Ken Livingstone’s campaign have released a new poster which accuses Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party colleagues George Osborne and David Cameron as being blue aliens from another planet.

The aim of the poster is to link Boris Johnson’s policies in London with those of the government.  This is a sensible strategy, as recent polls have shown that the national party’s actions seem to be having an impact on voter intention in the capital.

I don’t love this poster.

The headline and visuals are neither funny, clever or particularly cutting for an attack poster.  It just feels a bit flat.

If the message you want to convey is “These Tories are a bunch of posh boys and they don’t know what real life is like”, why not say that in the most punchy or amusing way you can?

This feels more like Labour are blowing a raspberry rather than giving a sucker punch.

UPDATE *** Here’s the high resolution version that ran in today’s Metro

Ken Livingstone has released a party election broadcast for his bid to become London’s Mayor that uses ‘ordinary Londoners’ to deliver his call to arms.

Put yourself into Ken Livingstone’s campaign manager’s shoes for a minute:

You are incredibly strapped for cash and you’ve realised, probably slightly too late in the day, that the airtime for your political broadcast is just around the corner.

Opting for a vox pop approach ( broadcasting term for interviews with members of the general public) is an attractive and sensible proposition for a campaign manager in your position.

Firstly, you can easily sell it to your left-of-centre candidate as being a great example of being a Man Of The People: “Ken, it’s a grass-roots approach that exemplifies your candidacy.”

Secondly, it’s cheap; there’s no expensive talent costs, set design or lengthy post-production required.

Thirdly, it’s pretty easy to do.  You can even write the script!  And be The Director!!

You’ve just got to pick your message, use the simplest language you can manage to create the narrative and get ordinary looking punters, in ‘normal’ looking locations, to read it out.  All the while you get to gesticulate enthusiastically behind the camera and casually drop Hollywood film-making clichés.

All completely fair enough and I, put in the same position, would almost certainly do the same thing.  Except…

I WOULD BUY A F*****G TRIPOD.

It’s so unbelievably distracting having the camera wobble around whilst Janet – the OAP in the local cafe – tries her absolute best to deliver a devastating commentary about police cuts.

Not using a tripod, or even perhaps a shoulder mounted camera, is so painfully amateur that it makes me want to pick up Ken’s YouTube channel and throw it out the 7th floor window of my West-London based advertising agency.

And, before you say it, no, this isn’t an attempt at using a POV shooting style popularised by the Jason Bourne films and innumerable amateur online porno clips.  It’s just lazy and crap.

I’ll ignore the shitty quality of the video that is currently uploaded.  They’ve, hopefully, created something of broadcast quality for the TV space, so I’ll put the tragic pixilation of the tape down to an encoding error that can be easily done (he says knowingly) and quickly amended.

Ken’s campaign launched a ‘travel voucher’ for distribution to the electorate.  As Ken explained at a press conference this morning:

‘Today I am launching my ‘London Travel Voucher’. I am saying to Londoners – keep hold of this voucher so that you have physical evidence of my promise to cut your fares. The voucher will be available online from today, but will only be valid if I am elected as Mayor on 3 May. Londoners who want to save £1,000 need to use their vote to cut fares.’

It’s not the most beautiful piece of communication, but in fare-ness (sorry) not many vouchers win awards for their creativity.

Ken’s campaign are really putting all of their eggs in the Fare Deal basket.  Their polling must show that it’s paying off.  Either that, or they havent got anything else up their sleeves.

Sack Boris 2012 are trying to raise funds to run an advertising campaign to promote their cause in advance of the London Mayoral elections in May.

They’ve posted scamps of the two posters that they intend to create and run.  They both pay homage to Saatchi & Saatchi’s Labour Isn’t Working poster that set (and continues to maintain) the bar for political advertising.

Whilst adverts that are pastiches, imitations or pistakes of prior campaigns can never live up to the originals, I would nevertheless love to see these posters get made for real.

These two iterations are directly relevant to issues that are live in the election race and the visual and linguistic mechanic of the original hasn’t been stretched too far.

Hypernaked have created an amusing new microsite for the ‘Sack Boris’ campaign called ‘Is Boris Working?‘.  It’s based on a popular online meme, which in this instance involves users being given various amusing negative responses to the question “Is Boris Working?”.

It seems to have got a good amount of traction online and is the sort of thing that non-politico, floating voters would engage with.

It just goes to show that online political advertising doesn’t have to break moulds or be particularly clever to work; if it’s funny, people will pass it round.

Ken Livingstone’s campaign have released a comically bad video to support their Fare Deal policy pledge.

The film features Steve Pound MP, dressed up as a professor, explaining how Ken’s fares policy is viable.

Have they used a campaign staffer’s desk lamp as the lighting rig?  Is it filmed in some mouldy town hall’s meeting room? And did they buy Pound’s outfit from Ann Summers?

Pound’s performance is so awkward, the production values of the video are so awful and the sound effects are so atrocious, that the viewer will not absorb any of the message.  Making this video was a complete waste of campaign resource and energy (even if it only took an hour, which it won’t have).

This film is a damning indictment of the state of British political marketing.  It’s cheap, it’s badly thought through and it’s nasty.

The only chance this video has of getting views is if people send it round as something to laugh at.

Ken’s team have released a response to the Not Ken Again poster campaign.  It feels like a bit of a damp squib of a retort.

What they’ve failed to realise is that the overall look and feel of the posters are negative in sentiment.  Almost regardless of what the copy says, the art direction creates an adverse emotion against Ken.

To quote my / your / our ex-girlfriend(s), “it’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it”.

Ken Livingstone has released a new video promising to reverse Boris Johnson’s cuts in police numbers.  Let’s face it, this video is pretty boring.

Making a piece of video that goes viral is hard.  It takes time, energy and more often than not, requires you to spend some money on production (or at least have access to someone who has the requisite kit and skills).

More than anything else, it has to contain a piece of creative magic.  Something which is so compelling, innovative, shocking, hilarious or timely that means you can’t help but forward it on to your network.

This new video by Ken Livingstone’s campaign has none of the above.  It’s a very well-trodden creative vehicle, not particularly well executed.  It’s also WAY too long.  There’s a reason why most TV ads are 30 seconds, any more and they can very easily get tired and boring.

Just because you can make a longer video, doesn’t mean you necessarily should.  Most viral seeding companies (people who you can pay to get your video passed around) reccomend keeping it to under 50 seconds.

When making a video that you hope to spread online the ‘hook’ is the single most important thing and you simply can’t afford to think about your message first.  People can choose what they want to watch online and I my bet is that they won’t want to watch this.