Insight: Political Advertising

As the dust settles on the UK 2015 general election, Selena Schleh investigates the changing face of political advertising across the world, from bland broadcasts and punchy posters to merciless memes and high-tech holograms

When it comes to an advertising brief, could there be anything less thankless than politics? Endlessly spoofed and derided as bitter, dull or hopelessly out-of-touch, political advertising makes selling cigarettes, gas-guzzling cars and sugar-laced foods look like a walk in the park. Risk-averse politicians are the clients from hell, and creative opportunities few and far between. Only one campaign – Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid – has ever won at Cannes.

Plus, there’s no hard-and-fast evidence it even works. In his recent book Mad Men & Bad Men: What Happened When Politics Met Advertising, journalist Sam Delaney examined the past four UK elections and concluded that while an agency’s strategic thinking, discipline and focus can certainly help shape political campaigns and give parties a better chance of winning, individual adverts have never changed the result.

Yet the sums blown by power-hungry parties on posters, broadcasts, tweets and films are eye-watering. India’s general elections last year commanded a total advertising budget of US$300 million – small change compared with the US presidential elections in 2012, where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a combined US$900 million on their marketing campaigns. In the wake of the 2015 UK general election, shots takes a look at the ads which broke the mould and the trends shaping the future.

Fear and loathing versus hope and positivity

When it comes to political advertising, one of the biggest complaints is its unfailingly negative tone. That’s a pedigree you can blame on the Saatchi brothers, who set the trend in the UK with Labour Isn’t Working – their infamous 1979 poster for the UK Conservative party with its endless queue of unemployed workers. Forty years later, the ad has inspired endless pastiches, been awarded Campaign’s poster of the century, and was even resurrected by the Labour party in this year’s UK general election under the headline ‘The doctor won’t see you now’ to highlight the increase in waiting times. Delaney describes it as “the poster which changed everything” because it “heralded the moment when the gloves came off”.

Daisy Girl, DDB’s attack broadcast for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 election campaign, set an even blacker tone. In a bucolic setting, a young girl innocently plucks the petals off a flower, but her childish counting is interrupted by an official voice-over: cue a massive, mushroom-cloud nuclear explosion. Despite being aired just once, the ad’s powerful subtext – vote for the opposition and he’ll blow up our innocents – was credited with helping sweep Johnson to victory. “[Daisy Girl] encapsulates the kind of negativity that has come to dominate political advertising in the States,” says Michael Franz, co-founder of the Wesleyan Media Project, an academic organisation tracking political broadcasting in the US.

The tendency to ‘go negative’ is all down to the emotions being traded, says Benedict Pringle, the account executive behind the blog politicaladvertising.co.uk; “You can dress it up any way you like, but essentially there are only two political campaigns you can run. As an incumbent, you sell fear: ‘Things are going ok – so don’t let the other lot back in because they’ll balls it all up.’ As a challenger, you sell anger: ‘It’s time for a change.’”

Plus, there’s significant evidence that putting the boot in is a quicker and more effective way of getting your message across than singing your own praises. That’s down to two things, says Pringle: firstly, “there’s almost nothing negative you can say about a politician that people won’t believe”; secondly, we remember negative ads, as a kind of “evolutionary” response. 

Franz agrees that US candidates and consultants “see negativity as the key to success”. It’s a similar story down under.  “When it comes to sport and politics, Australians don’t tolerate mediocrity and are quick to judge and condemn those who don’t live up to expectations,” explains James Needham, a planning director at CHE Proximity Sydney. “Ads that dramatise and demonise the failings of governments tend to resonate the most.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. A rare example of a positive – and highly effective – campaign was Barack Obama’s 2008 presidency bid, its message of hope perfectly summed up by the Shepard Fairey ‘Hope’ poster. A witty highlight was The Great Schlep, created by Droga5 New York for political action group the Jewish Council for Education and Research, which centred on securing Florida – a key swing state – for the Democrats. Opting to tackle the brief with humour, the agency enlisted aggressively non-PC comedian Sarah Silverman to galvanise young voters to travel (‘schlep’) to their grandparents in Florida and convince them to vote for Obama. “Given the dynamic, it seemed like comedy – the best of which is firmly rooted in honesty – was the only way to go,” explains Andrew Essex, vice chairman of Droga5 NY.

Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting spot sees Silverman bring together a Jewish nana and a young black man over a shared love of tracksuits, Cadillacs, bling… and the fact that “all their friends are dying”. Essex admits there were “a few references to Nazis with strap-ons that we had to gently encourage her to reconsider”, but that Silverman was “the one and only” choice to front the campaign and “got the idea immediately”. Moreover, her Jewish heritage gave her authenticity: “When you use a celebrity for celebrity’s sake, it suggests there’s no real idea…If the person has a relevant connection to the material, they can cut through the clutter like little else.” The gamble paid off creatively, scoring the work a Titanium Lion, but, perhaps more importantly, proved hugely effective: Obama received the highest elderly Jewish vote in 30 years and won Florida by 170,000 votes.

Glance at some of the 2015 UK election offerings though, and it’s clear that negativity still rules. While claiming to run a ‘clean campaign’, Labour and Beattie McGuinness Bungay played on fears of further National Health Service (NHS) cuts with their tagline ‘Next Time, They’ll Cut To The Bone’ above an X-rayed fracture. M&C Saatchi’s sledgehammer efforts for the Conservatives, meanwhile, included a wrecking ball smashing into the slogan ‘A Recovering Economy: Don’t Let Labour Wreck It’. 

A more creative approach is to temper nastiness with clever humour – but, says Delaney, that generally requires the confidence of a comfortable majority. ‘Sometimes in elections that aren’t that close run you can get away with it.” He cites the “witty” and “cocky” ads produced by Trevor Beattie (then creative director at TBWA) for the UK Labour party in 2001, when the party was an election shoo-in. Witness the famous ‘Wiggy’ poster, warning voters to ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid’ of Conservative leader William Hague in ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s bouffant blonde wig: it raised eyebrows but quite a few chuckles, too, making people feel warm-hearted towards the Labour party while ultimately making a serious point.

In a similar vein, the big ad hit of this year’s UK general election was M&C Saatchi’s In His Pocket poster, which played on English voters’ fears of a Labour-SNP (Scottish National Party) coalition, with a Photoshopped Labour leader Ed Miliband in (former first minister of Scotland) Alex Salmond’s pocket. A single, powerful message, simply and wittily expressed in a way everyone could understand, politicaladvertising.co.uk’s Pringle says this could be “one of the most effective political posters of all time”. 

Labour tried to neutralise its impact by ruling out a formal coalition with the SNP, but in time-honoured style, the Conservatives and M&C Saatchi ruthlessly hammered home the message with a sinister animation, Call The Tune, which peeped through a keyhole at Westminster to show Miliband dancing a helpless jig for the Pied Piper-esque Salmond. And the strategy worked. The spectre of a post-election deal was a key factor in Labour’s defeat at the hands of the Conservative party. As Delaney points out, “people vote out of fear, fear of change. If you can identify what people are most scared of, and play on that in your advertising, that’s the way to win.”

Boring politicians talking bollocks

Attack ads may leave a bad taste in the mouth, but at least they’re not dull.  At the other end of the spectrum is the official party broadcast. In the UK, US and Australia, that has generally meant one thing: “Boring politicians talking a load of old bollocks from behind a desk” as Delaney puts it. Contrast that with the glorious free-for-all on TV screens during Brazil’s elections, where every candidate – from presidential to city councillor level – gets a free airtime slot and Jesus, clowns and superheroes vie for viewers’ attention. “[It has] transformed political broadcasts into either the most boring or the funniest thing to watch,” comments Mariana Borga, a creative director at JWT Brazil, “depending if you’re optimistic or not.”

It didn’t feature a candidate decked out as Wonder Woman, but the Labour Party’s 2014 European and local election broadcast The Uncredible Shrinking Man was a mould-breaker nonetheless. Created by London shop Lucky Generals, the 1950s sci-fi pastiche played on the public perception of then-deputy PM Nick Clegg as a political pushover, dwindling in size with every broken election promise.  Although the ad drew ire (The Guardian called it a ‘classic example of politics with all the hope stripped away’) it also grabbed people’s attention, with agency co-founder Andy Nairn insisting it was “humorous rather than vicious – and underpinned with real substance”.  The follow-up stunt, Easter Cleggs, immortalised the Liberal Democrat leader as a chocolate treat in a box proclaiming “contains no nuts”, “completely hollow”, and “100% artificially Conservative”.  

Often it’s the smaller parties who take bigger creative risks with their advertising, as the UK Green party proved with its offbeat broadcast this year. In Change The Tune, Creature of London and comedy director Johnny Hopkins – known for his ‘singing farmers’ spot for dairy brand Yeo Valley – highlighted the homogeneity of the Greens’ opponents by imagining their leaders as an identikit 90s boy band. Having rejected past offers to shoot election broadcasts (“having a politician talk down the lens just doesn’t engage me”), Hopkins says it was a chance to bring some fun and appeal to a business that’s often “full of bitterness”: “It feels like politics has been wasting big opportunities to engage with the audience in an innovativeand entertaining way through the medium of film.” 

