Old time favourite

And as new media has grown and the sheer numbers of social media activists has exploded, the cries of ‘we’re all online now’ and ‘telly is so-o-o-o last millennium’ have drowned out any naïve hopes that TV would ever again become the dominant mass medium it once was.

So consider the 9.4 million of us who tuned in to the first TV leaders’ debate just over two weeks ago: was it just a complete coincidence? Was it simply the novelty factor? And when the Lib Dems started jumping for probable premature joy about their ten point upswing following the debates, is it possible to say that that response was down to the telly? I think it is. So have we all been guilty of ‘groupthink’?

We all thought this was going to be a new media election. Just like they had in the US. Email and blogging and social media and Twitter was going to change everything this time. Barack Obama had shown us the way.

But it hasn’t happened like that. TV still has incredible reach: 9.4m Brits is almost 40% of prime-time viewing. Also doing what it was set up to do — reach a truly mass audience — has been the national press. Newspapers may be in terminal decline but audited figures show that more than 8 million people ‘read’ the Sun every day.

So while 9.4m of us remember the TV debates and over 8m of us each day — and that’s just Sun readers — scan the various political parties’ progress (or disasters in Gordon Brown’s case) what happened to the brave new world of online? The world in which we work for our clients on a daily basis, actually! The answer is not much.

Think about it this way: the TV debates each lasted 1.5 hours; a newspaper (even the Sun) commands its readers’ attentions for about 30-40 minutes each day (I’m not going to say anything about Sun ‘readers’) and probably twice that much at the weekend. How many seconds to read an email? How many nano-seconds a tweet? It’s not difficult to conclude where real so-called ’stickiness’ exists and why?

OK, OK…like us, you still want to justify new media. Here’s the get out: it’s for young people. Bless. It’s true that almost 50% of live TV debates’ viewers (certainly the first one) were watched by oldies over the age of 55. These are roughly the same sort of reader demographics of the Mail and the Telegraph. But, hello…these are also the people who actually tend to vote.

Think of an email, or a tweet, something on your wall, that affected or infected you to reconsider / change your mind / go shout about it. Unlikely, isn’t it. And why should you have such hazy memories? Because the likelihood that you saw anything worthwhile wasn’t ‘out there’.

So let the numbers do the talking: of the candidates who have used Twitter in over 100 highly marginal seats (according to ‘Get Elected’) only 45% of them had a Twitter account. Their average following attracted just over 600 followers. As at yesterday, 4th May, President Obama had some 3.9m followers, but he’s special. Like Mourinho. An ocean of difference.

One final figure: the average constituency has some 74,000 voters. It seems like all 0.8% of them will be making their Twitter-informed views well heard. Be afraid, huh…?

It’s telly that has delivered the message. Tomorrow will deliver the numbers. And if the Lib Dems don’t do well then we can revert to our previous thinking: telly really is just about image.

See you again in six months’ time for the replay?