This, as I understand it, is a genuine piece of political advertising l for Lembik Opik’s campaign for the Lib Dem mayoral nomination. Utterly laughable. Is it bad enough that it’s almost good? I don’t think so. Just it’s just really weird and makes the viewer feel genuinely uncomfortable.
A very funny video taking the piss out of Cameron and Osborne’s privileged backgrounds using a re-write of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ track. Great copy writing, appropriate visual imagery and unsurprisingly getting a huge amount of traction online.
David Schneider (of The Day Today and Alan Partridge fame) has made a very funny piece of light political satire called ‘You’re Nicked’. I’m not sure if the aim’s to take the piss out of Nick Clegg or David Cameron, but you finish watching the video feeling worse about both of them.
If nothing else, it shows that trying to stand for a ‘new politics’ requires a completely new vocabulary in order to avoid sounding like you’re dishing out empty rhetoric.
The Liberal Democrats have ripped off the Conservative Party’s ‘Tax Bombshell’ poster of 1992 and in doing so sunk to all new lows of unoriginality. It stinks of lazyness, a lack of creativity and an unhealthy fixation with the past.
A very good video from the Liberal Democrats promoting their Labservative campaign. The crux of the campaign is that for the last 65 years we’ve had either a Labour or Tory government and the Liberal Democrats are making the case that the two are as indistinguishable as they are incapable. To make the campaign unbranded is an incredibly bold strategy and I suspect a significant reason for the campaign’s success thus far.
As mentioned previously, the agency 360 Recruitment are inviting comments throughout the creative development process that will eventually lead to publication of some political adverts in The Independent on Sunday. They’ve posted the first round of scamps in the article ‘Things can only get bitter’.
Above are my personal favourites. Both deal with the issue of the next election in clever, original and compelling ways.
In general elections there are really only ever two ads that can be made (obviously there are almost infinite numbers of smart, innovate ways of dressing up them up):
1. Time for a change (opposition party).
2. We’re doing ok, and better than the other lot would, so don’t spoil a good thing (incumbent party).
The featured adverts communicate the ‘it’s time for a change’ message, in a relevant and poignant way, whilst at the same time rubbishing the ‘everything is ok’ line of that the government will inevitably roll out.
Getting a majority of people to change their default position (i.e. voting Labour for the last 12 years) is incredibly difficult and opposition parties will be up against a vicious combination of nostalgia and conservatism. The featured adverts deal with the human instinct to stick with the devil you know and then urge voters to opt for a different future.
A great new website by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for the Lib Dems.
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.
The Lib Dems have launched a new campaign against advertising agencies retouching their adverts. They want the Advertising Standards Authority to insist that adverts carry cigarette-style health warning along the lines of “WARNING: THIS ADVERT FEATURES A RETOUCHED MODEL”.
Commenting, Liberal Democrat MP, Jo Swinson, who chairs the party’s working group on women’s policy, said:
“Adverts that feature heavily retouched images of perfect skin, perfect hair and perfect figures mean that women and girls increasingly feel that nothing less than perfect will do. Advertisers should be honest and upfront about the extent of airbrushing that goes on.”
Looking at the dodgy, cheap campaign materials that the Lib Dems have put out (see above) I think creative agencies will take a bit more convincing…
Chris Ostrowski - Labour Party
April Pond - Liberal Democrat Party
Rupert Reed - Green Party
The Liberal Democrats must have been pretty pissed off when they saw the Conservative’s most recent broadcast. The style and content is almost exactly the same. Clegg does not come across nearly as well as Cameron and the production values look lesser. Not at all a bad effort, but it’s made to look average because it looks like a ‘me too’ – even though obviously they would have produced it long before the Tories aired.