Nairn agrees that in an age of increasing political disengagement, there’s a strong argument for a more creative approach to advertising. Ultimately, though, it can only ever be about effectiveness. “More than any other category, the results are absolutely definitive and brutally public. So a lacklustre campaign that gets you over the line will always be preferred to a dazzling one that doesn’t garner votes.” 

Tea parties and tweets

Creative green shoots may be emerging, but technology is also shaking up traditional communication channels in politics. During India’s elections last year, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi took inspiration from an unlikely source: rapper Tupac Shakur’s ‘resurrection’ at Coachella. He enlisted the same digital agency, London-based Musion Das Hologram, to create a Modi hologram, which was beamed out to 1,400 different rallies simultaneously. Equally innovative was Obama’s decision to exploit the growing gaming industry in a move which saw ‘Vote Obama’ ads pop up in 18 video and smartphone games, from Tetris to Burnout Paradise.

In the UK, too, the days of rolling out a campaign across the nation’s billboards are clearly over: The Times reported earlier this year that parties’ spending on outdoor posters was down by 50 per cent from 2010. With paid-for TV advertising, the most impactful medium for politics, still banned under UK law, the Conservative Party turned to video-sharing on YouTube to get round the problem by using pre-roll advertising to push out a swathe of US-style attack ads such as Call The Tune. With Google tracking algorithms allowing for micro-targeting of adverts by age, gender, and location, the party could focus on marginal constituents and floating voters, just as Obama used sophisticated data analytics to laser-target his TV campaigns. With none of the rival parties having the funds to follow suit, those millions of YouTube views undoubtedly played a part in the Conservative victory.

In general, the interactive opportunities offered by social media, particularly with a younger demographic, have seen it grab an ever-increasing slice of campaign budgets. As ever, Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns are the gold standard, says digital brand strategist Beckie Williams, former head of social at Converse. Chatting on Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions (a tactic also seen in Australia’s 2013 elections); inviting America’s top vloggers to quiz him on superpowers and social reform; and not forgetting that record-breaking ‘Four more years’ 2012 victory night tweet, “Obama proved that with creativity and a genuine understanding of the spaces (and the audiences, crucially) social media can be a fantastic tool with which to engage and inspire,” says Williams.

Given how visual elections are, says Simon Francis, director of PR and digital agency Claremont Communications, Instagram is a social media platform that has so far been underused. That could all change next year, with the Washington Post suggesting that now it has overtaken Twitter in user numbers, the battleground for the 2016 presidential elections could move to Instagram. It can also be a powerful organisational aid as India’s BJP showed in the 2014 elections, using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to publicise on-the-ground events such as rallies and interactive ‘tea parties’ – live question-and-answer sessions with leader Modi, screened at tea shacks around the country, which were lauded as a pioneering fusion of the traditional and the technological.  

With 2015 touted as the UK’s first ‘social election’, much was made of Obama’s seasoned strategists David Axelrod and Jim Messina joining Labour’s and the Conservatives’ respective campaigns, which signalled a seismic shift away from a previously guarded approach. (Who could forget David Cameron’s “too many tweets make a twat” comment?) While Labour got all chatty with its ‘four million online conversations’ pledge, the Conservative campaign adopted an ‘impressions’ approach, shelling out a whopping £100,000 a week on Facebook adverts and using social media to broadcast ‘top down’ communications and amplify the messages in traditional print media.

How far this helped win them the election isn’t yet clear, but Williams thinks “these bland and generic strategies ignored the greatest opportunity that social media presents – actual dialogue with the public. Done well, social media could be the world’s biggest and most effective doorstop, helping people get to know and understand the candidates vying to represent them – and in turn, help candidates understand the people they are hoping to represent.”

When it comes to shareable, creative content, parties should look at what’s being generated outside official channels, continues Williams. Take creative tech agency +Rehabstudio, which added some much-needed political vocab to the emoji lexicon with ‘politicons’ including ‘smiley poo’ party logos, a smoking gun and a crying NHS nurse. Or the many parodists, both amateur and professional, whose creations now reach mass audiences online.

