Finland is getting ready for the parliamentary elections this coming March. I have to admit that I haven’t been following very closely politicians’ promises and debates, but there is one particular event that has cought my attention.

Jaro Koikkalainen might not ring any bells to you, however, Koikkalainen came up with an very ingenious way of campaigning for his seat in the parliament. All the major Finnish political parties go with the good ol’ newspaper add, poster, billboard combination, and most have even thrown in a blog (as is fashionable nowadays). A rather regular marketing campaign, one might say. But not for Koikkalainen.

The Central Party candidate Koikkalainen is campaigning on a tight budget with only 2,000€ to spare. It’s not really like he could go shopping for a marketing agency with this budget. Instead he collects questions from interested citizens and then once a week makes a vlog where he personally replies to the citizens’ questions and posts it on YouTube where it is available to the whole nation, and the rest of the Internet population.

Mr. Koikkalainen is not a major player in Finnish politics and he might not even have much chances for getting a seat in the Finnish eduskunta, but it is not hard to imagine many big fish politicians following suit and begin campaigning in a similar fashion. I call it campaigning on Google’s googol€ budget. Clever.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Culture, Finland, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.