The Home Office 'Go Home' poster vans – shockingly racist and a brilliant piece of marketing
The Home Office campaign telling illegal immigrants to 'go home' certainly turned heads and got people talking, and while controversial, Debbie Simmons, chairman at brand activation agency Incahoots, argues it as great piece of marketing for exactly that reason.
Last week, the papers and TV rolling news were full of the story of The Home Office’s ‘Go Home’ poster vans; mobile billboard ads aimed at encouraging illegal immigrants in London to go home of their own accord or face arrest.
Quite rightly, this did not go down well with many people. Unite Union leader Len McCluskey and new peer Doreen Lawrence said that the messages on vans were hateful and involved racial profiling. Vince Cable, the business secretary, called them ‘stupid’ and ‘offensive’. Even the UKIP leader Nigel Farage condemned the vans, saying they were ‘not the British way’.
But I disagree with LibDem leader Nick Clegg when he says that the vans were ‘driving aimlessly around North London’ and that they are ‘not a very clever way’ of tackling the issue.
We need to put this in context. The Conservative Party has had a pretty bad year when it comes to the issue of immigration. UKIP thrashed the Conservatives in the local council elections in March partly due to the Tories’ inability to address people’s concerns about immigration. Nigel Farage, the self-styled man of the people, has been on every TV news programme and every newspaper giving the British voters a clear, strong line on immigration. David Cameron and the Tory leadership has kept a dignified near-silence. Until now.
Enter the immigration vans. Every media outlet picked up on the story. Shots of the van, along with a direct call to action text number were, and still are, in all major newspapers. The coverage has spread to TV and radio. Even the nation’s favourite chat show – ITV Daybreak – ran the story.
Is it possible that the Home Office has taken a small budget and generated, via a controversial ambush marketing campaign, huge amounts of publicity on purpose? I believe so.
The voting public now know that the Home Office is serious about waging war on immigration and the Conservative Party didn’t have to pay for a 10m door drop, or an expensive TV ad campaign. They didn’t need a trendy celebrity spokesperson or the latest background track from a number one seller.
The Home Office paid for six vans to travel around a tiny area of London for one week only. My guess is the whole campaign cost less than £20,000 – reportedly just £10,000 – and took two weeks to devise and implement. Yet this campaign has generated millions of pounds worth of coverage.
Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, recently said in an interview that he loved all his negative publicity as it put ‘bums on his seats’. Benetton shot to global fame with its risqué ads.
Could it be that our Home Office, which we believe to be filled with stuffed shirts and box tickers, decided to outwit us all? Call the media’s bluff? I can imagine the conversations around the Home Office table: “It’s controversial sir, but I guarantee it’ll get the nation talking!’ And it certainly did.