The Attention Economy: How Political Campaigns Are Outpacing Brands in Digital Innovation
T he attention economy has thrown up something quite striking in Indian politics. If 2014 earned the label of India’s “Facebook election” and 2019 its “WhatsApp election,” then 2024 seems destined to be remembered as the year of the “Meme Election.” In a contest where attention spans have collapsed to mere seconds and voters scroll past hundreds of posts in a single sitting, political parties have emerged as unlikely trailblazers in digital marketing. Their tactics, it turns out, often outstrip the cleverness one finds in commercial brands. The numbers tell their own tale. During the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official YouTube channel put out over 1,200 full-length videos between April and May. These drew an average of just 44,000 views each. Yet 258 YouTube Shorts from the same stretch averaged 850,000 views, while 37 Instagram Reels hit a staggering 27 million views apiece. This gap was hardly accidental. Political strategists have grasped what consumer b...