This week we’re running a series featuring five of the most effective political adverts. Today the series finishes with the Conservative 1992 classic:
Labour’s margin of victory in 1997 was so great that it would have almost certainly won even if it had run an appalling set of adverts rather than ones of the quality of yesterday’s party political broadcast.
However, Labour’s defeat in the previous 1992 election had a lot to do with the way the Conservatives expertly attacked Labour’s economic policies via advertising, raising fears of a tax bombshell that would hit ordinary people.
As with the Australian Labor Party’s It’s Time, this was not a stand-alone advert but part of a wider communications campaign, highlighting how even the very best of political advertisements only rarely work well in a vacuum. Instead they use the creative power of an advert to tap into wider fears and hopes.
Here’s the advert:
You can see all the posts in this series on our Political Ads page – and scroll to the bottom of that page for Luis Fishman’s classic. The stretch from 7 seconds in until 22 seconds in is fairly normal. But as for the rest…