Thread by @canokar

I’ve just seen how much advertising the AKP bought for the last election and I am in shock. In March, they were No. 2 on TV, No. 1 in newspapers, No. 2 in out-of-home.

Yet they lost almost every major city. The will of the people is apparently difficult to buy.

There is a deeper issue here about how good the AKP really is. Academics, journalists, commentators, whether foreign or local, ascribe some genius quality to everything the AKP does. Yet they just spent millions on a campaign that should, on paper, be impossible to lose.

When I see intelligent observers, often friends who I respect, say the AKP would never force a re-run unless they knew they would win, I have to point at this advertising data and question whether there is all that much competence in their decision-making right now.

A different hypothesis for why the AKP does what it does might be that they are backed into a corner, both politically and economically, and they are trying to scrabble around trying to find any solution possible.

There might be no master plan.

I think we need to be clear about quite how much advertising the AKP used. They had only slightly less ad time (30 second slots) than P&G on TV and more than Unilever, Coca Cola and Pepsi. The amount of money or favours that would take is mind-boggling.

The AKP had as much 30-sec TV advertising as all of the following P&G brands combined: Gillette, Ariel, Braun, Oral-B, Alo, Heads & Shoulders, Orkid, Prima, Pantene, Fairy (it’s a long list)…

The AKP had MORE 30-sec TV advertising than all of the following Unilever brands combined: OMO, Yumoş, Domestos, Cif, Elidor, Dove, Toni&Guy, Signal, Rexona, Lipton, Knorr, Calve, Algida, Carte d'Or, Cornetto, Magnum, Vaseline… again it’s a long list.

The CHP had around half the TV spend and doesn’t appear in the top ten for any other category except radio. The opposition simply didn’t have the funds to advertise at anywhere near the AKP’s rate yet they won almost all the big cities in Turkey.

In newspapers, the AKP were by far and away the biggest ad buyer. In OOH, Binali Yıldırım by himself was No. 2, which explains all those posters around Istanbul for the last few weeks. But the real kicker comes next when we turn to what people actually watched.

As the AKP spent all that money on ad buys that would make any marketer envious, the top TV shows for all of March were almost entirely news programmes on one of the only opposition networks left: Fox TV.

People voted with their remotes.

Sidenote 1 for Americans: it will take me too long to explain why but in Turkey CNN Turk is aligned with the government and Fox is the only opposition network with the exception of smaller independent outfits.

The AKP was spending millions of dollars on advertising (money that was coming in large part from taxpayers), yet voters were watching the only news programmes with opposition voices. Even more than soap operas, reality TV or sports.

What about AHaber, which makes a lot of noise for the AKP? They had almost zero viewership. They’re screaming but it’s mostly into a void. Turns out propaganda works better when people aren’t hungry.

The high level of AKP advertising reminds us that their fabled “will of the people” is something you have to keep on manufacturing. It is not a constant and as we saw at this election, it isn’t something that you can simply purchase as you would brand loyalty for detergent.

The AKP can concentrate all the media to parrot its own message (at great expense) but as long as it has to leave one or two channels aside, people will flock to wherever information is non-AKP fed.

Of course, the AKP could choose to crack down on literally all opposition but then it would have to completely re-orient its entire rationale. Which is difficult to do when the country is utterly reliant on continued Western capital. But I digress…

The next time anyone says the AKP have the next election in the bag, take a breath and remember they’re very fallible. Also remember that they’ve given the opposition two perfect narratives for the next round: both are free, viral and easy to understand.

Narrative that doesn’t even need to be advertised 1: “The AKP spends millions to re-run elections that they don’t win even when you can’t buy onions, potatoes, basically feed your families. They can find money for billboards when you can’t find money for food.”

Narrative that doesn’t even need to be advertised 2: “One envelope. Four ballots. Same committee counting all the ballots. They cancelled only one of the ballots which happens to be the one the AKP lost.”

That simple logical mess is losing the AKP hearts and minds across Turkey.

Sidenote 2 for inquisitive people: all of that ad data took a quick google search to find. It’s publicly available so go have a look for yourselves.

Here ends the thread... Key message? This isn't over by a long shot.