Category Archives: Labour Party UK

Watch Out! There’s Less Police About

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Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party have released a new advert in today’s Evening Standard that attacks Boris Johnson for cutting police numbers.

The ad, with the headline ‘Watch Out!  There’s Less Police About’, shows Boris Johnson carring a ‘SWAG’ bag filled with London police offices and asks people to help Boris Stoppers by texting  ‘Copper’.  The advert coincides with the launch of Ken’s ‘Policing Pledge’.

The aim of the ad is to convince people that police numbers are down and that crime is on the rise.  It’s notoriously easy to pick and choose police statistics to make them work for you, so winning the communication battle on crime will be very important for both Boris and Ken’s campaign.

The tone, look and feel of the campaign is similar to the ‘Fare Deal’ campaign in the respect that it’s light-hearted and jovial.  This is a mistake.

Crime is a much more serious issue for Londoners and this copy and visual treatment seems to slightly trivialise the policy agenda.

Had the ‘Fare Deal’ campaign been very aggressive, serious and doomsaying it would have seemed over-the-top.  Yes, fare rises are irritating, but an ad that communicated unbridled outrage would have misjudged the public mood.  Fare rises are a relatively minor irritant, not the end of the world.

Crime, however, is something which the electorate take much more seriously and as such it gives you license to ramp up the drama in your advertising.  This feels like a real missed opportunity to build some negative sentiment against Boris Johnson.

I can understand why they’ve tried to keep some consistency.  It’s good advertising practice for brands as it builds up a more immediate recognition of your comms and improves awareness.  However, this is only worth pursuing – to the detriment of your creative work – if people are likely to actually build up an awareness of your style.

Ken will probably run less than 20 adverts in his whole campaign.  The chances of any normal person catching a glimpse of this cartoon style and immediately and subconsciously registering it as associated with Ken is zero.

*** Update *** here’s a higher resolution version:

Ken’s Organising Machine Working Hard

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Ken Livingstone’s team have released a video to promote the fact that on Saturday 28th January, to mark 100 days to go until polling day, they’re holding 100 campaign events in one day across London.

But the video is not only to promote these events; the video is a celebration of the work of volunteers so far and also aims to give a welcoming, feel-good impression of the campaign to supporters who are considering becoming activists.

It’s a charming little video that makes Ken’s team seem approachable, passionate and determined to win.  The scale of their grassroots organisation is very impressive and no doubt the efforts of these semi-ordinary people are to thank for the two-point poll lead over Boris Johnson reported today.

Beware of Boris ‘pickpocket’ Johnson – Ken’s Fare Deal Ad

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Ken Livingstone’s team have announced that they will be running a full page advert in today’s Evening Standard featuring Boris Johnson pickpocketing a passenger.

It includes a call to action to text ‘BorisStoppers’ (a reference to charity ‘CrimeStoppers’) and makes the pledge that Ken Livingstone’s fare policy would save the average Londoner £1000 over 4 years.

The advertising, which will also have an online component, aims to make public transport users aware of its rising cost since Boris came to power in 2008.

It’s a strong piece of copy.  It’s simple, funny and relevant to the media context in which people will be viewing it.  The attempt to harvest mobile phone numbers is subtly done.  The line of attack will certainly be salient and, despite being a negative ad, the tone is light-hearted due to the art directional gag.

Nice work.

*Updated below with high resolution version*

Ken’s £10,000 game of chicken

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Ken Livingstone’s Team have launched a fundraising campaign mascot – The Chicken.  The idea is that supporters donate money to Ken and as the cash flows in the chicken comes to life (to what extent is unclear).

The idea came about after Team Ken accused Boris Johnson of ‘being chicken’ for refusing to debate the Labour mayoral candidate over travel fares.

The ‘chicken’ mascot is not exactly the most innovative piece of attack campaigning.  Indeed, I’d be willing to bet in every general election since 1992 one of the competing parties has deployed the trusty ‘chicken-as-scared-metaphore’ press stunt at some stage or another.

What would set this chicken-related campaign apart would be if the image doesn’t just gain in colour, but also starts to gain in functionality and interactivity.  If all £10k buys Ken’s supporters is a coloured-in chicken, I’ll save them the bother:

Ken’s Fare Deal – video

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Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign have released a very nice little design animation video to support the launch of their Fare Deal policy (a pledge to reduce and then freeze fares on London Transport).

