A new poster by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (“NORML”). It features President Obama smoking a cigarrette wearing a panama hat as youngster carrying a take on his famous slogan – ‘yes we cannabis’. Very droll.
Miliband saves the world?
I just can’t believe how self-indulgent and transparent Miliband and his supporters in Labour HQ are being with their latest campaign. The Labour Party have sent party members an email asking them to sign up to and invite their friends to join ‘Ed’s Pledge’. Ed’s pledge is as follows:
” I’ll be pushing for clear action to get a global climate deal that’s ambitious, effective and fair. This means ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping countries to their word and supporting poorer countries in adapting to climate change. ”
What are people signing up for? Ed Miliband to keep his word? The whole thing stinks of shameless self-promotion.
Not only have they chosen to launch a climate change campaign on the same morning as New Earth Deal, they have also decided to try and position Miliband as the champion of the grass-roots Copenhagen campaign. This ‘campaign’ is nothing but a shameless attempt to profile Ed Miliband and will piss off a load of people who have been building towards Copenhagen for months.
The campaign name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, and its’ acronym – N.E.D – is the Scottish word for ‘chav’… but nevertheless I’m excited about this Wednesday’s launch of a new climate change campaign. John Prescott is doing the honours for the launch in his capacity as of Europe’s ‘Rapporteur on Climate Change’… very fancy title John.
Another awesome execution in Tappening’s campaign against bottle water that I wrote about a few weeks ago.
The scale of the debate that Obama’s healthcare reform has sparked in this country is quite extraordinary. The social media campaign ’We (heart) the NHS’ has recieved a huge amount of support online as well as significant amounts of coverage in the mainstream media. The hashtag #welovethe nhs has become one of the top 6 trends on the global twitter site and is now trending at over 750 new Tweets every 5 seconds!
Above is a screen grab of a really nice widget created by Alex Smith (of labourlist) that pulls in all tweets using the hashtag #welovethenhs and publishes them on rotation. A simple idea, executed well that will sustain and spread the campaign even further.
Greig City Academy
The Labour Party have launched a fantastic new social media campaign. They’re inviting supporters to take photographs of local hospitals that have been rebuilt, Sure Start start centres that have been opened or local schools that have been invested in since 1997. An example of an image from the campaign’s flickr site above.
Supporters are encouraged to upload photos to twitter and facebook, or email them in to be uploaded to their flickr page. Once a significant volume of photos have been uploaded the Labour Party will have a resource (which can be used in campaign materials at a later date) that visually depicts in a powerful way the impact the Labour government has had in local areas across the country, and will have engaged the grass roots along the way.
This is a great response to the communication dilemma I outlined earlier in the week.
As you know, I like to keep you abreast of political advertising from across the globe – so here’s an execution the German CDU are running in the lead up to the general election in 7 weeks time. The strap line reads “We have more to offer”. This isn’t a joke, but US based political advertising blogger ’30 or 60′ is unsure the PR coup will translate into votes.
Big communications challenges are what great advertising agencies love and relish. I wonder if there has ever been a bigger, more difficult communication challenge than that which Nick Cohen has outlined above.
Annoyingly, I can’t embed the Conservatives new widget, but below is a screen grab of the MPU and below that is the video which runs inside it. This is a really clever use of online display advertising. It gives information, encourages interaction, builds a database of possible supporters and enables advocates to share with wider communities on facebook / blogger / iGoogle etc… (though, irritatingly, not WordPress). Online display advertising is really difficult to do well and this is a great example of how to do it.
