the fraudulant congress way- appinting tainted corrupt netas to nominate for reelection- appont as governors- misusing cbi- as congress bureau of investigation etc How to Spend Money, Win Friends And Alienate People You may have skipped his primetime TV interview but you can’t have missed his face on billboards everywhere. The Congress is pumping Rs 500 crore – triple what it spent in the last elections – on building Rahul Gandhi’s brand. But it seems to be to no avail – the ad campaign has received stinging criticism and Gandhi’s media interactions remain as bland as ever. Now the campaign’s approach has been scrapped and a new message is being formulated to showcase other Congress leaders as well – but will it be too little too late? Grist MediaBy Bhavdeep Kang | Grist Media – Tue 4 Mar, 2014 Recommend50Tweet Print An airbrushed Rahul Gandhi, receding hairline pixellated away, dimples peeping just enough to be engaging without being girly, gazes out from your TV screen, your newspaper, the digital billboard at your bus stop and the hoardings on your way to work. “Pappu” to the social media community, “RaGa” to subeditors with a predilection for catchy headlines and “Gandhiji” to sycophants, he is officially the face of the Congress campaign for Lok Sabha 2014. The building of Brand Rahul is well underway, and a two-pronged approach has emerged. On the one hand, private advertising agencies are handling the party’s ad blitz in coordination with the Congress communication and publicity team, chaired by Digvijay Singh. On the other hand there is also the Congress’ own media outreach that involves Gandhi’s media interactions and other Congress leaders’ TV appearances. The latter is being handled by Ajay Maken, head of the All-India Congress Committee media department, and these efforts are distinct from the UPA governments ‘Bharat Nirman’ campaign highlighting its achievements (handled by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting under the broad supervision of a Group of Ministers on media led by P Chidambaram). There is some overlap, though, since Gandhi – having nothing of his own to boast of – has to appropriate the UPAs achievements and this is naturally a priority for the party. Rahul Gandhi (R), Indias ruling Congress party Vice President and son of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, attends … Given the manner in which political parties receive and spend their funds, there is no question of getting an official figure for expenditure on advertising, but the figure is rumoured to be around Rs 500 crore. To put this in perspective, the Congress’ 2009 estimated election advertising budget was Rs 150 crore (less than a third of its budget this time around), and the BJPs current budget is said to be in the region of Rs 400 crore. Congress spin doctors are hard put to explain the method in the madness. The expensive TV and print ad campaign is intended to build up Gandhi as a Gen Next politician who leads the Congress because he deserves to, and not because he is a Nehru-Gandhi. The media outreach program is also extensive in comparison with his media interactions over the last 12 years – which have been zilch. Gandhi is now making an effort to reach out in two ways. One is by having Congress leaders get directly in touch with newspaper proprietors for Gandhi-friendly coverage, and the other is by setting up formal and informal interviews with him. The Rs 500 crore ad pie has been divided between the advertising majors Dentsu, J Walter Thompson and Genesis BM. While Dentsu is taking care of the creatives and the ad campaign, Genesis BM is looking after digital media – both of which are said to cost Rs 400 crore. JWT is handling “on ground” activities (billboards, posters, hoardings, etc.) budgeted at around Rs 100 crore. The challenge was – and is – to build up Gandhi while downplaying nepotism. To project him as a leader who does not want the party to be leader-centric. To appropriate the achievements of UPA I while disowning the mistakes of UPA II, both without mentioning Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or Congress president Sonia Gandhi. “There is no hunger for power; he is transparent enough to say power is poison,” Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha gushed when I spoke to him. Then realizing that this might be too sugary a mouthful, Jha added “What he means is, power for the sake of power is unhealthy.” Nor does Gandhi want the party to be person-centric, according to Jha. At his January 17 AICC speech, he sneered at the BJPs personality-driven campaign. He wants to give primacy to the young, the new, the ordinary. “Empowerment” and “inclusivity”, says Jha, are the leitmotif of the Congress campaign so far. Why then, one might ask, is Gandhi the centerpiece of the Congress campaign, thereby inadvertently reinforcing his image as a dynast (and a do-nothing one at that)? * * * Dentsu is the lead agency for the Congress campaign, after a successful pitch based on its recent acquisition of the creatives-led ad firm Taproot and digital developer Webchutney (the acquisition meant it could offer a strong creative team as well as experience with digital end to end solutions). It also hired adman Rohit Ohri from JWT, the man who headed the team handling the Congress campaign in 2009. When Ohri migrated from JWT to Dentsu, so did the Congress account. Advertising industry sources, however, say that Dentsu secured the lucrative contract thanks to a connection with a Congress minister very close to Gandhi. Rumor has it that the Congress is less than pleased with Dentsus efforts so far. Hardly surprising, when the very first ad in the 2014 campaign – “Main nahin, hum” – appears to have been lifted from the same Narendra Modi 2011 slogan for ‘Team Gujarat’. The inadvertent theft apart, the campaign has been criticised by the media for being defensive, open to all manner of misinterpretation, and Modi-actuated. Most of all, by making Gandhi the face of the campaign, it puts him in direct confrontation with Modi, a contest the party