Expert: Peter Gabany - 9/21/2006

Question
Hello

It is possible that my question wouldn't be related to your specialty, but certainly your recommendation would be very useful and helpful for me.

As you already know there are several elections in all countries, such as president election and parliament election. And within 3 months, in my country-IRAN- city council election will be held. Of course it is not as important as the president election, but so many people candidate themselves for this election and as it will be held in all of the cities and even villages, it is a very good market for publicity companies.

These companies for candidate propaganda, apply some methods such as poster and brochures printing, but certainly the company will be more successful who applies new methods and designs.

I have a small publicity office in which I design posters, do photography and film taking,.. and I am very keen to get familiar with the propaganda methods in your country which are certainly more modern and attractive and maybe I would have the opportunity to apply those methods in my office.

I would like to ask you to kindly advise me about the methods I can apply in this propaganda for this election .Of course my inquiry is not related to expensive T.V. advertisement, Because I can not afford them .In fact I'm looking for economic but effective methods.

I will be very glad to have the pleasure of hearing your opinions, whatever it would be, I am sure that would be very helpful and useful for me. Besides if you know any related web-site, please kindly introduce it to me.
I appreciate you in advance for your kind consideration.

Regards
Shahram Ashkani  

Answer
Shahram,

I have not ignored your question but thought about it for a day and boy this is a tough one. You already have it tough being in kaos each day let alone work to have one elected.

The lowest cost avenue to explore is word of mouth and self-publishing. You need friends and a strategy. The strategy that I would use would be something that arrests people and makes them think.

We worked a campaign to bring awareness around landmines. Printed disks were place on the floors of shops and in downtown, high traffic areas. On one side - the side facing up - the disk read - PICK ME UP. Whenyou turned it over, there was printed in large print - you're dead with a paragraph written explaining if this was a landmine, you would be dead or seriously injured and went on to drive people to a website and asked for donations to contribute towards the battle to eradicate landmines from war torn countries.

I can't help but think that if you had one central issue and you could develop a platform around that issue – BUT - round out your platform with all issues that a politician would be confronted with whould get people to sit up and take notice.

If you do this well, the media will seek you out for FREE interviews as well as newspapers and the like. You would have to be edgy or on the edge. You would HAVE to be VERY well prepared on a well rounded view of all issues surrounding your office.

I hope and trust that you will gain some value with this. I would be most interested if you would let me know what you are attempting to do, how you are doing it and what results you achieve.

Thank you for your question and good luck!

Please stay in contact,

Pete