The Electoral Commission have released this new spot entitled ‘Silent Generation’.  It’s beautifully shot, the production values are high and the sound effects are impactful.

However, it’s an incredibly literal execution of a brief which would have been along the lines of “we need to make young people aware that if they don’t register to vote they won’t have say over their future”.  Sticking a young person as the lead role doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone under 25 is going to sit up and take notice when it comes on the box.

This audience are viciously cynical and adept at avoiding or blocking out advertising messages.  You need to be brutally original and provocative in both your creative and your media planning in order to stand a chance of cutting through.  If I were briefed to change the behaviour of young people who are not on the electoral register, I certainly wouldn’t come back with a script for a relatively placid 30 second TV spot.

Check out some of the recent work for the Metropolitan Police, for a highly effective, cost efficient and extremely innovative piece of creative work which goes after a similar demographic.

The Conservative Party have released a new poster, coinciding with the start of the dog show Crufts, attacking Labour’s plan to introduce a requirment  for pet owners to take out 3rd party insurance.  The proposal is estimated to affect around 5 million people.

The poster depicts Gordon Brown as the dog from the slightly nauseating Churchill Insurance adverts and carries the canine’s catch phrase in the headline ‘Oh yes’.

It’s a fairly light-hearted attack that will probably raise a smile for most people.  It’s in a similar vein to the R.I.P attack advert from last month, making a slighty cheap gag about a relatively minor point of policy, but the tone and style of this execution is more appropriate.

These sorts of probing attacks are the political equivalent of a cheeky slap in the face and not the sort of communication that wins elections.  However, it’s early days in the long campaign and this sort of activity is an easy way of getting a few headlines and keeping the Labour ’stealth tax’ agenda ticking over.

 First, watch the Dodge viral advert, then watch the very witty response below it. 

I’ve just been sent this promo that the Labour Party put out about a month ago.  It’s good.  Stylish, inspirational and backed up with hard policy (whether or not you agree with the assertions). 

The Labour Party have been using the ‘change we see’ slogan for a while (there’s even a website for the broader campaign) and I’ve always felt it to be a really strong message.  It aggressively encroaches on the opposition’s assumed territory of ‘change’ and uses it to both undermine their proclamations of a ‘new tomorrow’ and underline the incumbent’s record of delivery. 

It hasn’t yet, I don’t think, been used in a party political broadcast or a billboard and seems thus far to have been used more to galvanise supporters internally.  I’m sure the party has tested it on focus groups as a core election message, but I’d be astounded if it doesn’t resonate with waivering Labour Party supporters.

Here’s an interesting interview with Mark Hanson, who works in the Labour Party’s ‘New Media’ department, about the party’s digital strategy for the upcoming election.  His core point about the need to reach out, ‘give’ and listen to the digital community and not just ‘ask’ is a good one.  

It does take time, energy and man-power to do it effectively.  On the brands that I work on we’re constantly thinking about how we can give our consumers interesting things to talk about or play with.  One of the misconceptions about social media strategies is that it’s cheap and easy to implement, as it doesn’t take any time or money to set up a Facebook, Twitter or Blogger account. 

But to generate content with enough social currency to get people talking about your brand and then maintaining relationships through conversation and updates takes a great deal of smart thinking, time and usually at least a little bit of money.

Polling company ComRes and the UK’s biggest online betting company BETFAIR have joined forces to make some fantastic widgets that predict and track the results of the 2010 general election.   

The widget above (wordpress currently won’t let me embed the widget, so just an image at the moment) tracks polls from the UK’s six biggest polling companies (ComRes, YouGov, ICM, Angus Reid, Populus and MORI) to give the most accurate reflection of public opinion. The graph will be updated live as and when new polls are released, so that you are kept right up-to-date with all the movements over the course of the campaign.

The ebbs and flows of polls will have a huge influence on the tone and content of the political advertising that is released throughout the election.  And, you never know, maybe a political advert might end up having some sort of effect on the polls!

This is the poster that The Labour Party erected in Brighton, the location for the Conservative Party’s Spring Forum, over the weekend.  It is so painfully bad, on so many levels.

The pun-tastic headline is very poor.  It’s not clever, funny or insightful.

The art direction is terrible.  Is that the best photograph they could find for Osborne?  Was there no time to cut him and place on another background so that the textured blue didn’t contrast so appallingly badly with the flat grey / red / black colour scheme of the rest of the poster?  The use of a square box to contain Osborne’s face within the centre of the rectangular poster is also visually jarring.  The whole thing looks like something I could have done on PowerPoint in about 5 minutes.

Compare it with the posters the Green Party put up during the Labour Party’s last conference in Brighton and the true scale of the creative and strategic depths that the Labour Party have plunged to with this poster will be even more evident.

What an absolute turkey.

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.

Over the weekend the Labour Party revealed their slogan for the 2010 general election.  The strap line, created by Saatchi&Saatchi, is due to be carried across all media touchpoints in a campaign that goes live next month.

Richard Huntington, director of strategy at Saatchi&Saatchi, said that the line captured “eternal heart” of the party and also highlights that “…change is a process. It locks together a destination for Britain and it articulates that the future for Labour is for the many, compared to the Conservatives where the future will always be for the few.”

The slogan is definitely ‘on brand’ but I don’t think it will blow anyone away (or turn anyone off) on its own.  The success of this slogan will depend on the communication which it will accompany in the coming months.

Conservativehome.com have launched mylabourposter.  A couple of the funnier iterations from the website are featured above.

It’s slightly bizarre that Conservativehome have done this.  It’s almost like the Conservatives are taking the piss out of their own poster campaign.  Not only is it odd, it’s also poorly executed.  There’s no template provided for supporters to use and as such very few people can be bothered to make one.