As a newsperson whose livelihood eventually depends on the paper's ability to generate advertisement revenue, it's obviously not too prudent to run down advertisement campaigns. But who's the BJP convincing? Their track record in pushing the investigation into what they have traditionally portrayed as the mother-of-all-scams, the Bofors case, for instance, isn't exactly brilliant.

Besides, close to a decade after the principal accused Rajiv Gandhi's death, and 13 years after the scam first surfaced, has anyone bothered to figure out if the common man isinterested anymore? In any case, why bring up the Congress scams when your own government's reputation, especially in trying to shield Jayalalitha, isn't exactly lily-white either?

And how many people even know what the Congress' sugar scam was? If anything, given the Congress campaign on how the BJP government encouraged purchases of sugar from Pakistan's army-controlled co-operatives even while that country was plotting the Kargil invasion, the popular perception is that the `sugar scam' is a BJP one!

Or take the Congress' counter-campaign of `13 months of bungling', of how `economic illiterates' virtually brought the economy to its knees. How convincing is this, given the well-established fact that the economy was well into a slowdown before the BJP came to power and that all economic indices for several months now have been screaming that a recovery has taken place? The sensex is a poor indicator of an economy's health, but at 4,800 it's difficult to convince anyone the economy's in badshape.

That's where Coke's best known marketer, Sergio Zyman, comes in. Sergio, to those unfamiliar with Coke's global business, was primarily responsible for an incredible 50 percent jump in Coke's sales in just five years in the late 80s, and for a jump in the company's market value from $40 billion to an incredible 160. For our present purpose, however, what's important is what Sergio has to say about advertising and marketing in his latest book, The End of Marketing as We Know It, out just a few months ago.

Sergio was the first, and perhaps the only, marketer who decided to do away with the common practice of paying advertisement agencies a commission on the advertisement billings they generated. McCann-Erickson, for instance, would get $20 m in commission if they ran a $100 m campaign for Coke.

Instead, he said, Coke would pay each agency an amount based on the work they put in, and would even give them a percentage of profit over this.

Otherwise, the agencies' main interest is in runninglarger and larger campaigns. And yes, Sergio insisted on measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns in boosting sales, not in the long run but over a few weeks.

So the man who advertising agencies got to hate (and nicknamed Aya-Cola to rhyme with Ayatollah!) actually pulled out immensely popular campaigns if they didn't result in a sharp increase in sales. Ad companies, Sergio wisecracks, want to go to Cannes and get their friends and colleagues to judge their ads, but he could tell you stories all day of campaigns that won Super Bowl awards and lost sales for the year! Advertisement and marketing are about sales, not about popular acclaim.

So which one of the various firms or gurus associated with the Congress or the BJP's multicrore publicity campaigns is actually talking of even trying to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements? Or linking these to what are popular themes in the public mind? Not being an insider to any of these firms, I'm not privy to the exact details of how the campaignsare being planned, but every evidence points to them being based on what the advertising agency, or committee, thinks is top of the public mind. Will the campaigns sway voters and get them to change their traditional allegiances? If no one really knows, then why even bother to waste crores of rupees in meaningless advertisement campaigns?

Interestingly, Sergio's tactics of withdrawing an advertisement or slogan if it doesn't translate into sales, throws new light on the BJP's obvious ambiguity and embarrassment over issues such as the Ram mandir, and Articles 356 and 370. Are these on or off your agenda, thunder the opponents, and the BJP flounders. The most embarrassing, of course, was party spokesperson Venkaiah Naidu saying on Star TV that they were off the BJP's agenda even if the party got a majority on its own. (He later denied saying this, and Star produced the recording of the debate.) Perhaps the reason for the ambivalence is that the BJP think-tank is no longer convinced that the Ram mandir is asure-shot winner.

The BJP has increased its vote-share post-mandir, but the increase hasn't been significant enough to prevent the party from losing votes due to various caste-based and other alliances by the opposition parties. In pure marketing terms, if the strategy has stopped giving good results, it makes sense to replace it with another. Ironically, though, after Mandal vs Kamandal, the party hasn't been able to come up with an equally catchy concept. Hence the all-over-the-place advertising campaign.