Oh dear. You’d have thought a party funded by non-doms like Lord Ascroft and Zac Goldsmith would at least have the money to throw at professional, vote-winning advertising. Thankfully, though the Tories may preach value-for-money to others, they show zero signs of putting it into effect themselves.
Example One: Political posters
The Tories, after all, are the party which brought us the most famous British advertising slogan of all times: Labour Isn’t Working.
Yet their most recent attempt – the confused and confusing “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS” – brought universal derision thanks to the weak message, the air-brushed Dave image, and the crowd-sourced satirical efforts courtesy mydavidcameron.com.
The result: the Tories have sidelined advertising agency Euro RSCG just weeks before polling day, and reverted to the tried-and-tested M&C Saatchi.
Example Two: Online campaigning
Time was the Tories were lauded as the party which ‘got’ Web 2.0: they dominated the blogosphere, had thrown money at their Internet strategy. Those days seem so far away now.
This week, the Tories launched CashGordon, a doomed exercise which can perhaps be filed under, ‘It seemed a good idea at the time’. (Or, alternatively, ‘This is what happens when you let kids run the place.’)
First came the news that the Tories’ CashGordon had used an off-the-shelf template developed by a US anti-healthcare lobbyist. Not great timing in the week President Obama is being praised to the skies for defeating US anti-healthcare lobbyists.
Then it dawned on the Tories that perhaps allowing anyone to post a Tweet to their site without moderation wasn’t perhaps such a great idea – Twitter users flooded the site with obscene messages, and code that allowed the site to be hacked and redirected.
And then the final humiliation: the exposure that the girlfriend of Samuel Coates, the Tories’ online campaigning guru, had phoned the employers of a Twitter user threatening litigation against him for tweeting to the site.
The result: CashGordon dies a miserable death.
Example Three: Fundraising videos
Tory blogger Iain Dale highlights today the video of Tory candidate Anthony Calvert, intended to inspire donations to his campaign to unseat Labour’s Ed Balls. Here’s the video:
Now, I haven’t actually been able to watch it, as the video doesn’t load. So my following comments are based on seeing a pictures-only version …
Why on earth did the Tories choose to highlight Michael Portillo’s defeat? This seems a crashingly bad idea on at least three levels. First, Portillo’s defeat reminds most people how glad they were to be rid of the Tories 13 years ago. Secondly, Portillo isn’t popular even with Tories – so why use him to promote your candidacy? And, thirdly, the target of the ad is (I understand) Labour’s Ed Balls – so why would you focus so much on Portillo?
The result: a prime political example of how not to use video, let alone to motivate potential donors.
Overall
Well, from a Lib Dem perspective all I can say is that I sincerely hope the Tories Carry On Advertising as they have so far this year: wasting their donors’ money, and sending their party’s ratings into a nose-dive. Now that’s what I call a double-whammy.
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10 Comments
I think the Calvert video is aimed at Tories not ordinary voters. That is why he talks about “us Conservatives”. It is a fund raiser aimed at people who dislike Balls. Admittedly that contains a lot of Labour MPs but on balance Tory activists are the target audience.
The video is a rookie mistake — it is essentially the headline of the video about a well remember Labour victory. Thanks for the memory Anthony.
@ Guido – I don’t disagree – so why not feature Balls? Why focus on Portillo, and one of the most iconic moments of political televisual history celebrating Tory defeat? It’s just bizarre.
The proof is in the pudding, how much does it raise. It is about stirring up Tory activists desire for revenge on one of the most detested Labour MPs.
Indeed, Stephen. There are not many more things more joyous in this life than the sight of Tories burning their own money.
Stephen, having watched it, I think the video is quite effective at getting the message across to the target audience.
It was an iconic defeat still remembered now, in a constituency that should be considered ‘safe’, but was lost as the big outlier result.
He’s in with a chance of doing the same in M&O (true), but needs money to do so, and he’d like to be the headline of the night this time oaround, castrate LAbour, chop off Balls (not a bad line for targetting at Tories).
It’s not brilliant, but it is effective; do to them what they did to us when we lost.
As it happened, I considered going for M&O for us (just down the road from here), I see they’ve now selected, might’ve been a fun campaign winding Balls up at Hustings.
“CashGordon had used an off-the-shelf template developed by a US anti-healthcare lobbyist”
I’m not sure that the origins of the product should matter. The whole point of a market is that one does not need to know about the producers of products, or share their beliefs. It coordinates behaviour at a distance. I’m sure that Nick Griffin buys food that has been packaged by immigrants, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Church of England owns shares in Richard Dawkins’ publisher.
It would be different if there was cross-subsidy going on: if the platform was being sold to finance the anti-healthcare campaign. That would be like buying Iranian oil or Russian gas. But then again, I’m sure we’ve all had the central heating on this winter!
@ MatGB – actually the full video is less worse than I made it out to be (now I’ve been able to watch it in full) – though I still don’t think it’s great.
What doesn’t work is the short clip used in the MessageSpace ads which focuses only on Portillo.
Ah, that is a weird position to take in the clip advert, yes. If it’s getting plastered around the place then it’s not just going to be seen by the target.
I never see Messagespace ads these days, while I won’t use adblock, I’ve blocked stuff from their server from loading, they’re simply too obnoxious and the expand-on-mouseover image ads are bloody awful on a small screen netbook, which is what I do most of my browsing with.
Tom, I think the basic thing is that when buying any product or service, you try to get the best deal in terms of cost/benefit. Obviously, we don’t know what these guys charged, but whatever it was it appears to have been too much.
If you get the best possible deal, but it’s from a dodgy supplier, then you’ve at least got a post-hoc excuse. But if you get a crap deal and a crap product from a supplier that’s also done a bad job for your extremist friends across the pond?