The Committee on Standards in Public Life has recommended a 15% cut in the amount that a political party can spend in an election campaign.  Their report also suggested that campaign spending over a parliament  should be limited to £25.4m per party.

The inquiry stated: “We have received evidence to suggest that political parties could and should reduce their campaign spending, particularly on billboard advertising or direct mailing, both of which are unpopular with many voters.”

Why don’t they just spit in my face?  I joke.  I’m all too aware that political advertising is the dirtiest bit of the dirtiest business and that my stomach must be incredibly strong to perpetuate this hobby of mine.

At last year’s election, the Conservatives spent £7.5 million on advertising, but lack of money forced both Labour (£785,000) and the Liberal Democrats (£230,000) to cut their ad budgets sharply.

Total spending on ads fell from £15.6 million at the 2005 election to £9.1 million last year.  I was wondering why my political advertising consultancy never quite took off…

Chris Burgess, a fellow political advertising enthusiast and academic at The University of Nottingham, has accomplished the staggering task of putting on an exhibition of historic political posters.  If you’re anywhere near Manchester before June 2012, get down to the People’s History Museum for a gander.

Chris is also writing a PhD on the topic, but has kindly summarised 10 things that he has learnt from his analysis of political posters through the ages thus far:.

1. British politics is as much about what we see as about what we hear.

2. There is ‘language’ of posters. Poster designers rely on the voter to understand a number of symbols and words. These symbols – like the pipe –  drop in and out of favour. Some like the sun remain.

3. Poster design changes, but there is no systematic development. As a result, some posters look older than they actually are, and some relatively ancient examples have the look of something produced yesterday.

4. Political posters are ephemeral and transient. They aim to speak to a particular electorate from a specific election.Most are forgotten as quickly as they are produced.

5. If the job of Prime Minister’s is becoming increasingly ‘presidential’, it is because the diminishing power of Cabinet and Parliamentary scrutiny, not because leaders are promoted differently. The ‘presidential’ Prime Minister began in 1929 when Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberals promoted their leaders above their parties. Even before this point, parties understood the electoral benefit of a popular leader.

6. The vitriolic attacks on Asquith, Chamberlain and the House of Lords before 1914 show that politics has long been ‘personal’.

7. Even after they won the vote on equal terms as men in 1928 the parties appealed to them not as individuals but as mothers and as holders of the domestic budget. I have only found two posters which appeal to female voters as workers.

8. Despite feminism, parties remain convinced that women should be appealed to in ‘special’ ways.

9. Posters can be the place where art and politics meet, although not always.

10. Posters aren’t static transmitters of information. They form a vibrant public politics of the street and, since 2010, the web. If posters are a throwback to the 19^th century, they are the continued hurrah of Victorian politics: they remain vital to how the parties try to communicate with the people.

The World Development Movement have launched The Real George Osborne campaign.  The aim of the campaign is to bring an end to financial speculation on food commodities as the WDM believe this pushes up food prices and causes hunger and poverty around the world.

The WDM are convinced that George Osborne can act to prevent this and are calling for people to email him a generic protest message as a way to force his hand.

The centrepiece of the campaign is the above video.  Blink and you’ll miss the fact that it’s anything other than a piece of political satire.  The creative vehicle – taking the piss out of George Osborne for being posh – has little or nothing to do with the cause with which it’s supposedly supporting.

This is just episode 1, apparently we’re lucky enough to be treated to a further 13 episodes.

The production values are good and the gags, whilst incredibly hackneyed, aren’t too horrendous but as a campaign to end food commodity speculation it falls very flat.

It feels like the writers have spent too long relishing the prospect of taking the piss out of someone upper class and not enough time thinking about the strategic and creative platform which will best serve their organisations aims.

Hopefully the remaining 13 episodes will deal more directly with the issue.

(Thanks @TomBage for sending).

Twitter has announced that they will start selling political ads this week.

The ads will appear as Promoted Tweets, with a purple check mark (as opposed to the orange of ‘normal’ brands), and be displayed when searching for specified topics.

For example, if a voter hears about a gaff that a politician from Party X has made, they might search for the politicians name on Twitter and, along with their search results, get served an ad by Party Y trying to capitalise on the mistake.

Promoted Tweets will also appear in the timeline of Twitter users who follow a political campaign.  This will be useful for mobilising your own supporters or trying to convince supporters of 3rd parties to jump ship and join your campaign.

Campaigns can also pay to be featured as ‘people you might like to follow’.  This is the most broadbrush approach for the new medium and would doubtless be the first to be most readily adopted.

Five campaigns have already signed up, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Luke Bozier, a member of the Labour twitterati and a political strategist, has written a blueprint for online campaigning.  The 5 well-construed principles of his blueprint are outlined above, but the full pdf is worth a look.

Bozier is obviously a man after my own heart, his principles are more or less congruous with the principles (which I borrowed from Foot and Schneider) that I outlined in my dissertation on the topic in 2007.

Whilst I managed to squeeze my thesis into a casual 10, 000 words,  Bozier has droned on for an entire side of A4.  I think it was Horace who said “Whatever advice you give, be brief.”

