At GE2015 the traditional media will be far less important than ever before
Getting messages across is going to be a lot more difficult
The above is from a Populus/Open Road poll which asked the simple question of which parts of the media people got information from each day.
The poll did not cover the type of information so it is to be expected that percentages consuming what we think of as “news” are a lot lower.
Clearly we’ve seen from newspaper circulation figures how the printed media is falling sharply. What I find interesting is that this drop has not been compensated by increasing usage of newspaper websites which remained the same. Maybe part of this is down to paywalls.
We hear so much about Twitter yet usage amongst the general public just increased by 2% from 13% to 15% over the two years. Facebook is moving upwards but how much of the information that people get impacts on voting? We don’t know.
-
So much effort goes into developing and refining messages for general elections campaigns yet the channels for getting these across are getting narrower
All this leads me to observe that the ground campaign is going to be more important than ever before. Direct personal contact with voters in the marginals will be central and this comes at a time when membership of the older parties is on the decline.
Foot soldiers to knock on doors and to push things through letter boxes are at a premium yet there are far fewer of them.