Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar
BPI worked intensively to elect Kamla Persad-Bissessar as Trinidad and Tobago’s first female Prime Minister, crafting an aggressive online strategy that focused on social networking and persuasion advertising to take advantage of dissatisfaction with the political status quo. Outgoing Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who had been in power for 13 of the previous 17 years, had called an election on short notice when threatened by a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
In a five-week timeframe, BPI’s targeted Facebook advertising strategy grew Persad-Bissessar’s Facebook supporters from 7,000 to 43,000, and grew an anti-Manning page to 35,000 supporters from scratch. These bases of support on Facebook spread Persad-Bissessar’s campaign messages to up to 150,000 potential voters out of a total population of 1.3 million – stunning reach in a country with limited internet penetration.
The result: Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s People’s Partnership coalition won 29 out of 41 seats in Parliament.
