BETC London, the creative agency behind Ken Livingstone’s infamous party election broadcast, have released an advert for their agency in this week’s advertising trade press. The ad features Ken crying and carries the end line “we also move products”.
Very good indeed.
Ken Livingstone was moved to tears at the launch of the broadcast created by BETC, saying: “It’s an appalling responsibility… the people you saw on the screen represent hundreds of thousands of Londoners who desperately want a mayor who is going to make their life easier in this city.”
The ad is perhaps to draw a line under some of the mainstream media and Westminster Villages’ (over) reaction to the broadcast and remind any clients reading the trade press that BETC is a very capable creative agency.
Cancer Research have released a new video calling for signatures to a petition that seeks to remove branding from cigarette packaging.
The ad shows a group of 10-year-old children discussing cigarette boxes, to illustrate how young people are affected by the different colours and designs.
The film concludes with the thought: “Unbranding cigarette packs won’t stop everyone from smoking, but it will give millions of kids one less reason to start”.
I can’t comment neutrally, as this was made by my agency, but I found it incredibly impactful. It’s a clever advertising idea, based on solid research that suggests cigarette packaging is attractive to young people.
By using children as the creative vehicle, it enables adults who “know better than to fall for some pretty colours on a cardboard box” to support the campaign, as they can feel they’re acting for kids who they perceive to be more vulnerable to brands than themselves.
Finally! A decent piece of video content for one of the candidates for London Mayor (although Paddick’s official campaign claim to have had nothing to do with it).
The NightMayor attacks Boris Johnson for his percieved absence during the 2011 London Riots and his purported culprability for issues surrounding News of The World links with the Metropolitcan Police.
The film concludes with a piece of positive messaging around Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, and leaves viewers with the damning end line “jokes aren’t funny the second time around”.
The video carries a simply and effective narrative by professionally putting together existing footage of both Boris Johnson and the Lib Dem candidate. Yes, the ‘movie-trailer-as-political-ad’ has been done to death, but if it’s done well it can be very impactful.
Whoever’s pulled this together has obviously had some experience in production and, my word, doesn’t it show. Paddick’s campaign is having a strong back straight!
Brian Paddick’s campaign have released a poster which calls for London’s police force to take a more relaxed position on dealing (tee hee) with cannabis.
It features the headline “Police are wasted on cannabis” and asserts that massive amounts of police time, money and energy is misspent policing the sale and use of the herb.
Now this is a ballsy advertising! As David Trott, creative advertising legend, famously says: the first job of any piece of advertising is “get noticed”. Well done Team Paddick for having the cojones to be bold.
Brian Paddick has two significant points of difference from the mainstream candidates:
1. His background, policing, isn’t one of either of the ruling elites that most people despise – politics or journalism.
2. He has some policies which differentiate him from the two leading candidates; in this case, relaxation of rules on policing smoking marijuana.
And, as any sensible marketeer would do, he’s making these points of ‘product difference’ into seemingly functional benefits. Very good.
The next step is to build an emotional connection, based on these functional benefits, with the audience. If I was running his campaign, I’d be busy thinking up an ad along the lines of “what London means to me”.
Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate for the office of London Mayor, has released a new poster (top) which reminds voters what he looks like and gives a pithy, single-minded reason as to why they should put a cross next to his name on May 3rd 2012.
The poster is a follow-up to an execution ‘You break it, you fix it’, which ran in March, that outlined Paddick’s policy of punishing criminals with community service, as opposed sending them to jail.
I like these posters. The campaign has decided that they’re going to hang their hat on the issue of crime, a no-brainer given Paddick’s background, and they’ve executed it cleanly and simply.
When you’re running a candidate with relatively low levels of name or face recognition in such a personality-based election, you can’t be too ambitious with your advertising. These ads do the basics very well and anything more discursive would have probably been a mistake.
DGM Netherlands have created an incredibly powerful video featuring young women, posing as prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red light district, completing a dance routine to heavy dubstep music track.
The stunt was performed in front of unsuspecting onlookers walking through the area and was secretly filmed.
The pay-off is that thousands of women who are promised a career as a dancer in western Europe end up being trafficked into the Netherland’s sex trade.
At first it’s incredibly uncomfortable viewing, but the punchy music track and impressive moves of the girls quickly gets you nodding along. Just as you start to really enjoy the performance the message hits home very suddenly and in a highly impactful way.
Ken Livingstone has released a party election broadcast for his bid to become London’s Mayor that uses ‘ordinary Londoners’ to deliver his call to arms.
Put yourself into Ken Livingstone’s campaign manager’s shoes for a minute:
You are incredibly strapped for cash and you’ve realised, probably slightly too late in the day, that the airtime for your political broadcast is just around the corner.
Opting for a vox pop approach ( broadcasting term for interviews with members of the general public) is an attractive and sensible proposition for a campaign manager in your position.
Firstly, you can easily sell it to your left-of-centre candidate as being a great example of being a Man Of The People: “Ken, it’s a grass-roots approach that exemplifies your candidacy.”
Secondly, it’s cheap; there’s no expensive talent costs, set design or lengthy post-production required.
Thirdly, it’s pretty easy to do. You can even write the script! And be The Director!!
You’ve just got to pick your message, use the simplest language you can manage to create the narrative and get ordinary looking punters, in ‘normal’ looking locations, to read it out. All the while you get to gesticulate enthusiastically behind the camera and casually drop Hollywood film-making clichés.
All completely fair enough and I, put in the same position, would almost certainly do the same thing. Except…
I WOULD BUY A F*****G TRIPOD.
It’s so unbelievably distracting having the camera wobble around whilst Janet – the OAP in the local cafe – tries her absolute best to deliver a devastating commentary about police cuts.
Not using a tripod, or even perhaps a shoulder mounted camera, is so painfully amateur that it makes me want to pick up Ken’s YouTube channel and throw it out the 7th floor window of my West-London based advertising agency.
And, before you say it, no, this isn’t an attempt at using a POV shooting style popularised by the Jason Bourne films and innumerable amateur online porno clips. It’s just lazy and crap.
I’ll ignore the shitty quality of the video that is currently uploaded. They’ve, hopefully, created something of broadcast quality for the TV space, so I’ll put the tragic pixilation of the tape down to an encoding error that can be easily done (he says knowingly) and quickly amended.
