Saatchi & Saatchi will not back Labour at the election
Creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi will not back former client the Labour Party at this year’s election and expect a Conservative win, according to chief executive Robert Senior.
Senior told The Telegraph that the agency, which handled Labour’s advertising during the last election, would not be returning for a second campaign with the party.
He told the newspaper: “In political advertising, just like any advertising but even more so, the team has to believe in the cause and what it is pushing and it’s a very different beast now and I think there are plenty of other things that we should be focusing on.”
The agency, which masterminded Margaret Thatcher’s three election victories for the Conservatives, was appointed by the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2007 to handle his Labour party’s advertising.
However, it would appear that the both Saatchi & Saatchi and Labour about have drifted apart over the last five years. Senior believes that Labour’s key election charge around the NHS is not enough to claim victory of what “potentially” is going to be one of the “most boring elections in British history”. He also rubbished the Liberal Democrats chances and predicts they will plummet into “obsolescence”.
Senior, who was promoted to chief executive of Saathci & Saatchi last September, added: “The ideas that have laid the foundation for political thinking since the Cold War have been democracy, American power and markets and all three of those ideas have been challenged quite fundamentally recently.
“There’s a void and a moment in time to create fresh political narrative but this election, however, will be fought and in my opinion won by the Conservatives on the basis of what George Osborne refers to as ‘chaos and competence’ or, put another way, on the staples of the economy and personality.”
Senior’s comments further the agency’s deep-rooted ties to the country’s political landscape. It was the first to be hired by a British political party in 1978 and produced the now legendary “Labour isn’t Working” poster, which featured a lengthy queue of unemployed workers snaking into a jobs centre.