Elections are front page news in France, here in the UK and the US so I thought it might be fun to look at how vibes and ideas work in political advertising. What’s been interesting here in the UK is the distinct lack of political ads. Actual party campaign ads. Maybe everyone knew Labour would win and so decided to save their money?
My favourite political ad ever was a leaflet given to me at a Vasco de Gama football match in Rio. The message was simple; a headshot and a line saying, ‘Vote for me and I’ll reduce the entry price to the Vasco games’. It’s a bribe but a simple, honest one. In a sense all advertising is a bribe.
Most political ads are personality based and by their nature ephemeral. So it’s not surprising there are not really many, what we might call platform ideas. Usually the person is the product. The product benefits change very quickly, sometimes daily, even hourly.
In the US one of the most famous personalty based ads was the 1952 ‘I Like Ike’ campaign for Dwight Eisenhower. It’s much more like an FMCG spot from the time. It has a simple repeatable jingle that sticks in your head. Helps if it was written by Irving Berlin and animated by Disney. Helps to have a nickname too, or at least be known by one catchy name. Lula in Brazil, Boris in the UK, Obama in the US. Name recognition is everything. Which is why the Democrats are currently keeping with Biden, even though they are zimmerframing their way to an epic L.
Combine a catchy name with an arresting image and your off to the races. The Shephard Fairey screenprinted stock shot of Obama caught fire. It wasn’t politics, it was street art. It was cool. I had just moved to Brooklyn in 2008. It all felt very exciting to me. I was - still am - part of a group called Creative Social. One of the members, Louis St Pierre, worked with Shephard. We did an event at Ogilvy NY where he spoke. He signed some stickers - I have one framed in my bathroom - and then we hung out while he DJ’d at the Guggenheim. Sorry, but that IS COOL.
You couldn’t really say that Shepard’s HOPE work was an idea. It was a vibe, a style. That style was then used and used and used for four more years. Until that crazy Kony 2012 campaign, about the warlord Joseph Kony in Central Africa. I’m not sure how I got involved in that campaign. I was on the global creative board for JWT where one of the affiliate agencies in San Diego was involved in Invisible Children, the charity behind the campaign. I helped make a case study video for Cannes (I think that’s pretty much all I did at JWT for two years!) but then the founder went crazy because of all the attention. The original 30 minute film has 103m views.He was last seen running down the street naked before having a breakdown. So that was kind of that for that Shepard Fairey style. (At least within the creative community, norms still use it.)
I can’t think of an actual party campaign for the recent UK election. Saatchi & Saatchi ran a campaign called Voting is Hot AF to encourage young people to vote. This is a tried and tested way to not necessarily win support for a candidate but win some metal at the shows. More on that in a bit. Saatchi London was of course famous for running ads for the Conservative Party in the 80s. Labour Isn’t Working is the origin story of Hope. You can argue it’s just a pun but it’s a lesson in persuasion.
Being establishment in the late 70s and early 80’s was a good thing. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Saatchi built an empire, at one point they had 600 offices, on the back of those ads and the connections they got from it. You get British Ariways and so on. Maurice becomes a Lord, Charles the most famous art collector in the world. I worked for Saatchi in New York for a bit. It was a lot of fun. To this day it is the only ad agency anyone has ever heard of.
Saatchi re-incarnated, aka M&C Saatchi, made the New Labour New Danger campaign. That’s probably as close to a platform idea I’ve seen in political ads. It was about Tony Blair but bigger than Tony Blair. As much as I hate the Tories, that was also a brilliant piece of communication. The founders of M&C did actually do one ad for the recent election but it feels very dated. It doesn’t have any of the punch, the ‘brutal simplicity’ the M&C mantra, of New Labour New Danger.
An entertaining lie trumps a boring truth.
Donald Trump is a very good copywriter. Sleepy Joe Biden and Crooked Hilary are so good they negate any whataboutism. There are so many bad things about Trump it’s impossible to write a tight brief. He IS ACTUALLY A CRIMINAL yet every creative knows you can’t say that because it’s been done for Hilary Clinton. Creative don’t repeat ideas, not purely out of vanity but because a second hand message is less likely to land. Call this process Darwinian vanity.
It’s much easier for agencies to show their talents in the general political arena. As mentioned above the Saatchi ‘Voting is Hot AF’ will get them noticed and gives their designers something nice to play with. Lord Maurice is probably spinning is his House of Lords robe but whatevs. There is a whole swathe of political protest campaigns mastered by people like Led By Donkeys that deserves a separate post. I’m sticking with voting for this post.
Getting the ‘Youth To Vote’ as a campaign strategy was probably started by Rock The Vote in the US. Rock the Vote was set up by a load of Virgin Records executives. The first PSA featured Madonna doing a riff on her ‘rap’ in Vogue, changing it to Vote. It’s a perfect slice of 1990.
Music can work. Labour used D-Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ in Tony Blair’s campaign to great effect. The image of the Labour grandees awkwardly dancing on stage to it is burned into people my age’s brains. So much so, that when I was working on a campaign for Wildfarmed, a new Regenerative Farming brand, we were targeting Mum’s my age, so I wrote the line ‘Things can only get butter’. The people that got it loved it. I’ll do a post on ‘Regen’ and Food vibes soon.
In terms of the battle between strategy and vibes the late 90’s, early 00’s was prime time, strat time. All the best work had an idea. We were pre-social but there were lots of channels so 360, matching luggage, big ideas were..big. It wasn’t enough to have a vibe, you needed an endline, which if done well, explained your strategy and removed the need for a headline.
The kings of that were Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod at BMP. They created the ‘Use Your Vote’ idea for the Ministry of Sound. Like New Labour New Danger it was the perfect combination of art direction, using shocking found imagery, and copywriting to justify everything. I imagine they had the idea and tried to find a client rather than working to an MOS brief. They were lucky to have VW as client at the same time. This style of strat plus image (and no headline) was perfected with their campaign for VW Polo Automatics featuring nothing but an abandoned shoe. The vibe was no vibe! That vibe went out of vogue quite quickly, possibly because we all thought we could never do anything better.
Sometimes creatives are accused of showing too much strategy. The “Sir you’re strategy is showing’ diss. The thinking being If you’re really, really good at what you do it shouldn’t be obvious. But one of the best pieces of political advertising definitely came from a strategy. Like an actual real political voting strategy, but was still huge on vibes. Death vibes in fact.
The Great Schlep, a site where young voters were persuaded to get their grandparenets to vote for Obama was hugely strategic. You can imagine the wonks doing the math. Obama needs to win Florida but all the olds are scared of black people. So they leaned into it. They basically said, ’Tell your grandma to vote for this guy, if you don’t I won’t visit you before you die, plus it doesn’t matter you’ll be dead soon anyway’. Death is normally a total no-no but when delivered with the skill of someone as talented as Sarah Silverman it came off. Big time. Obama was the first democrat to win Florida since 1976 and first to carry it since 1948. (And it won all the awards,) The perfect example of vibes and strategy coming together for the greater good.
Let me know any other great political ads you’ve seen in the comments. I know I'm somewhat limited to the UK and US and I’m sure there is a load of other great work out there.
I’m off to Barcelona for a few weeks so I hope your summer vibes are working for you.
toodles, James