The principles of running an effective online campaign are well researched and documented.  However, if you don’t have a good product (candidate, party, cause) with a believable and compelling narrative, the numbers of people that will want to know about what believe in, connect with your campaign, advocate for you and generally disseminate or engage with your message will always be minimal.

SocialVibe provide online display advertising units and are used by many of the world’s biggest brand advertisers to offer people something of value – such as credits for online games – in exchange for interacting with an ad.

So far so normal.

However, SocialVibe recently ran some research in Iowa – a key state in the upcoming Republican primary elections – that showed that the politically-themed engagement ads were shared at more than twice the rate of a typical ‘non political’ SocialVibe campaign.

People are meant to hate politics and hate political advertising even more, so these results really are surprising.

If I owned a shed load of online media space in the UK, I’d be busy trying to flog these engagement ads to political organisations and parties.

As regular readers will know, I love reading a good rant against political advertising as discipline, and I just stumbled across an absolute gem regarding the recent Canadian elections.

What’s always interesting is that time and again, even those who detract most from political advertising (often with good reason), the effectiveness of it is rarely questioned.

The Political Marketing Game by Jennifer Lees-Marshment is about as thorough an analysis of a discipline, regarded as much an art as it is a science, that one could ever hope for.

The central thesis is that political marketing isn’t just about slogans and posters in the lead up to an election, but is instead an approach that should permeate every aspect of a political organisation.

It’s worth noting that Jennifer Lees-Marshment is a career academic and if you’re looking for a quick insight into how political parties go about trying to get our votes, brought to life by light anecdote, this isn’t the book for you.

Lees-Marshment combines 100 interviews (over 5 years of research, across 5 western liberal democracies) of heavy weight political marketing practitioners with her keen understanding of the wealth of existing academic literature on the subject.

Undoubtedly, the highlights of the book are the musings of communication directors, political representatives, pollsters and strategists including (amongst many others) Alastair Campbell, Iain Duncan Smith and Philip Gould, on their various electoral battles.  Indeed, one wonders if the transcripts of the interviews would be worth publishing in their own right.

Jennifer Lees-Marshment breaks down what it takes to successfully market a modern political party and / or candidate into its component parts and her findings are as relevant to a candidate fighting a local council seat as they are to a team of people who covet the highest of office.

She sets out the relatively simple principles behind what it takes to win the Political Marketing Game: effectively communicate a clear, motivating brand proposition that is credible and differentiates you from the competition.   Sounds simple.  But case study, after case study reveals just how difficult it is to arrive at, and stick to, a strategy that fulfils on such principles.

The multiple pitfalls include the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ created by the 24 hour news cycle, party disunity, pandering to polling, ignoring polling, being overly negative towards the opposition, disregarding the opposition and many, many more.

The book reaches a slightly unnecessary and unrealistic conclusion by proposing that we are on the brink of entering into a ‘partnership democracy’, whereby political elites and the public reach mutual understanding and respect via a virtuous circle of democratic participation and open decision-making.  However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a hugely informative study on an important field that is changing and developing at an extraordinary rate.

(Originally published in Progress Magazine).

I’ve recently reviewed The Political Marketing Game by Jennifer Lees-Marshment for Progress Magazine (I’ll post the review here once the article’s published) and the author – undoubtedly one of the foremost academic writers on political marketing in the world – has kindly agreed to answer a few questions.

1.       Is political marketing an inevitable aspect of politics?

Yes – but because political marketing offers modern insights to the age old question as to how political elites listen, respond to and deliver for the public. Whilst old fashioned methods such as persusion, or class indications of voting, once worked to help politicians get elected, this is no longer true. Just like businesses politics needs to use marketing methods to understand and increasingly diverse and unpredictable electorate. Market research and segmentation offer new tools to do this. However it is not easy to satisfy market demands – and politicians are now realising the voters want a more nuanced and reflective leader who will consider the realities, constraints and long-term needs of the country, rather than just public wants identified by focus groups. In this case, politicians also need conceptual tools such as branding helto help develop not just a product but a sense of direction and vision; and more mature conversational market research tools such as co-creation and deliberation. So yes, it is inevitable, but it is not easy.

2.       What’s your favourite piece of political advertising?

The posters or credit cards used by UK Labour in the 1997 election to advertise their pledges. The reason is this highlighted a trend to political marketing which emphasised delivery. They crystalised what the party was about policy wise, but also how they were interested in achievement not just rhetoric. If politicians focus on delivery, then they actually worry about getting things done. Whilst the detail of those pledges, and public service targets generally, might be debated and critiqued, the spirit was right – to make politics about changing and delivering, which holds the potential to create longer-term trust between politicians and the public.

3.       If you could give one piece of advice on political communication, what would it be?

Make it positive. Whilst negative attack on competitors gets attention, it reduces voters’ ability to believe in you. Say what you are going to do to make things better for them or the country. I think the negativity is what lost the Conservatives support in 2010 – people though well if everything is so bad economically, how will the Conservatives make a difference? Despite the important of political marketing, and the need to research voters’ views, politics still comes down to being focused on changing the world for the better. Negative political communication cannot do that.