UKIP are currently running a poster in Manchester featuring the headline ‘Stop Open Door EU Immigration’.

The poster has caused controversy in the area and led to the local community lobbying the media owner – Clear Channel – to remove the poster.  There was a brief hiatus over the past few days whilst the media owner decided their position.

Thankfully, for the sake of freedom of speech, Clear Channel have decided to allow the poster to remain.  

This is not the first time that media owners have been put in a compromising situation with regards to running controversial political advertising and it will not be the last; the reason for this is that the Advertising Standards Authority refuses to rule on political advertising.

Political advertising in the UK is a free-for-all.  Parties, pressure groups and trade unions can say whatever they like in their advertising without fear of recrimination.  They can – and do – promise the world and have no obligation to deliver against it.

This is completely contrary to the rules for all other advertisers, who have to comply with rigorous self-regulatory standards.  It is quite literally one rule for the people and one rule for the politicians.

There are many problems with this approach from a democratic perspective, but the one which this UKIP case has revealed is that media owners are getting landed in hot water with the public by having to decide whether or not to run advertising that may be controversial.  If the media owners refuse to run advertising there is a serious risk of infringing on the right of political parties to freedom of speech and landing themselves in a law suit.

By changing the self-regulatory system to force the ASA to include political advertising in its regulation of what is legal, decent, honest and truthful advertising  (and what isn’t) it removes the possibility of political parties having their freedom of speech infringed upon and prevents landing media owners in controversy.

According to these seasoned campaigners, the answer is: yes, stupid.

In short, attack ads work better than positive messages because:

1. People remember them better.

2. People believe them more.

3. As a result of (1) and (2) their impact is more immediate.

I found these three great quotations about negative political advertising in a book called Crowded Airwaves: Campaign Advertising in Elections, that whilst a little old still provides some really interesting insights into the subject.

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.