The really clever thing about the narrative is the way it makes the freeze feel relevant to people; he name checks various areas and establishments across London and highlights what the savings could buy you at them e.g:

“[It would] pay for 267 pints of beer from The Grape and Grain at Crystal Palace… I could buy 130 chicken tikka masalas from Brick Lane”

It goes on a bit too long, but overall, it’s a lovely little film with some delightful design elements that bring the whole thing to life.

Ken Livingstone’s Fare Deal

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I was handed a Ken Livingstone leaflet at Queens Park tube station on the way in this morning.  And it’s a good one.

One message – a pledge to reduce fairs on public transport in London – which is likely to be popular, communicated very clearly and simply, with a snappy slogan for good measure.

So often campaign managers cannot resist the temptation to tell the candidate’s life story on every single piece of direct mail produced.  They haven’t mentioned his experience, his successes when in office, the fact that he likes his tea with etc…

Political advertising is so often not about what you say, but what you communicate and the simplicity and cleanliness of this leaflet leaves the recipient feeling that this is a guy who knows what he’s about.

Your Ken – Livingston launches social campaigning hub

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Yesterday the Ken Livingston for London Mayor campaign launched a social campaigning hub.

The site is quite clearly an off-the-peg offering that in all likelihood has been used by countless candidates across the USA.

But who cares?

Reinventing the social media campaigning wheel would be completely pointless for a team that has a tiny budget and the output would be unlikely to measure-up to the prefabricated ones from the States.

Unsurprisingly, given that it has probably seen plenty of frontline political action, the site is very tight and works like a dream.  The Twitter and Facebook API’s work well and it contains all the tools (donate, invite friends etc..) that you’d expect.

The feature that most impressed me was the activist leaderboard.  You can score points by doing both on and offline activities.  Presumably turning up to do some canvassing on the doorsteps of Cockfosters will earn you enough points to see you comfortably to the top of the podium.

*UPDATE*

Turns out the photo of the Labour supporters used at the top of this blog was taken outside the house of the incumbent Mayor, Boris Johnson’s house.  Oops.

A year to remember

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To mark the anniversary of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, the Labour Party have released an online commemorative calendar which give the electorate a day-by-day account of all the policies that they feel are misjudged and all embarrassing events that have occurred.

Clearly the Labour Party feel that all the unfair or lamentable actions of the Coalition haven’t recieved enough attention in the last year, so have built a microsite to remind the media of the year that was.

I understand the compulsion for the Labour Party’s attack team to create something like this.  It must be frustrating to have gone a whole year without really owning or leading the news agenda.  But trying to get people to write about (quite literally) last year’s old news just doesn’t seem to me to be a worthwhile way to spend time and energy.

As Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer on the weekend:

“Berating the incumbents may make Labour people feel warm with moral outrage, but being the angry party is not the same as looking like a plausible alternative.”

Better to get on the front foot.

Maggies back in Barnsley

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Today is polling day in Barnsley, where the Labour candidate Dan Jarvis is expected to win comfortably.

I picked up on this piece of direct mail on politicalbetting.  As he rightly points out:

“There’s going to come a time when Labour’s going to need a new idea apart from “we are not the nasty Tories” even though that has worked well for them over the decades.

Clearly Labour wants a thumping victory – but surely someone could come up with more up to date rhetoric – “the squeezed middle” perhaps?”

I’ve said this time and again, but likening Thatcher to Cameron is not a strategy for success.  It might make Labour die-hards feel good, but the electorate are not dim to the fact that Thatcher was 20 years ago and Labour have been in government for 13 of them since.

Jurassic Politicians

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This is a poster by the Yes2AV campaign group who are lobbying for a form proportional representation to be used in UK elections.

The film poster-style advert portrays supporters of the current first-past-the-post system as political dinosaurs.

It’s inclusion of Nick Griffin – leader of the far right BNP – has caused widespread controversy.  The NotoAV camp claim that including Griffin both gives him political legitimacy and is a slur on the names of other mainstream politicians included in the poster.

Apart from anything else, the political-poster-that-looks-like-a-movie-poster was used to death in 2001 by The Labour Party and should never again see the light of day (see below):