If you could excuse some brief navel-gazing, just came across a very amusing post from Barry Singleton:
“Politics is truly ‘the art of self deception, wrapped in the craft of deceiving others for their own good’. If you have a strong stomach and dependable ribs: http://politicaladvertising.co.uk”
Barry is currently pursuing justice over what he feels to be a misleading piece of political communication in the last general election.
Two of adlands most prolific bloggers have today written about the depths that political advertising has plunged to during the mid-term elections. Polling day is tomorrow and both Seth Godin and The Ad Contrarian have highlighted how the vast majority of negative political advertising is used to dissuade the undecided electorate from turning out.
The basic logic of running negative ads goes as follows – ‘if they aint gonna vote for us, let’s make sure they don’t vote at all’. Convincing voters to stay at home sounds like a strange strategy to win an election, but most of the research data shows that it works.
“Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there’s one reason: because of TV advertising. Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters.”
“Political advertising has been horrifying for a long time now. But it has reached a level of nastiness and deception that I believe is unprecedented….
…The thing that should be really frightening to us ad people is that nobody studies the effects of their advertising like the political class. They test everything. They are constantly polling to see how their advertising is affecting their numbers.
Unfortunately, we ad people have to face the reality that this horrible advertising and the strategies behind it are alarmingly effective. It’s very sobering.”
There are three words, that when combined, are responsible for more hours of hot air talked, volumes of bullshit written and vacuous PowerPoint charts created than any other in the history of the English Language.
Social. Media. Strategy.
How many Directors of Communications for political parties, candidates and pressure groups have spent countless hours pouring their hearts and souls into serving up their own brand of social media bullshit to their masters?
No more.
Now, whenever one needs to sound like a guru of all things Twitter, Facebook, and FourSquare simply type whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com into your browser and copy and paste as necessary.
You’re welcome.
Stephen Armstrong has written an interesting piece for MediaWeek on what he percieves as the triumph of ‘old’ media in this election. The crux of the argument is that the vast majority of money has been spent on outdoor advertising and the thing that has had the most impact on the discourse of the election has been the live TV leaders debates.
Full article here:
This year was supposed to be the UK’s great multichannel, Obama-style election. All the political parties and most of the commentators predicted online would be the medium where the toughest battles were fought and, in the early days, the rival poster mash-ups and Facebook campaigns did suggest that might be so.
As the parties settle in for the slog, however, and after the triumph of Nick Clegg in the first televised leadership debate, old media – from TV to posters – has reasserted its supremacy.
“That first TV debate [on ITV1] revived good old analogue media,” argues PR guru Mark Borkowski, who owns Borkowski PR. “The MPs’ expenses scandal means too many people can see the puppet strings in this campaign.”
He adds: “The parties have yet to find a dialogue or an unmashable idea and they feel clumsy and fumbling online. Ironically, given both Labour and the Tories hired Obama election strategists, Nick Clegg won the debate because the others seemed as though they were doing political karaoke.”
David Balko, commercial director of Jigsaw and former Labour account director at TBWA/London, bemoans the lack of imagination. “The usual messages are being pushed out and the leaflets coming through my door – I live in Richmond Park, one of the seats the Conservatives are targeting – contain the usual messages seen in the last five elections.
“If the political parties are to encourage people to vote in a way that The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent are capable of, I believe it will take a change in the way parties communicate to the electorate.”
David Kershaw, chief executive of the Tories’ creative agency M&C Saatchi, insists the tested methods still work. “It’s a fallacy that online has replaced offline in terms of media communications,” he says.
Back to basics
The appointment of Kershaw’s agency at the end of March followed mutterings of “carnage” at the party’s lead agency Euro RSCG – with one senior executive understood to have told a friend at a dinner party the campaign had made him a “broken man”.
The Tories returned to their old team, which is working alongside Euro RSCG, with a strategy of buying up plenty of poster sites – the Party’s media agency MPG booked more than 1,000 poster sites in marginal constituencies, with creative work switching rapidly between attack ads on Gordon Brown and personality pitches for David Cameron.
“This election will be decided by the 20% of the population in marginal seats,” says Marc Mendoza, UK chief executive of MPG. “In that way, and in many other ways, it’s just like the previous elections. Everyone was saying this is going to be the great digital campaign – but the vast majority of the money is still being spent on outdoor.
“The Conservative Party has had a strategy in place for 18 months and they are sticking to that strategy. The other parties came to the game very late and they’re suffering all sorts of problems, from media price inflation to creative issues.”
And the other parties can ill-afford to pay inflated prices. In terms of spend, there’s an £18m legal limit on election expenditure, but with individual candidates allowed to spend up to £40,000 each, further sums can be channelled into local associations. The Tories have a budget of £25m, Labour about £10m and the Lib Dems far less.
Cost-cutting measures have forced Labour to operate with half the staff it had in 2005. The party turned to supporters to create attack ads – including the David Cameron Audi Quattro poster and online mash-ups of Tory posters.