was keen to avoid. The agency settled on the formula of ‘personality dilution’ in their TV ads, an industry source explained. Random characters, usually young men and women from minority communities, feature as protagonists or the lead persona rather than Gandhi. They say their piece, then step up to Gandhi and stand shoulder to shoulder with him. The focus is thus on the aam aadmi, while simultaneously projecting Gandhi as a man of the people. Or so the rationale went. Gandhis inner coterie happily approved the storyboards.Two broad themes are discernible in the Congress campaign so far, says image guru and media analyst Dilip Cherian. First, the recognition that UPA II has not delivered as well as UPA I on “poverty issues”. Dentsu seems determined to compensate for this and “fill in the gaps”. Second, to present nameless Congress people (presumably representing the new volunteer) as the centerpiece of the campaign. Sushil Pundit of Hive Communications, who has handled a slew of advertising for the BJP, doesnt think the attempt to showcase Gandhi as standing with the aam aadmi rather than aiming for power, has worked. He finds the Congress campaign rooted in negation of the BJP: Naseehat nahin, nateeja, Rajneeti nahin, kajneeti, Kattar soch nahin, yuva josh, Arajakta nahin, prashasan sudhaar. “It is a not this, but that kind of campaign,” he says. “This is a bad idea because it pits Gandhi against Modi and lets face it, theyre chalk and cheese. They should have instead built him up as someone who stands in his own right rather than anchoring him in someone elses personality.” Interestingly, the aam aadmi aspect of the Congress has been downplayed in the campaign. Pundit and Cherian agree that the Congress clearly sees Modi, rather than the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), as its primary rival. After having successfully played up the common man factor in its 2004 and 2009 national election campaigns, it has now given up the rhetoric after the strong emergence of the AAP. “One can understand Gandhis poor performance in his TV interview,” says Pundit. “But in an advertisement, you are in complete control of everything, of what you say and how you say it. You can define yourself in any way you please. It is your turf. So how could they have messed it up so badly?” A media analyst who asked not to be named feels the campaign made a mistake in ignoring hard issues such as corruption and lack of governance, and in not showcasing the party’s superstructure of top leaders. He also thinks Gandhi’s emphasis and endless harping on party reforms and democratizing the Congress – “housekeeping issues” – should have been kept out of the public domain. He sees the latter as the incapability of Gandhi’ss young team to draw a distinction between private and public, given that it believes in “letting it all hang out”. “The focus,” adds the analyst, “should be on renewing the country rather than renewing the party.” The narrative of a leader looking to subvert power rather than reach for it has been lost, while that of the ‘shehzada’ (Modis term for Gandhi) claiming his throne dominates. Party sources say the feedback from the UPA governments Bharat Nirman advertisements has been far more positive than that of the Congress Gandhi-based ad blitz. Apparently, Dentsu has been sent back to the drawing board and phase one of its campaign will be given a quiet burial after the contracted period is over in mid-March. “The campaign is evolving,” admits Jha. “You will see phase two getting a different message across.” This new phase will focus on the Congress’ “phenomenal depth” – other leaders that include both the youth brigade and some of the credible veterans. This is expected to take the focus off Gandhi and allow the party to move into the foreground. When I spoke to Rohit Ohri on the phone, he said Dentsu was not permitted to speak about the Congress campaign. He agreed to field an email questionnaire but did not respond to it. * * * While senior Congress leaders have been visiting newspaper offices to gain equity for the party, Gandhis media interactions are planned independently of the Congress’ media arm. For instance, the media committee had no role to play in his first-ever TV interview, since he joined politics 12 years ago, with Arnab Goswami -- which turned out quite badly. Not that Team Gandhi thought so, to begin with. For a couple of days, party sources say, they actually believed the interview had gone very well and another was fixed with a different TV channel (which is said to have been promised the very first interview, but lost out when Priyanka Gandhi Vadra chose to go with Times Now). By day seven, it became clear that the courageous move to face off with Indias most aggressive TV anchor (Gandhi had apparently been advised to take critics head on) had been counterproductive. At the eleventh hour, after all the cameras had been set up at Jawahar Bhawan and the TV crew had arrived, the second interview was cancelled. The TV journalist who had been promised the interview went back to her office and wept. In a desperate attempt to put a positive spin on the interview, party spin doctors were told to emphasize that Gandhi’s first TV apperance was intended to showcase him as a leader who was too honest to make spurious claims of success or indulge in dangerous rhetoric. To say that he came across as sincere, transparent, understated and not given to making ersatz promises to garner votes. As someone who rose above the usual political rhetoric, spoke his mind and saw himself as a game-changer rather than a player. As someone who sees politics and government as instruments for change and chooses not to play by the established rules of the game. His nobility and selflessness stood in sharp contrast to that amibitious and power-hungry demagogue, Modi. As for the overwhelmingly negative response from the social media, it was dismissed as the frivolous verdicts of wannabe political pundits and hence not representative of the silent majority. The spin doctors denied that he had