Cameron takes the rap and Mitt gets Gangnammed

British mash-ups artists Cassetteboy (see ‘The power of political parody’, above) have secured the kind of viral success political parties can only dream of. Cameron’s Conference Rap mashed up Eminem’s Lose Yourself with the Prime Minister’s speeches, causing him to spit rhymes about falling wages (‘We have the bravery/To bring back slavery’) and social class (‘I’m hardcore/And I know the score/I’m disgusted by the poor’). The result garnered five million views online; the official speech, a paltry 44,000. 

Elsewhere, the satirical standout of 2012 was Mitt Romney Style, from LA-based comedy website CollegeHumor. Slick production values coupled with on-point lyrics lampooning the Republican candidate’s ‘benefit hopping’, distinguished hair and over-privileged progeny bagged the Gangnam Style spoof 57 million YouTube views.

Some candidates have taken an ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ approach: in 2013, Julian Assange popped up in a spoof election broadcast for Juice Media’s Rap News, to bolster his Australian Senate bid. A Game Of Polls saw the Wikileaks founder don a mullet wig and bandana and mime along to chart-topper You’re The Voice, in a baffling attempt to present himself as a bona fide ‘bogan’ [unsophisticated person]. Though it went down surprisingly well online, the stunt ultimately failed to secure Assange a seat.

Obama, too, goofed around to great effect with a selfie stick and Joe Biden’s sunglasses in a recent Buzzfeed spot to promote his HealthCare.gov initiative, Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About. Arguably, success all comes down to national attitudes. Australians generally dislike grandstanders, or ‘tall poppies’, explains CHE Proximity’s Needham. But in Britain, most people still expect politicians to conduct themselves “with a bit of self-respect”, argues Cassetteboy’s Mike, which is why the Liberal Democrats’ ‘joke’ mash-up of Clegg’s speeches bombed so spectacularly.  

So is there any way for political parties to ‘spoof-proof’ their adverts? In an age of universally accessible editing tools such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, the answer is no. “You have to accept that you can’t second-guess what people will try to do,” says Delaney. “What you can do is avoid giving them open goals.” A classic example referenced by both Delaney and Pringle is Euro RSCG London’s much-derided 2010 campaign poster of David Cameron alongside the headline: ‘We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS’, which spawned its own spoof-generating site, mydavidcameron.com. As well as lacking intellectual clarity, a zealous hand with the airbrush left Cameron looking like a beauty counter assistant. It was a “terrible” poster, says Pringle, “which quite rightly got put to the sword.” 

Equally spoofworthy was the M&C Saatchi In His Pocket poster, but here the parodies were a bonus, because the original was a creatively strong offering in its own right. “M&C Saatchi would have known that it would attract lots of media coverage, and the spoofs would just extend its lifespan by getting more people discussing it,” says Pringle. And when it comes to political ads, generating a media buzz is the name of the game, agrees Delaney. Sharing memes and mash-ups on social media isn’t enough to make a difference – because friends and followers usually have similar political values. “Effectively you’re trying to convince people who don’t need convincing [to vote a certain way] rather than reaching the true ‘floating voters’ who ultimately decide an election.”

Three’s a crowd

While the average Joe creating memes and spoofs for lolz may not be changing the course of history, there are other, more powerful players emerging in the field. Benedict Pringle and Michael Franz both agree that the rise of these third party influencers is currently one of the biggest trends in political advertising – and one which looks set to continue.

They include political pressure groups, such as the UK’s Operation Black Vote, who enlisted Saatchi & Saatchi London to create a print and online campaign in which several black celebrities, including Homeland actor David Harewood and footballer Sol Campbell, appear “whited up” alongside the tagline: ‘If you don’t register to vote, you’re taking the colour out of Britain’. How effective the campaign has been in galvanising black voters isn’t yet clear, but it has been hailed as one of the most striking pieces of advertising to emerge from the UK 2015 election. 

In the US, says Franz, it’s the super PACs (independent political action committees which aren’t required to disclose their sources of funding) that are dominating political advertising. Not only is their advertising output prolific, much of it is framed as real life stories which Franz’s Wesleyan Media Foundation identifies as resonating most with voters. Take 2012 TV spot Stage, released by pro-Obama group Priorities USA Action, in which a blue-collar worker talks of building a stage at a paper plant, only for executives to use it to announce his firing following a takeover by Mitt Romney’s company, Bain Capital. The ad closes with the line: “Turns out that when we were building that stage, I was building my own coffin.” “That still gives me chills when I think about it,” says Franz, “because it’s such a powerful message.”

