An independent survey firm Sunday said the synchronized elections on May 10, 2010 will be a media-driven campaign with television, radio, and print advertisements emerging as the most preferred mediums of national candidates to put their political agenda across.

Ed Malay, director of The Issues and Advocacy Center (The Center), said the voters’ decision-making process can be enhanced and influenced by the outpouring of information from national candidates through different media platforms like newspapers (both broadsheets and tabloids), television, and radio.

Malay believed Sen. Manuel “Manny” Villar’s sustained TV/radio and print ads allowed him to keep abreast of frontrunner Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, who previously enjoyed a wide margin over Villar.

Malay said the results of the latest nationwide survey last February sustained its earlier assumption that the synchronized polls in May will be media-driven, saying the strategic placements of advertisements in television and on radio allowed Villar to generate the needed amount of perceptibility support.

On the other hand, those who said they will vote for Aquino in the same survey also prove that the country’s 50- million voters have not really made up their minds yet, and have not firmed up their choices on whom they will vote for.

“This latest survey also sustained again the assumption made by The Center that this year’s election for the top two national positions will go down the wire and the candidate who has a well-organized political machinery will enjoy the advantage when the voters go to the polls on May 10,” the Center said in a statement.

The survey also shows what it described as a “negligible slip” in the ratings of former President Joseph Estrada who is in third place, due in most part, to the low level of media advertisements from the camp of the former president.

Significantly, former Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro took advantage of the vacuum among the youth, following the withdrawal of Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero from the race as he moved up on account of his decision to takeg his campaign to various college campuses nationwide.

Sen. Richard Gordon has also started to move up in the perception game. This was traced by The Center to the capacity of the Transformers Team, as Gordon and Bayani Fernando would like to be known, to put up posters nationwide even before the official campaign.

In the vice presidential contest, Sen. Manuel “Mar” Roxas overtook and expanded his lead over his main rival – Sen. Loren Legarda – in the February survey of The Center.

Thus, from a four-point lead in January, Roxas with the help of close to 400 minutes of airtime that his campaign put in, has managed to widen the gap to nine percentage points last February.

Legarda who topped the senatorial polls in 1998 and 2007, was able to keep her vice presidential campaign afloat on the basis of the 120 minutes of airtime that she put in for the same period in review.

The Center said although the 120 minutes of TV-Radio airtime that Legarda put in paled in comparison to the amount of TV/radio advertisements contracted by Roxas, the margin between the two closest rivals for the vice presidency could have been wider had Legarda not decided to also mount her own media campaign for the same period.