side-stepped questions on corruption and misgovernance while harping endlessly on the achievements of UPA, primarily the Right to Information (RTI) Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Gandhi’s media interactions have been informal since the Arnab Goswami interview, though a series of formal interviews have been promised in March. Cabinet minister Jairam Ramesh is playing a critical role in structuring Dentsu’s ads for Gandhi – he’s the first person Dentsu pitches its storyboards to. When Ramesh clears them, they move on to Mohan Gopal (the director of a Congress think tank called the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies), whom Gandhi trusts to ensure that Congress ideology is reflected in these ads. Gopal and and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are also Gandhi’s key advisors on his media outreach (they decided where and how he should give his interview to Goswami). The Congress media cell is unhappy because it has been marginalized, with Priyanka and Gopal calling the shots on whom Gandhi should meet and what he should say. The media cell has been reduced to secretarial functions such as inviting journalists to Gandhi’s formal and informal group meetings. Some journalists, for instance, have been promised interviews after March 10, but no firm date has been given so far. But the media cell has nothing to do with these, or with the ad campaign; it has heard about the proposed change of message, but has no role to play in it. There is a high level of frustration with the way Gandhi is managing the campaign and a lot of uninformed muttering about why ‘bhai-behen’ are lavishing money on a Japanese company which has no idea of what appeals to India. Those in the media cell are either wry about it (If your product is weak, spending money will not make it strong) or outright dismissive (Self goal pe self goal kar rahe hain). A source in the media cell pointed to spoofs of the campaign that are already viral online such as ‘Koi soch nahin, khali pili ka josh’ (taking off on ‘Kattar soch nahin, yuva josh’). Another senior Congress minister says theyve pretty much thrown in the towel. Priyanka is managing the campaign. Better if she was the [face of the] campaign. He is also scathing about the way the party is represented on TV, with Salman Khurshid, Manish Tewari and Kapil Sibal as the UPAs talking heads. Rahul says there is no place for arrogance, and then you put these guys up front,” he says. “I tell you, people change the channel. Disappointingly, even after the Arnab interview, there has been no discernible change in the script for Gandhi’s interactions with the media. The off-the-record interactions with various journalists, all the way from bureau chiefs to editors to beat correspondents, have been cautious to the point of being lacklustre. From a journalistic viewpoint, the question-and-answer sessions, always conducted in small groups, have been as disappointing as his TV interview, with no new insights whatsoever. His answers, on or off the record, are limited to empowering the worker and the block Congress presidents and repairing “the system”. Gandhis vision is long-term, Congressmen are fond of saying. It has to do with restructuring party processes, which could take a decade. He does not appear to have any short term ideas, for instance, to do with fighting and winning the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. However, there has been a visible change in the partys projection of Gandhi. Consciously avoiding Gandhi-centricism, Minister of State for Power Jyotiraditya Scindia was placed next to him on the dais during his meeting with young MPs on February 20 at the AICC office in Delhi. Scindia made a presentation on the contours of the proposed election manifesto to some 50 MPs and MLAs. After that, Gandhi shared the stage with Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee chief Sachin Pilot and Rashtriya Lok Dal MP Jayant Choudhary at a series of four meetings in Ghaziabad and Greater Noida on Feb 23. A Congress media committee member regrets the lack of PR convergence between the party’s own media cell and Dentsu’s advertising campaign. The media department, which interacts directly with journalists, feels its input on what is likely to play well with the press is not being taken into account. Nor is feedback sought on the impact of the campaign. Since their access to Gandhi is limited, they are often out of the loop. For example, Ajay Maken had no clue Gandhi was going to appear at the Press Club of India and take on Manmohan Singh on the ordinance to protect convicted MPs. They were unable to run interference for him and shield him from the subsequent flak. Nor could they make suggestions on how he should handle his maiden TV interview. According to the latest edition of Rasheed Kidwais book 24, Akbar Road, Gandhi invited Stephanie Cutter, aka The Box Cutter or The Ninja, deputy campaign manager for US President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, to Delhi last year. She was unimpressed with the Congress set-up and told him bluntly that Indian politicians did not understand social media. She gave Gandhi’s team food for thought regarding their role, pointing out that instead of seeking popularity with the media, she became a polarizing figure who said uncomfortable things that the leader could not or would not say. Cutter emphasized that in her role, there was no scope for error. When asked to speak on Brand Rahul (he eventually didnt), a young Congress MP quipped “Is there such a thing?” And therein lies the nub of the problem that everyone in the Congress is struggling with – we still don’t know who Rahul Gandhi is. Bhavdeep Kang has been a journalist for 27 years. She has worked with The Times of India, The Sunday Observer, The Indian Express, The Pioneer, The Telegraph, India Today and Outlook. Today, she writes on politics, agriculture and food policy. Follow her @bhavkang.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:24:37 +0000
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