Text voting gets political

Rating: Politically sensitive

Paul Skeldon, London

Keen, perhaps, to tap in to the millions of votes that reality TV gets on a weekly basis, the UK’s governing Labour Party this week set a political milestone by building an SMS interaction function in to a party political broadcast made on UK TV this week.

Falling somewhat short of the million plus interactions that some reality TV shows get from their SMS voters, the call to action received 4633 replies: paltry compared to Pop Idol, but impressive for politics these days.

Devised by mobile marketing agency Incentivated, which is retained by Labour to encourage voters to join the party and donate via text, during the broadcast Blair urged the public to text ‘TALK’ followed by their comments to 62233.
Messages were at standard rate and only Incentivated and the network operators saw any of the cash.

Jonathan Bass, MD of Incentivated, says: “This is a defining moment for the mobile communications industry. We were surprised by the response; we have never seen anything like it, except on reality TV. This was also a huge response in a matter of a few hours, especially since statistically significant surveys can be conducted on the basis of just over 2000 randomly selected people, and the results of elections then predicted.”

Comments ranged from the inevitable “Get out of Iraq” to “Don’t let a whole generation of British workers become unemployed because of cheap foreign labour” to “Thank you for making the UK a more fair and equal society” (perhaps from Tony Blair’s mum). No one appears to have texted in offering money for a peerage.

The move is significant because the public sector is seen by Incentivated and other mobile agencies as being a rich seam for telemedia-based interactivity services as local and national government seek new — and cost effective — ways of interacting with the public and vice versa.

The success of voting services on TV has prompted much attention from the public sector as to how to perhaps use voting services over electronic channels to try and appeal to younger voters. It also offers rich segmentation of data so that it can easily be used to target ethnic groups in their own languages at a fraction of the cost of printing and distributing literature.

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