Catherine Shannon from Total Politics has brought to my attention that Tremor Media are jumping on Spotify’s bandwagon and trying to capitalise on political parties’ inability to broadcast on TV or radio by offering up pre-roll activity (the adverts you get before watching videos on sites like 4oD and The Sun).
Tremor Media’s UK Managing Director Adrian Lacey said:
“Until now, the ban on political broadcast advertising has limited parties to print, ambient and outdoor media, which are un-engaging and easy to ignore compared to online video advertising. A far more effective way to engage voters is through pre or post-roll online advertising, where a short video ad is played before, during or after desirable video content.”
Apologies about the ‘pre-rolled’ gag. That was a new low.
If you want to read an absolute diatribe against the political advertising and political PR industry, this is for you. Having posted yesterday about my desire to increase the realm and scope of political advertising in the UK, I thought it only fair to concede that, undoubtedly, there are significant downsides some of which are articulated fairly clearly in the above film.
Despite everything in the video and all that is said in the article, I stand by the argument that our democracy suffers because paid for and direct political communication isn’t permitted on the most popular media platform.
I’ve just been informed that my one-man campaign to get TV broadcast political advertising legalised in the UK isn’t in fact as niche (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that it’s still a postive crany in the long corridor of UK issue campaigns) as I originally thought. Media law giants and experts Lewis Silkin have been pursuing this agenda for the last couple of years (see above), they’ve even produced a badge!… no I don’t have this fastened on to my anorak… except perhaps proverbially.
‘Open Up’ is a new campaign that’s demanding that open primaries take place in every constituency in the country in advance of the next general election – fairly ambitious stuff given that it’s demanding a bunch of turkies vote for their own deselection.
The website is slick and the integration of social media channels is seamless, but the video content isn’t quite of the quality that will help make the campaign viral. The above clip ‘Are you a duck?’ tries to a poke some fun at and stir up some irritation about MP’s expenses in order to drive engagment and interest in the campaign. The concept of ‘tales from the duck house’ is amusing but dubbing a voice over a duck isn’t of the hilarity that justifies the 1 minute and 40 second length and follow-up episode.
The campaign seems to be building momentum but doesn’t yet seem to have ‘tipped’. However, everything seems to be in place to capitalise from either a new bout of Westminster scandals and / or the production of a genuninely interesting, viral piece of content.
This is probably the most well put-together of a throng of BNP Question Time mash-ups that I’ve seen.
I thought in the run-up to the Question Time event all the major political parties would have prepared some anti-BNP materials for their supporters to use on social networks in order to try and capitalise on the wave of anti-fascism that has emerged from the silent majority after this event, but it seems that they’ve missed a trick.
This video has already had over 1/2 a million views on YouTube, making it one of the most viral pieces of political communication in the UK this year. I bet Labour and Tory HQ are wishing they’d thought of it.
Former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Linda McMahon is running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, but she didn’t count on the Connecticut Democratic Party producing one of the most salacious and provocative political adverts I’ve ever seen.
Linda McMahon had previously defended WWE wrestling programming, saying, “There was a time when our program was TV-14, today’s it’s PG and our networks rate our programming… It’s fun, it has something for everyone within the show. It’s energetic, it’s entertaining. It’s music, it’s pyro, it’s pomp and circumstance, it’s what keeps people interested in the product.”
The Connecticut Democratic Party then took these words and relayed them over scenes from WWE showing simulated public sex and necrophilia. I felt so incredibly uncomfortable watching this clip and it certainly made me feel worse about Linda’s candidacy, but I certainly wouldn’t be rushing to the polls to vote Democrat after watching it.
This is the sort of attack advertising that has the effect of driving down overall turnout and has little positive impact on the share of vote of either party.
This Green Party advertising campaign, which ran last year during New Zealand’s general election and was created by agency Special Group, won 3 gold awards at the NZ advertising effectiveness awards last week.
This campaign is one of my all time favourites. A single-minded, brutally simple and evocative strategy that has been executed with some stunning photography, disciplined copy writting and careful art direction. Powerful stuff.
This is a new video from environmental organisation 10:10 produced by AMV BBDO. I worked on the video so any negative comments will be taken with incredulity and hyper-sensitivity.
You can choose snippets of speeches from the leaders of all three main political parties and compose your own personalised manifesto.
You can preview your clip, then hit ‘enter’ and it automatically uploads to a specific YouTube channel. Literally hundreds of videos have been uploaded. Great fun. Not sure how much it does for the Lib Dems. But still, great fun.
