This week we’re running a series featuring five of the most effective political adverts. After looking at the US and Australia, today it is back to the UK and the 1997 general election campaign:
Yesterday’s Australian advert, It’s Time, looked as much like a music video as a political advert. Music too played a major role in one of the UK Labour Party’s 1997 general election broadcasts, and the most powerful of all the ones I’ve seen ‘live’ at the time of broadcast.
As in the Australian Labor Party’s case, Labour too had been out of power for a long time – 18 years this time – and also faced an incumbent government that many felt had passed its sell-by date. The genius of the Labour ’97 effort was to put together ingredients which usually featured in Conservative broadcasts – patriotic music, Union Jacks, Conservative ministers, celebrating Conservative members – and turn them into a devastating attack, raising fears of what another term of Conservative government might do.
As I noted in my previous blog post about this broadcast, watch out for the very different way in which Ken Clarke was viewed then compared with now:
(Also available on YouTube here.)
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…
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6 Comments
A fantastic advert, which caught the feeling of the time. That the Tories had messed up, and it was time for a change.
What is striking is that, after Labour had made such an utter mess of things, the Tories didn’t come up with something similarly devastating last May.
“What is striking is that, after Labour had made such an utter mess of things, the Tories didn’t come up with something similarly devastating last May.”
I suppose it was their failure to land the killer punch which lost them the election. Thank goodness for their new friends, the Lib Dems!
A nomination for tomorrow:
http://pebs.group.shef.ac.uk/sir-hartley-shawcross-and-christopher-mayhew
Or Rosie Barnes stroking that sodding rabbit.
I’m interested. This ad worked, but how many of those claims were anything like true?
Were there 50k fewer nurses?
Would the old age pension be abolished?
Had crime doubled?
Would VAT be put on food?
I can see a couple that look credible – eg Crime figures, though it looked like a rise of 70% to 1995 then a fall back of 10%.
Political advertising as the search for the most effective FUD. On all sides.
Depressing.
The Tories had a specific plan for pensions that could quite reasonably be said to be the abolition of the state pension, yes. Ken Clarke told journalists on more than one occasion he wanted to extend VAT to food. Crime had more than doubled and yes, nurse numbers had fallen.
Had forgotten that the Brighton Centre featured so prominently…….also rather more sand apparently on the beach in front of it than is usually the case!