UABDivulga - Barcelona recerca i innovació

Diego Montoya-Bermúdez (Universidad Javeriana de Cali, Colombia) and Carme Ferré-Pavia, professor at UAB and director of the research group Comress-Incom UAB (Communication and Social Responsibility), published in July 2022 in the journal Latin American Research Review (Cambridge Core) an article on the transmedia aspects of the 2018 political campaigns in Mexico and Colombia: Transmedia communicative strategies in political campaigns: The cases of Colombia and Mexico in the 2018 presidential elections.

For two decades, the field of communication has been discussing the transmedia phenomenon, as well as the generation of narrative strategies based on stories that use different media, channels and platforms.

The objective of the study is to analyze to what extent digital media have somehow modified Latin American electoral campaigns. The starting hypothesis is based on the assumption that transmedia has not yet become evident in political and electoral messages. The case studies focus on the presidential political campaigns of the candidates that contested the 2018 elections in Colombia and Mexico, under the perspective of transmedia communication. This allows the expansion of a story through several platforms.

In addition, the text makes a methodological proposal for communication in electoral scenarios typical of the culture of media convergence, in which old and new media are linked; in which official media clash with alternative media and in which the traditional media producer coexists with the consumer. The so-called prosumer now has the possibility of producing and disseminating his own content.

The methodology proposed in the text, called Transmedia Intermediate Systems, allows to analyze how content productions converge both in the industry and in the users. The study focuses on the case studies of the main candidates and on the analysis of the contents of their websites and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube). The results show how the political discourse used by the candidates migrated to digital platforms but maintained the typology of traditional media.

It is concluded that political communication agencies are still unaware of the opportunities offered by the transmedia phenomenon to encourage the active participation of potential voters in the production of content for the campaign.