The media and the message

Political marketing models maintain that politicians can achieve electoral success by following strategies based on marketing consumer products and generally assume a passive role for the media. This paper assesses media coverage of the 2010 general election campaign, highlighting the active role played by the media. The various media played a major role in framing, transmitting, championing and challenging the messages of political actors: models of political marketing which fail to address this effectively are fundamentally flawed. Further, while the press may have been influential in the final days of the campaign, both their influence and interpretative role appear to have been weakened by the televised leaders’ debates and the rapid public response to the debates via relatively instant opinion polling. Although online social media failed to have their expected impact, there are signs that a more sophisticated approach to their use by political marketers will play an important role in future.