Aquino not only lost momentum, he lost the agenda – now set to lose the election

Aquino not only lost momentum, he lost the agenda – now set to lose the election

We have seen the poll numbers change and the changes are not good for noynoy aquino. his ratings are falling and villar whose ratings in previous polls were either holding or slightly rising has finally caught up with aquino and now in a statistical tie.

we attribute aquino’s fall on bad advertising decisions and fatal advertising blunders. (click here to read articles on the topic: why aquino will lose the election). we think what happened is that aquino has lost his momentum due to the fatal blunder of not doing anything in advertising after they aired the first ad . he used to be at the top fo the polls, clearly dominant with the 2nd placer, villar very far down the ladder but not anymore. not doing anything new and allowing a gap in the ads allowed villar to build his base and grab the agenda.

villar has grabbed the momentum away from aquino. in marketing and in elections, that is a very dangerous thing to happen, most specially at this time when we are just less than 3 months away. in these things, momentum sometimes matter more than actual numbers.

the aquino campaign has responded with more pointed and focused efforts on the message of corruption. this is a good effort but we do not think this is enough. we also think this latest effort sorely lacks the strategic thinking that was sorely missed in the fatal blunders they have made in advertising.

meanwhile, villar as of today released new ads, at least we heard this on the radio where villar talks about something personal – his brother died because they had money to buy medicines. this is a brilliant ad.

it has drama, it is personal and it talks very eloquently of a national issue – poverty, high cost of medicines and bad health care system. what the villar campaign is doing is that they are defining the agenda for this campaign. aquino used to do this at the start but from doing nothing, it has conceded this initiative and allowed villar to take the lead in defining the agenda and the messages.

once again, aquino’s advertising team was caught flat footed. and once again, they were too slow to react and did not have enough strategic thinking skills in doing something about it.

we think the aquino campaign is in trouble.