There must surely be at least a few readers here who will remember the board boys of the past… no, not the guys who wear black suits and ties and discuss the importance of hawala through the panama route. I am talking of the bare-foot advertising soldiers that many cinemas were fond of hiring.
My father had a platoon of these board boys who had to walk all over the city with a board having all the information of the new film. There were many types of these boards… there were the single ones strapped on the back, or boards with hinges that they could carry over their head that made them look like walking tents, or two boards connected by broad straps and hung over the shoulders with one in front and the other at the back. The board boys were a popular breed and small kids walked and danced around them as they walked in a line. That was what the local flavour of advertising was when I was a little kid. I was there at my father’s cinema on Thursdays, a day before a new film was to be shown… and our official painter, Israr Ali, was invariably busy painting boards and massive banners. The atmosphere was electric with everyone doing something or the other… after all, Friday morning was vital and the entire town had to know which film was to be shown all through the week. The postering of every strategic wall in the town was done at night and the board boys had to report very early in the morning for their duty.
There were no political parties involved then. They were not keen to pick up promotion hints from other businesses… but I guess, things have changed now. Political parties too hire ad and pr agencies and do everything both online as well as offline to get eyeballs and all the attention that they can muster.
This is what I felt when I read about BJPWalkers Rocking Kerala. This story is about the strategy that Sri.Kummananam Rajasekharan the President of BJP, Kerala State and a candidate for the assembly elections due on May 16, has adopted in Thiruvanananthapuram (Vattiyoorkavu assembly constituency). The BJPWalker created with the portraits of Sri.Kummanam and Primde Minister Modi ji were carried as a light weighted back pack by volunteers… something like the board boys that I have mentioned. In addition to this, these volunteers are given three dimensional masks of Modi ji and Kummanam Ji to wear… I know this is like pulling credibility to its limits but then political parties can be expected to do anything, you see.
The advantage of doing anything new in this age of social media and online brouhaha is that within no time there will be selfies and updates all over. This is what gets to be the ice-breaker in any conversation for many evenings and stays in the memory of the voters far longer than throwing badges and leaflets at them dispassionately.
The comments are expectedly what any one can predict. ‘Voters loving it , BJP message is passing to voters in effective way, voters reading the content published on bjpwalkers and sharing this unique concept with their friends and families, we are taking feedback from different section of voters for future upgrades and low cost interactive communication system with high Return of Investment for future BJP campaigns’, says Buddha Chandrasekhar creator of BJPWalker. This response triggered Buddha Chandrasekhar, the Creator of BJPWalker to create software to analyse the impact on the voter mind-set and creating measurable touch points. By the way, the reports mention that it isn’t the BJPWalker alone that the campaigners are using, they are also using Hydraulic moving display of Modi ji and Kummanam ji, large balloons and models of electronic voting machines in training voters.
Elections are thus getting more and more innovative… but I wonder at the usefulness of all this expense to woo a few votes. Do voters really want to regaled by all this drama on the streets? Won’t they prefer political parties working to remove corruption from our society… or made the country a safer and cleaner place? I am sure there will be cross-section of voters who would have loved all this money being diverted to create avenues to remove joblessness. But then there aren’t many people who will argue with the Minister of Chemicals and Fertilizers Shri Anantha kumar who has inaugurated the BJPWalker. The readers of this piece are free to contact Buddha Chandrsekhar for any queries, sending brickbats or bouquets: 9740169197 or Chandrasekhar.buddha@gmail.com
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Boardboys walking on the streets
Boardboys… inauguration. In Kerala.
Boardboys… an ad concept lifted from the past
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Arvind Passey
02 May 2016
