Commentary on the grubbiest part of the dirtiest business, by Benedict Pringle.
The Yes campaign are using a quotation from an article in the Financial Times in their latest piece of online content.
3rd Party endorsements are an essential element to any campaign and few are as highly regarded with regards to matters of the economy than the FT. However, both sides are using FT articles as endorsements.
It will be interesting to see if the FT act to clarify their position.
Newt Gingrich, despite having pledged to fight a positive campaign in the Republican Party Presidential nomination, has today launched a full page attack ad in the New Hampshire Union Leader against Mitt Romney.
Labelling himself a ‘Reagan Conservative’, the advert contrasts Romney’s relatively (to the field of candidates) relaxed positions on key right-wing policies with his own.
The insert is certainly not the easiest on eyes. The impact of making it so detailed is that the vast majority of people will skip straight passed it. Not including the candidate’s name in either the headline or sub-header, given it’s extensive nature, is also a gamble.
I would guess that this is an advert that will work well as a stimilus for press coverage, but I doubt the average undecided Republic voter will be too influenced by the advert alone.
Above is a screen grab from a very good new video for Antony Calvert. Calvert is the Conservative Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Morley and Outwood and he’s standing against the incumbent Ed Balls MP. The video attacks the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and calls for donations to help him reverse Balls’ significant majority. The video is running as online display advertising and users can click through to donate. It’s very nicely put together and I’m sure Calvert will be reaping the financial rewards for the effort.
Will the Labour Party feature Gordon Brown in a single piece of communication between now and the election? On this showing, I would suggest not to.
Above is a nice new advert the Labour Party have put out. It’s clearly going after the Middle-England demographic that Cameron and the Conservatives have been so successful in courting for the past few years.
The ambition of the advert is to make the voter think that, perhaps things are starting to look up with the economy and a change of government would put this recovery at risk. It’s not just the Conservative’s who can benefit from instilling a feeling of conservatism.
The sentiment of the communication is overwhelmingly upbeat, which isn’t easy to do as an imcumbent government. The ‘nice and normal looking family’ look nice and normal looking. The headline is well crafted. If I had to change something, I would have kept the whole headline in white out of red, as oppose to using the black. But broadly, this is a decent piece of advertising.
This advert by Catholicvote.com was banned from last year’s Super Bowl ad break (watched by 95 millions people and something of a cultural event in the USA) yet the cause is set to raise its controversial head again this year:
“The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme ‘Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.’ The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.”
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.
What a massively gratuitous use of a celebrity in this ad. A terrible, cheap looking advert. Celebrity advertising, political or otherwise, is only usually effective when brand values overlap to create a mutually beneficial relationship that has at least an element of consumer credibility. I can just imagine the guy selling the script using the fact that she was in Scrubs as a justification for her casting…
