Scroll Wars

For what felt like eons before PM Anthony Albanese fired the starting gun on the race to May 3, everyone was certain this would be an election like never before. How right everyone was! Yes, the heat is on big, heavy topics (such as cost of living, cost of living and cost of living), but ignoring for a moment the policy and politics of this very political event, it is indeed an election like never before purely by how it’s being campaigned.

This is no junket of debates and cuddling babies, executed cleanly according to ‘the plan’.

What we are seeing unfold is the political equivalent of real time traffic info where the party social accounts are Google Maps. In one suburb (call it TikTok, primary population 25-34 years old) it’s a pile up of content about grocery prices, climate change and housing affordability. In the adjacent suburb (known as Instagram, average resident aged 35-55ish) it’s a slightly less chaotic but equally noisy traffic jam of cost of living, migration and energy transition. Over the hill, we reach the slightly more established suburb of Facebook (you need proof of age of 50+) with a high frequency of more orderly content around Medicare, national security and superannuation.

There is some seriously clever marketing behind the campaigns here. The party puppeteers pulling the content marketing strings for the ALP, LNP and the Greens have nailed the brief when it comes to leveraging social media to their advantage. It’s not a policy contest. It’s a content marketing contest. The players know what to say, who to say it to and where to say it. They go high, they go low and they go fast.

Cases in point:

On Thursday April 3, Anthony Albanese fell off the stage at a conference in New South Wales. The LNP clapped back with this post and took the chance to turn the gaffe into a smear campaign.

On Saturday April 5, Peter Dutton accidentally hit a cameraman with a football at a photo-op in Darwin. In less than 24 hours, Labor had an ad using parts of the footage rolled out and didn’t miss the chance for a take down on some key messaging.

Within the day of Dutton backflipping on his WFH policy, the ALP had this snappy video out.

Practically as the debate was taking place on April 7, the LNP threw this post on their feed.

It’s not classy and it’s definitely not part of ‘the plan’, but it’s got cut-through that Uber Eats at Super Bowl Sunday would be envious of. You only need to look the comments to see how powerfully quick and deep these clever plays on unscripted moments get hold at a level littered with undecided voters. This is definitely a new election for the ages, and not least because policy points came 3^rd, 4^th or 5^th in the ads.

What’s equally fascinating, particularly for anyone who knows the rules of engagement when it comes to the best-practice frequency of social posts, is the blatant disregard for those alleged rules by the parties in this campaign. Any experienced marketing advisor will normally caution against multiple posts on the account grid per day (stories can be a lot more generous), but it’s working to the parties’ advantages to be really loud, quite relentless and definitely chaotic. This is likely down to the huge range of voter demographics represented in the social media sphere, and that those party marketing pros know they need to be everything to everyone in this short five-week timeframe.

As users go further down the social rabbit hole, the content that gets served to them gets more and more specific thanks to the mythical algorithms that sit behind the conga-line of content on a feed. What ends up happening is that content pushed out by the parties gets served to users in line with their perceived tastes and interests. If someone watched and reacted to say, the ALP post about Dutton hitting the cameraman with the football, chances are they will see more ALP-sided content aimed at discrediting the opposition via humour. Before we get to May 3, we will all have our own echo-chamber of electioneering.

A campaign to an election in 2025 is a new beast. In this case it’s a race (a five-week sprint with not an athlete in sight) being fought on who can get the cleverest, most reactive content loaded first and grab that valuable slice of the attention economy spread thinly amongst as-yet undecided voters. And it won’t be won just at the booths. It will be won in the comments threads and the first 5 seconds of a reels scroll.