{"id":1146,"date":"2012-06-21T02:02:58","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T09:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/?p=1146"},"modified":"2013-06-13T12:11:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T19:11:20","slug":"first-look-at-campaign-smothered-ulaanbaatar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/2012\/first-look-at-campaign-smothered-ulaanbaatar\/","title":{"rendered":"First Look at Campaign-Smothered Ulaanbaatar"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you arrive at Chinggis Khan airport, the first campaign poster is visible right outside the airport premises. On the long drive into town, posters from the two largest parties, DP and MPP, dominate all the billboards, though most of them show the candidates in the local majoritarian district (District 21 for the West of Ulaanbaatar), rather than the party per se. This changes as you get into the centre of town where some of the smaller parties also have set up campaign posters.<\/p>\n

Just to get a sense of the intensity of advertising using billboards and posters in the town centre, we counted all the posters we saw along a 2km stretch of Peace Avenue (the main East-West axis in downtown Ulaanbaatar) from the State Department Store to the State University of Education. It is probably safe to assume that this would be the most expensive stretch of outdoor advertising available in the country.<\/p>\n

Banners are posted on existing billboard\/poster structures, i.e. billboards that are set up for commercial advertising, but have been taken over virtually entirely (at least in the city centre) by political ads. They are a mix of street-level, roadside poster frames that house posters approximately 1 * 0.4m, and much larger billboards that are on billboard structures above pedestrians’ heads (perhaps 2 * 3m). There are also some rare other shapes, including some very large billboards right by Sukhbaatar Square.<\/p>\n

On the 2km stretch we counted the following number of variably-sized posters:<\/p>\n