It turned out that quite a few voters shared Franz’s response; the ad was widely credited with torpedoing the Republican party’s hopes in Ohio. Franz predicts a huge increase in super PAC-sponsored attack ads versus those released by the parties in the 2016 presidential elections. As well as raising questions about transparency and accountability, it’s a trend which won’t help the prevailing climate of negativity. “The fact that anyone can say anything creates a vicious atmosphere,” agrees Pringle.

Independent creators were behind much of Obama’s 2008 campaign, too – from street artist Shepard Fairey, to director Charles Stone III, who rebooted the Budweiser Wassup adverts. Showing the original characters in miserable straits after seven years under ‘Dubya’, the heavily critical spot secured a special jury commendation at Cannes, as “an extraordinary piece of work…a standalone political statement [that] is perhaps second to none”.

Celebrity endorsements can be hugely influential. While political parties have long relied on star power to sex up their official ads – most recently, the UK Labour party chose The Hobbit actor Martin Freeman to front their election broadcast – hip-hop artist will.i.am’s Yes We Can music video was a powerful piece of content that was created entirely independently of Obama’s official camp. At a time when Hillary Clinton was the favourite to lead the Democrats, says Pringle, “the impact of a pop star may well have changed the course of history.” 

Similarly, in India’s 2014 elections, the most talked-about ad was an unofficial poster, put out by model Meghna Patel, who went all American Beauty in support of Narendra Modi by posing naked – with only a handful of petals to spare her blushes – on a bed of roses. Though the BJP party threw a virtual modesty blanket over the ad – “We are not in support of such vulgar displays…and we completely condemn this behaviour” – the resulting media furore only fuelled Modi’s election campaign.

It’s a similar story in Brazil. “The most interesting initiatives of the last couple of years appeared not from the candidates’ marketing [departments], but spontaneously, from internet users,” says Mariana Borga of JWT Brazil. She references a popular fictional Facebook character, Dilma Bolada (‘Crazy’ or ‘Badass’ Dilma), the straight-talking alter-ego of Brazil’s current President Dilma Rousseff. Created by student Jeferson Monteiro, Dilma’s fake Facebook profile has attracted over 1.6 million ‘likes’ and scooped a 2013 Shorty Award (the Oscars of the social media world) for Brazil. Rousseff even agreed to an interview with her virtual doppelgänger, thereby boosting her own social media following and the popularity of a campaign mired in allegations of serious corruption.

Turning a problem into a solution

So what does the future hold for political advertising? It goes without saying that social media will continue to exert huge influence. As Popbitch founder Camilla Wright pointed out in her AdWeek Europe 2015 talk: “by the next [UK general] election in 2020, the voters will have grown up using it.” In order to translate that into an election advantage, political parties will need to tailor their content and messages accordingly, says Claremont Communications’ Francis. “It’s all very well paying for impressions and likes… but you need to make sure that your content is as shareable as possible and that you’re having the right conversations.”

As for the political poster, both Delaney and Pringle maintain it is here to stay – albeit largely in digital form. But, quoting Jeremy Sinclair, the creative mastermind behind many of the successful UK Conservative campaigns, Delaney says posters will always remain relevant, even though mediums change, “because if you can’t boil down your core message to five or six words in a punchy headline, the chances are that your message isn’t right in the first place.” And there will always be a role for agencies in crafting these messages, says Pringle. “Politics can be complicated and politicians tend to nuance the statements they’re making in order for them not to be taken the wrong way. That can lead to very verbose, cluttered and fuzzy communications. Ad agencies can help to distil these complex messages into something incredibly clear and impactful.” Delaney agrees: “Politicians are not naturally capable of giving people simple, understandable messages that are a fair reflection of the values they represent. Admen, however, specialise in creating those sorts of messages – which can only be good for politics.”

Win or lose, even the worst cases of political advertising can serve a common good. Witness a recent creative initiative from JWT Brazil and Mobilize Brasil, who came up with a novel way to tackle one of Brazil’s biggest post-election bugbears: illegally-placed sandwich boards advertising candidates’ names and numbers. As well as lacking creativity, being “without concept, philosophy or ideology” says JWT’s Borga, the placards disrupted mobility, creating over 250 tonnes of rubbish in São Paulo last year. The answer? Turn them into sleek, useful furniture. Designer Mauricio Arruda published the designs – including the droll ‘mesa de centro’ table – alongside step-by-step tutorials. “By thinking of a more useful destination for that material, we turned a problem into a solution,” says Borga of the project. If only politics were that simple, effective and positive…