have the most ample funds. The more popular ones appear less endowed.

Officially, it is not yet time to campaign. That is a minor technicality. As long as a candidate does not explicitly ask the viewer to vote for him, the candidate is not liable under our election laws.

This is the reason why the airwaves are full of political ads. The ads reached a crescendo last week, obviously intending to influence the major fourth quarter surveys. The pollsters were feeding out their questionnaires last week.

Most notable for the volume of advertising are LP presidential bet Mar Roxas and independent candidate Grace Poe. The former obviously wants to pull his ratings up while the latter intends to remain at the top of the heap.

On election years, the main commercial media outlets always report substantially higher earnings. While the volume of political ads pleases the owners of media outlets, they irritate the viewers.

The timing and density of political ads are well calculated by experts. At the present time, they are primarily intended to boost name-recall and improve survey ratings. Improved ratings, in turn, reflect in a more generous flow of contributions important to build up the other aspects of a national campaign.

In a word, the “air war” conducted at this time is intended to set the momentum and prove the viability of a presidential campaign effort. Mar Roxas desperately needs momentum. Grace Poe must convince supporters she has a viable candidacy.

Experience teaches us that the “air war” alone cannot secure electoral victory.

In the 2010 contest, two candidates – Manny Villar and Mar Roxas – over-relied on political ads to deliver the final results. Both lost.

Both lost for exactly the same reason: the credibility of their message snapped at some point during the campaign. Voters were turned off. The earlier support indicated by the early tracking polls simply evaporated.

Both Villar and Roxas, through their ads, were trying to convince voters they understood the poor. They stretched the message.

Villar, one of the richest property developers in the country, claimed to have spent his childhood in a sea of garbage. That message backfired. His presidential bid, whatever its merits, was doomed.

Roxas, scion of propertied families and a certified member of the political aristocracy, had this funny ad showing him pedaling a tricycle. That was a ridiculous video. Whoever thought it up should have been shot. After it was aired, the Roxas bid went into a tailspin. Jojo Binay, who had hardly any ads, beat him in the trenches.

Villar and Roxas committed the same cardinal mistake. They thought the “air war” could win elections. Therefore, they invested unwarranted trust in commercial advertising outfits.

It is to the interest of these outfits to convince their clients that volume of advertising matters. Volume of advertising produces more placement commissions for the ad agencies, not more votes.

Roxas might have been encouraged to overspend on advertising in 2010 because of the prior success of his “Mr. Palengke” ads that enabled him to dominate the senatorial race. But that is the senatorial race, where name recall matters.

In the presidential contest, we necessarily assume all the major candidates enjoy 100 percent name-recall. Therefore, what is important is messaging and market positioning.

Jejomar Binay, early on, chose to position his candidacy to appeal to D and E voters. That is where he resonates in the surveys. That is where his message sells. The man, after all, truly originated from the ranks of the very poor. He speaks their language and he speaks it well.

Rather than expend his campaign resources on primetime television, Binay is out on the streets every single day meeting voters in the flesh. It is an exhausting method in this age of mass media but Binay is used to hard work.

There is a maxim that says all politics is local. Binay has worked that well, establishing close alliances with local leaders nationwide.

He has taken the maxim even further. For Binay, all politics is personal. No candidate works his phones more intensively than him. He has no downtime. As soon as he gets into his car, he starts calling up people.

All the time and effort he invested in personal networking enabled Binay to evolve a stable base of support that no amount of negative propaganda could shake. The viability of his candidacy is guaranteed by the fact that no one is about to rise to question his citizenship.

Rodrigo Duterte, if we go by the results of the Pulse Asia tracking poll leaked last week, is off to a good start.

The Davao mayor does not need to contrive a message and seek the help of professional “packagers” from the advertising industry. He was the peace and order icon long before he decided to join the presidential fray. Like Binay, his city attests to his executive abilities.

Unlike Binay, Duterte has not developed a nationwide network of political support. But the enthusiasm and passion of his volunteers more than make up for that. He has a message that resonates and a personality that inspires – virtues that Mar Roxas can never have.

If we are to see any “air war” emanating from the Duterte camp, that will be a function of the funding he raises for his campaign. So far, he does not seem to need any introduction to voters.