Offline spending still leads in GE2025 campaign

Singapore’s 2025 General Election saw candidates spend $13 million to win votes. Nearly half of that went to old-school, offline formats—posters, banners, stage rallies. Digital ads? Just 16% of the total. That number should raise eyebrows. In a country where 94% of the population is online daily, this is more than a media strategy. It’s a model bias.

Because when nearly every product category is shifting to digital-first engagement—why are political campaigns still anchoring their conversion funnel in vinyl and loudhailers? The answer isn’t lack of access. It’s lack of trust in the digital funnel. And that’s a product teardown worth doing.

If you were optimizing for reach, cost, and conversion, the funnel would look obvious. You’d target awareness via short-form video, retarget based on engagement, and close with call-to-action nudges—maybe attendance at a rally or digital volunteer signup.

That’s how most high-velocity product marketing works. Voter behavior, especially in digitally saturated markets, should lend itself to the same funnel logic. Instead, parties treated the campaign like a billboard race—measured by eye-level dominance, not behavioral targeting. That might work in 1995. But in 2025? It suggests the model never even made it to A/B testing.

Let’s be clear. The decision to pour nearly half of campaign spending into offline materials wasn’t purely nostalgic. It was intentional. Offline formats—especially in politics—don’t just drive visibility. They convey conviction. A rally isn’t just a reach tactic. It’s a full-stack trust builder. Posters and banners don’t just decorate lampposts. They create presence, density, and recall in key constituencies.

This isn’t performance marketing—it’s signaling. And in politics, especially where institutional trust is still a proxy for credibility, signaling matters more than CPA. So while digital ads offer precision, they don’t yet offer perception. And that’s what parties are still buying.

Only 16% of total spend went to digital. That’s a product clue. It tells us that parties still don’t see digital engagement as a full-funnel path. They see it as either top-of-funnel noise or echo chamber maintenance. And that’s a missed opportunity.

In B2B SaaS or D2C e-commerce, 16% of spend on digital would signal an underfunded, under-tested channel. In political campaigns? It suggests fear of misfires, ad fraud, or simply a lack of performance correlation between CPMs and votes.

If you don’t believe digital converts—and can’t model the path from impression to vote—you don’t invest. That’s not a digital gap. That’s a data confidence problem.

The People’s Action Party spent $9.4 million—more than 70% of total campaign expenditure. With 97 seats contested, that’s about $97,000 per seat. Compare that to the Workers’ Party’s $1.6 million across 26 seats—about $61,500 per seat. Other opposition parties spent even less per candidate.

But here’s the kicker: all parties stayed below the legal spending cap of $5 per voter. So this wasn’t a race to the cap. It was a strategic selection of where to invest and how much ground game to buy. And PAP’s approach was classic enterprise logic: own the funnel, saturate presence, out-distribute the challengers. It’s the opposite of a nimble growth hack. But it mirrors what platforms like Alibaba and Meta have done: spend to block margin for others.

Here’s where it gets interesting for platform founders and GTM leads. No party treated their campaign like a freemium growth motion. There was no viral loop built into digital content. No referral mechanism via volunteers or creator amplification. No high-leverage meme ops. No bottom-up onboarding for undecided voters.

If this were SaaS, we’d say there was no product-led growth. Just sales-heavy, offline-first conversion. That’s not an indictment. It’s a gap.

Because political campaigns, like products, are increasingly about affinity, distribution, and repeat engagement. And digital gives you infinite surface area to test, iterate, and convert. But only if you treat it like a growth loop—not a billboard.

Singapore’s electorate is digitally native. TikTok is ascendant. Platform behavior shapes everything from dining to dating. But in campaign logic, the flywheel’s broken. Parties are distributing spend based on institutional playbooks—not audience behavior. This isn’t a problem of tech adoption. It’s a problem of belief: that digital presence doesn’t equal political persuasion.

But that belief is aging fast. And it’s leaving scalable, efficient, funnel-native tactics on the table. Here’s the punchline: it’s not that digital doesn’t work. It’s that no one is building for it. The voter journey is already online. The campaign strategy just hasn’t caught up.