Celebs like Peter Davidson, Sean Pertwee and Eddie Izzard front the election broadcasts for free, with Izzard opening his film by claiming the Tories are going “to hit us with lots of posters and adverts… because they’ve got shedloads of money from wealthy donors who know they will get their cash back from tax concessions”.
The Lib Dems, meanwhile, are riding high on the TV debates, but have two agencies working outdoor, broadcast and online: The Assembly for conventional ads and Iris for guerilla marketing. Iris created the ‘Labservative’ campaign – a mock political party that has been in power for 65 years of war, recession and scandal.
“People liked Nick Clegg but didn’t think there was much point voting for him,” explains Paul Bainsfair, Europe chief executive of Iris, who has previously worked on Tory and Labour campaigns. “We started with posters and moved online where we were kind of immune to spoofs because we were a spoof.”
All the same, he agrees with Borkowski. “This election will be remembered for the debates. The televised discussions are like Pepsi and Coke having a live taste test on national TV. They’d never do it – it’s uncontrollable.”
Steve Henry, founder of ad agency HHCL, has written a very amusing article summarising the political advertising efforts of the three main parties thus far. After reading it I’m seriously thinking about changing the name of this blog to “Welcome to the grubby bit”.
Philip Gould, Lord Bell and Trevor Beattie
Rumours are rife that 3 political advertising luminaries of elections past have been drafted back into the front line.
At a recent Labour Party fundraiser Alastair Campbell was reportedly dropping Blair’s former adman Beattie’s name in at regular intervals and discussing ideas the two were working on.
At an event held by the IPA last night, Lord Bell (involved in the infamous Labour isn’t working) was ‘outed’ as being back in the political advertising game. Bell let on that David Abbott – one of the greatest copywriters of all time - had recently written him a poster around the thought “the economy is Brown bread”. Very good.
And Philip Gould – a founder of New Labour and author of political communication bible The Unfinished Revolution - is featured on the Labour Party’s new create an ad website (and is presumably helping to judge the winner) offering tips on creating a good political poster: “Keep the message simple; use strong images; try to weave in humour wherever possible” . Couldn’t agree more.
As the result of the election gets ever more uncertain it seems the parties have called upon the communications experts who have served them so well in the past. With these guys on board, I’m sure there will be advertising fireworks to come!
There’s been a great deal written recently – by the likes of John Prescott, Mark Jones and Alastair Campbell – about the death of the political billboard. Indeed The Times are running a story saying that Labour will not be running any posters whatsoever.
After airbrush-gate, Tory Tombstone and #IveNeverVotedTory it’s understandable that the directors of communications for the political parties will be apprehensive about booking billboards and put their creative agencies under even greater scrutiny.
However, the truth of the matter is that the billboard hasn’t been used as a genuine broadcast medium by political parties for some time. By ‘genuine’ I mean that the primary objective of political billboards in recent times has been to drive the news agenda. The days that the whole country has been plastered with a given political poster are long gone. The rules on donations now prevent the major media owners donating space to their party of preference and buying the requisite number of space is simply too expensive for our cash-strapped political parties.
Parties will and should continue to run outdoor advertising. But they will and should do it more tactically. Outdoor advertising is simply the most impactful media platform available to a political party. The sheer scale of a 96-sheet poster, the incredible numbers of people who can be reached at targeted locations and the media notoriety that results from a really provoking piece of outdoor advertising means that I’ve a feeling we’ll be seeing the political billboard in elections for many years to come.
As we come to the end of the year I’ve fallen pathetically in line with convention and compiled a reflection on the year that was. So without further ado, justification or democratic engagment, here are the top 10 British political advertisments of 2009:
1. Labour’s Spent (Euro RSCG)
2. Old News (Glue London)
3. Rape is cheaper than bullets (Amnesty International/Different Kettle)
4. Bottled Water: 98% melted ice caps, 2% polar bear tears (Tappening)
5. You won’t be laughing if they win (Saatchi & Saatchi)
6. Dad’s nose, Mum’s eyes and Gordon Brown’s debt (Euro RSCG)
7. SpeechBreaker.co.uk (Lean Mean Fighting Machine)
8. #WelovetheNHS (founder unknown)
9. Against the odds (Labour Party)
10. Labour’s put us all in the red (360 Recruitment)
Total Politics magazine very kindly asked me to feature in their ‘blogger profile’ section of this month’s edition. You can read my answers to their question with greater clarity here. Needless to say, I’ve left issues of the magazine (with the correct page folded at the corner) in every toilet cubicle in the office.
Pre-rolled
Catherine Shannon from Total Politics has brought to my attention that Tremor Media are jumping on Spotify’s bandwagon and trying to capitalise on political parties’ inability to broadcast on TV or radio by offering up pre-roll activity (the adverts you get before watching videos on sites like 4oD and The Sun).
Tremor Media’s UK Managing Director Adrian Lacey said:
“Until now, the ban on political broadcast advertising has limited parties to print, ambient and outdoor media, which are un-engaging and easy to ignore compared to online video advertising. A far more effective way to engage voters is through pre or post-roll online advertising, where a short video ad is played before, during or after desirable video content.”
Apologies about the ‘pre-rolled’ gag. That was a new low.
