Jitters, Jerks, and Jumping Polls: Welcome to the Silly Season

By Vincent R. Pozon

It’s that time again—polls swing like tarpaulin posters in a typhoon, and rankings rise and fall with the barometric pressure of a meme. Yes, the surveys are accurate—scientifically sound, margin-of-error this, statistically significant that—but you tend to forget: they’re time machines. Time machines that only look backwards. They show you how people feel about you three Tuesdays ago, a day you might not have said the wrong thing yet, not asked the wrong question of your audience on a stage in your hometown yet, not tried to cast a net for fish while a crowd filmed your every flinch and failure and fumble yet.

In short, survey groundwork was before the day you shot yourself in the foot.

In just a month, you’ve swung from fifth to fifteenth place. The next month, you're back in safe territory—but other surveys say otherwise. Depending on which pollster you ask, you're either surging or already embalmed.

Your heart? It’s aged a decade.

Your soul? In committee.

The Difficulty of Deciding What to Do

All you have is the feel on the ground—and even that deceives. One enthusiastic crowd does not a country make. But at least it’s live. Immediate. The only part of the campaign that isn’t a delayed echo. Unlike surveys, which show you a past already slipping away, the feel on the ground happens in real time: raw, messy, unfiltered. You can smell it, hear it, sometimes get heckled by it.

You could do focus group discussions, but their usefulness does not go beyond checking ad materials for negatives, for what might bother or distract the reader/viewer/listener.

So: do you change the campaign midstream, based on data from a day that’s already vanished? Change the colors, the catchphrase, the cast?

You are nervous. On tenterhooks

Meanwhile, your advisors, donors, and assorted whisperers—spouses and nephews and nieces now doubling as communications consultants—each offer a theory, a TikTok, a dance. A full chorus of disagreement. You have 30 seconds of airtime, and too many copywriters.

Do you cram in everyone’s wisdom? Or stick to one story?

You pound the table, gently but with resolve. “No,” you say. “We will trust only the tried and tested survey firms. We will not bother with the rest.” But then you still take a peek at the survey results of fly-by-night firms.

And again, louder now: “We will have faith in the campaign, the brand story we saw as hewing closely to the product, the one we picked, polished, prayed over, and already spent behind.

Or you can panic—twirl, twerk, toss finger hearts on TikTok, sacrifice your dignity, and hope the algorithm is feeling generous.

Vincent R. Pozon

After a year of college, Koyang entered advertising, and there he stayed for half a century, in various agencies, multinational and local. He is known for aberrant strategic successes (e.g., Clusivol’s ‘Bawal Magkasakit’, Promil’s ‘The Gifted Child’, RiteMED’s ‘May RiteMED ba nito?', VP Binay's 'Ganito Kami sa Makati', JV Ejercito's 'The Good One'). He is chairman of Estima, an ad agency dedicated to helping local industrialists, causes and candidates. He is co-founder and counselor for advertising, public relations, and crisis management of Caucus, Inc., a multi-discipline consultancy firm. He can be reached through vpozon@me.com.