Voting in the Province of BC -a poster mix.

People of Canada living in the province of British Columbia enjoyed their freedom to choose their representative through voting today. It was a unique occasion as people of the province were not only voting for their favored candidate but also for a referendum to change their voting system to a single transferable voting system or STV-BC as the campaigners are calling it in multi media platform from street campaign to web . The joy of liberty and bright faces of the future could be scene taking their time off their busy life to vote and ensure a good conscious life.

From a 21st century democratic citizen it was a very interesting marketing mix. Most of the campaign around from billboards to lawn signs were all done in a organised professional approach from major parties and their PR agencies. In between BC-STV campaign team of PR agencies had to promote their message which also had all the touch of a organised creative team. End result in an Urban scenario like Vancouver is confusion of message for an average citizen even though using most forms of mediums from electronic or print.

As one can notice everything is in bright primary colors, very bold typefaces or fonts used it almost gives the appearance of a certain unified unwritten design guidelines for political posters. If you notice the amount of content is minimal, my guess the target audience is a moving one like driving or preoccupied. The similarity between a product placement with a marketing mix and a political campaign is unavoidable.

In a haste to capture the attention span of a modern democratic being the media designers forgot to separate issues like candidate campaign with voting mechanism in their promotions. Many citizens where surprised that BC-STV wasn't a political party on their candidate list while few were surprised at the listing of Sex Party in the ballot. 

Moral of the story is people are busy and getting their attention for even the most important issue for them is hard. Mixing messages of social importance and make the campaign look like Realtors Ads or Soap Box Ads lead to misinformation. As one young BC resident expressed his disappointment that he would not have voted against STV if he knew STV was not a electronic voting system like campaign posters made it look like.

Hopefully for the citizens of BC hope STV would be accepted by the majority of the people and does not get crushed just cause of one misinformed vote.