First there was Obama Girl, then Tzipi Livini Boy and now we have The Cameron Girls. Well done to the girls for putting the effort in to making the video. I would say it fits into the ‘so bad, it’s almost good category’. I’ve got no doubt this video will get a good number of views and it wouldn’t surprise me if the mainstream media pick it up.
When two viral phenomenona collide…
This is a very moderately amusing video that the Conservative Party put out on April Fools day to support an advert they placed in the Guardian newspaper that was designed to highlight various elements of government waste under Labour. As ever, with these centrally generated party ‘virals’, it’s not funny enough to send to a non-politico friend and it’s way too long. Unsurprisingly, not many people seem to have passed it on as only about 10, 000 people having viewed thus far.
Labourlist have created a tool which allows people to quickly and easily make their own Conservative Party poster. Not a new idea, but one which people still seem to enjoy using.
A tieless, earnest looking David Cameron is the focus of the Conservative Party’s new poster.
Cameron is the party’s poster boy and therefore it should come as no surprise that they have made his image the dominant feature of this advertisment and indeed (in all likelihood) the focus of the Conservative Party’s general election campaign henceforth.
Given the topic of the poster the shot selected of Cameron is a good one: serious, confident and yet still approachable. However, the headline is overly wordy. It seems as if there has been a battle over what the key message for the poster should be – (a) We can’t go on like this, or (b) I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS. Both are strong on their own, but the combination of the two seems like a bit of a fudge and the impact of the headline is slightly lost.
The poster will be placed on 1000 sites around the country. This is a massive (and vastly expensive) poster campaign. With that number of sites, roughly 70% of the population will see this poster at least once within the first week. Labour are not and will not be able to compete with this level of media spend. The Tories only worry about running such a huge campaign will be looking like rich boys trying to buy the election.
A fantastic new poster for the Conservative Party that I just saw on a site near Mornington Crescent. It’s another in the ‘debt crisis‘ series and, like those before it, the poster cleverly stirs up the positive emotions parents feel towards their children with the sentiments of anger and fear that messages around debt bring about.
The Conservatives made use of Google’s Adwords platform this week to make sure that anyone searching for ‘Budget’, ‘Pre-Budget Report’ or ‘Treasury’ were directed to their website. This domination of the top positions provided anyone interested in the content with George Osborne’s view on the state of the economy.
As you can see below, there’s a huge spike in the number of searches around ‘pre-budget report’ and the Conservative Party want to make sure that those searching it can access the Conservative Party’s response to it quickly and easily. The people searching such terms will be high powered individuals such as bankers and leaders of industry as well as opinion forming elites like journalists and academics – all of whom are worth having on-side.
Spending a relatively small amount of money on adwords to ensure a tiny but highly influential group of people are aware of your stance on the key issue of the next (and arguably any) election seems like a very smart thing to do.
The Conservative Party have got their hands on a draft government document which sets out the government’s vision for the future of information services in the public sector. The Conservative Party don’t think it goes far enough and have decided to crowdsource their response. They’ve set up the website www.makeitbetter.org.uk to publish the document and invite comments.
You’ll notice it’s unbranded and makes no reference to The Conservative Party, outside of the embedded video. The reason for doing this is they’re trying to communicate that they are a serious ‘government-in-waiting’ and not playing childish political football with important strategic matters. Smart stuff.
The Conservative Party are going to be using the new social media music phenomenon ‘Spotify’ to advertise in next year’s general election.
The reason why this is so exciting is that Spotify can target adverts at their database of users based on: age, gender and most importantly postcode location.
So, for example, if the Tories had research which showed that young women, living in a particular area, in a particular marginal constituency, were particularly receptive to messaging around crime – the Conservative machine would be able to serve up adverts that outlined their plans for the area with regards to law and order.
This sort of targeting is the utopia for any political campaign. And, as an added bonus, online advertising is virtually unregulated, quick to produce, easy to adapt and very cheap.
Spotify, which has 2.7 million users and has just been released as an application on the iPhone, provides users with free, instant and legal music from a massive library of songs. Every hour of music listened to, requires users to sit through roughly 3 minutes of adverts.
Whilst they don’t have a huge number of users, they’re currently growing by about 10, 000 every day and come general election time (given the speed of growth of other popular social media platforms) it would be unsurprising if they had 10 million users.
If I was planning a general election campaign, I’d be on the phone to Spotify tomorrow morning.
The Conservative Party have just launched a new advert to promote a policy announcement on international development. They continue to use this ‘Girl Effect’ style of advert; for an advert hack like me it’s feeling a bit tired now, but no doubt it’d be impactful for someone viewing a Tory advert for the first time – if they included a few bits of non-typed animation it would certainly jazz it up a bit.
I won’t go into any detail as to the content of the policy initiative, but it certainly seems like a new territory for The Conservatives. In terms of political marketing, releasing content around international development at the same time as Obama tours Africa is a really smart, capitalising move.
