The National Union of Students have launched a campaign that seeks to harnass the student vote in this year’s general election in order to prevent candidates who support increasing university fees getting elected.
It’s a clever campaign, based on the insight that no MP would like a bunch of angry student activists stirring up trouble in their constituency at a general election, which looks increasingly like it could be a close one.
The NUS want MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates to fess-up as to whether they’d increase the top-up between now and the election. That way they can tie the post-election hands of those would-be-MPs who would like to court the student vote pre-election and target those who are not supportive of their cause for some serious electoral aggro.
Will the Labour Party feature Gordon Brown in a single piece of communication between now and the election? On this showing, I would suggest not to.
Above is a nice new advert the Labour Party have put out. It’s clearly going after the Middle-England demographic that Cameron and the Conservatives have been so successful in courting for the past few years.
The ambition of the advert is to make the voter think that, perhaps things are starting to look up with the economy and a change of government would put this recovery at risk. It’s not just the Conservative’s who can benefit from instilling a feeling of conservatism.
The sentiment of the communication is overwhelmingly upbeat, which isn’t easy to do as an imcumbent government. The ‘nice and normal looking family’ look nice and normal looking. The headline is well crafted. If I had to change something, I would have kept the whole headline in white out of red, as oppose to using the black. But broadly, this is a decent piece of advertising.
The Labour Party have announced that they intend to release an iphone application next month. The app will feature local Labour Party events, searchable by postcode. Perfect if, woe betide you, you find yourself away from your local branch and have no idea where your next campaigning fix will come from.
It will also support a mobile version of the party’s Virtual Phone Bank, which enables supporters to call potential voters and enter details into an online database. Now those comrades with iphones are able to perform their caller ID duty to the party whether they’re waiting for a bus or standing in a picket line.
This advert by Catholicvote.com was banned from last year’s Super Bowl ad break (watched by 95 millions people and something of a cultural event in the USA) yet the cause is set to raise its controversial head again this year:
“The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme ‘Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.’ The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.”
This poster actually came out on New Years day, prior to the launch of the hotly-debated one featuring David Cameron, however I only came across it for the first time yesterday on a huge site in Shepherds Bush.
There’s a lot of things that are poor about this advert, but I’ll list my top 3:
1) It’s so painfully unoriginal. There are too many brands/people/pressure groups to name who have projected something on to The Houses of Parliament.
2) It’s unbranded. Nobody outside of the political elite will know who this poster is for. The Conservative’s “…for change” logo is far from embedded in the minds of the British electorate. I get that it’s meant to tease, but this will leave most people completely cold.
3) ‘Time for change’ is pretty much the only message opposition parties can opt for, so you can’t really criticise that. However, I don’t think the electorate are so clear to what the Conservatives’ are going to change that the ‘year for change’ claim can be made without some sort of justification.
I’ve now been sent 3 photos of the Conservative’s new poster, featuring David Cameron, that have been deliberately disfigured. Given I’m aware of 3, there must be a great number more. This level of vandalism doesn’t really occur on non-political advertising. This could easily be anti-political / anti-establishment sentiment that has always occured at every election that the internet has made easier to document and share. Or is it hostility aimed directly at the Tories and evidence that Dave hasn’t quite managed to shake off the ‘nasty party’ label? It will be interesting to see whether Labour’s posters (if they ever manage to afford to put any up) recieve the same treatment.
A hilarious take on the Tory’s new poster. After Hoon and Hewitt embarrassed themselves and the Labour Party in their revolt, this is the exact sort of thing that really rubs salt into the wound. Easily the best of the various adaptations.
A tieless, earnest looking David Cameron is the focus of the Conservative Party’s new poster.
Cameron is the party’s poster boy and therefore it should come as no surprise that they have made his image the dominant feature of this advertisment and indeed (in all likelihood) the focus of the Conservative Party’s general election campaign henceforth.
Given the topic of the poster the shot selected of Cameron is a good one: serious, confident and yet still approachable. However, the headline is overly wordy. It seems as if there has been a battle over what the key message for the poster should be – (a) We can’t go on like this, or (b) I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS. Both are strong on their own, but the combination of the two seems like a bit of a fudge and the impact of the headline is slightly lost.
The poster will be placed on 1000 sites around the country. This is a massive (and vastly expensive) poster campaign. With that number of sites, roughly 70% of the population will see this poster at least once within the first week. Labour are not and will not be able to compete with this level of media spend. The Tories only worry about running such a huge campaign will be looking like rich boys trying to buy the election.
