Political Advertising
The sight of David Cameron on numerous billboards shortly after New Year signalled that the advertising campaign for the 2010 General Election campaign has unofficially begun. Politicians love getting involved in advertising and agencies seem to love getting involved in politics.
During my time working for the Labour Party in Scotland, managing its advertising campaigns, I was always amazed by the eagerness of agencies to work on our accounts. We had very little money to pay them, we demanded super human efforts in return and we always wanted results yesterday. Yet still agencies queued up to pitch.
Frustrations
Working on a political campaign for an agency can be tough going. At times it seems like a never ending series of demands, frustrations and unrealistic expectations as parties search for the one poster that will change the course of the campaign and boost their electoral fortunes.
The working hours can be exhausting. If politicians are up at 2am thinking about the strategy for the next few days then they expect the agency to be as well. If they need a last minute poster to react to the events of the day then it is going to mean working through the night. You can produce a brilliant, bold piece of communication then watch politicians take cold feet and it’s soon heading straight for the pile marked ‘thanks but no thanks’.
Then there is the potential for disaster at every turn. I remember in 2003 standing in a very wet Parliament Square in Edinburgh watching in horror as our final poster of the campaign became more and more rain soaked to slowly reveal the Tories poster from the previous day underneath.
Thankfully that didn’t attract any significant press comment but you are always one mishap away from being on the front page of the Daily Record. I often wonder why any sane agency would want to get involved. The reason is that no other sector offers the potential profile and the unique experience that comes from working on a campaign. Where else would you be delivering an ad concept at 5pm, testing it in focus groups at 7pm, debriefing the client at 11pm and driving past it as a billboard a few days later? The sheer adrenaline and buzz that comes from working at that pace is fantastic. It is fast, it is vibrant and it can be addictive. Working on political advertising campaigns has given me some of the most memorable moments of my career.
I remember the thrill of testing the image of William Hague in a Margaret Thatcher wig in the 2001 election and watching the response from voters. We knew right away it was going to be a defining poster of the campaign. I recall flicking through the ad concepts from TBWA/Edinburgh in 2003 and finding the simple image of a Scotland torn from England and the words ‘Then What?’ and knowing that here was a poster that summed up the folly of independence far more than any 100 page policy document ever could.
High profile
It doesn’t even need to be a high profile poster. In 2003 we produced a fairly low level leaflet on what Labour had achieved for pensioners.
The concept was simple – an illustration of a pensioner waiting at a bus stop with the line ‘You wait for ages and then three come at once’. Turn it over to discover that in the last four years Labour in the Scottish Parliament had provided free bus travel, free care for the elderly and free central heating to benefit older people.
Just getting the leaflet agreed was a battle as politicians needed persuaded that using
a cartoon illustration wasn’t undermining the serious business of politics and that we didn’t need to scream Labour on the front of every piece of communication. But the battle was won and it went out. Just a few days later I feared the worst as I was approached by one of our no nonsense Glasgow MSPs wanting to talk about ‘that leaflet’. He told me that he had opened the box and thought what the hell is this? He handed it to his activists and their reaction was the same. But they took it out on the streets and had received the best reaction they had ever experienced to a Labour leaflet.
When you get it right and the voters respond then it is quite magical. Working for a political party is perhaps the ultimate gamble for an agency. The high profile nature of the work makes it high risk and high reward. Produce a killer poster and you will forever be credited as the person who won the election single handed.
Mess up and you are blamed for the defeat or front page news. Just ask the agency who airbrushed David Cameron to look a little too perfect.
Right now the battle lines for the coming campaign are being drawn. It will be interesting to see the tone of each party’s campaign and the balance between positive and negative advertising. There is a myth in political advertising that only negative campaigning really works but it only works if it is based on an existing truth.
Attacking William Hague by placing him in a Thatcher wig was only accepted by voters because it was funny and, more importantly, because voters were genuinely concerned about going back to the Tories if they were still the party of Thatcher and the Poll Tax.
Vindictive
Going negative just for the sake of it will risk you ending up looking petty and vindictive like the Tories did when they portrayed Tony Blair with devil eyes in1997 or the SNP did in the run up to 2003 when they produced a New Year poster showing Jack McConnell as a cigarette being stubbed out in an ashtray. Yes it was as bad as it sounds.
The first Conservative poster sets out their initial strategy quite clearly. Focus on the need for change and emphasise the leader rather than the party. The sensible thing to do when polling shows that the Cameron brand is more popular in the country than the Conservative brand. No doubt attacks on Labour and Gordon Brown will follow. For Labour the challenge The Conservative Party’s newly launched campaign has caused a stir; while Labour’s worries of old were different to today’s problems is how to look fresh and represent the change the country needs when you are the incumbent who has been in power for the last 12 years.
The threat of Tory cuts may not be as potent given the global recession and Cameron provides a less obvious link to the Thatcher Government than William Hague or Michael Howard did.
That said I still wouldn’t rule out them producing the defining image of the campaign as they have done in recent elections. The other parties will be struggling to compete as the big two dominate the debate. No one knows exactly how the election campaign will unfold but the one thing we can be sure of is that it will be fascinating.
Steven Lawther is the founder of Red Circle Communications and former Head of Communications for the Scottish Labour Party. He has worked on political campaigns since1992. He continues to advise the Labour Party on polling, advertising and communication. He recently worked on a major public opinion survey for the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland and spent time at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research – a leading US polling agency – during the 2004 US Presidential Elections.