A few years ago, the LibDems asked some people from the media to a meeting to discuss how we could help them do better in an election.
I listened to everything everyone said, but it just seemed more of the same. They wanted some quite nice posters and cinema ads knocking the Tories and Labour.
Then the election, and the LibDems finish third as usual. I knew just doing some nice ads wasn’t going to change anything. I thought, like any smaller brand, if they really want to change things they need to stop copying the market leaders.
That just maintains the status quo. They need to act like one of Adam Morgan’s ‘Challenger Brands’. They need to break the market rules. They need to take a predatory look at where new votes could come from. They need to get upstream of their competition.
To come up with a strategy for that, first I needed to research the brief. The LibDems had always favoured PR (Proportional Representation). To understand what this means you have to know how voting in the UK works.
We don’t count the national vote, we count constituencies (seats). So, suppose for instance there were only 3 seats in the UK, each with 100 voters. And suppose there were only 2 parties, Labour and Conservative. Now, in the first seat Labour gets 51 votes, and Conservatives get 49.
The same in the second seat: Labour 51 votes, Conservative 49. But in the third seat, Labour get 0 votes, and Conservatives get all 100 votes.
What happens is Labour only get 102 votes to the Conservatives 198 votes. But Labour got 2 seats to the Conservatives 1 seat.
So Labour win the election because only seats are counted, not number of votes.
The LibDems thought this system was outdated and unfair, because it always resulted in them getting less MPs than they would have got if the actual number of votes were counted instead of just seats.
So I thought, that’s our brief. Switch the electoral system to Proportional Representation. But who do you target with a message like that?
Well actually there’s a very big chunk of the market we could target. In every election, only about 65% of voters actually bother voting. So we could target the third of the electorate that doesn’t vote.
I reckoned it was because they were so disenchanted with the system. I thought PR was an argument that could motivate people like that.
So, to appeal to that third of the electorate are the target market, I thought the LibDems should stand on a single-issue ticket. That, if elected, they would introduce Proportional Representation.
And then immediately call another election under PR rules. So that, whether or not you like the LibDems, it’s still in your interest to vote for them.
The LibDem campaign line should be: DON’T JUST CHANGE THE GOVERNMENT: CHANGE THE SYSTEM. Don’t you think all the protest voters, the disenfranchised, the students, everyone who’s dissatisfied, or disenchanted would get behind that?
It’s a bit more exciting than the usual bland, meaningless political slogans. You can imagine it on T shirts, bumper stickers, grafitti, newspaper headlines.But best of all, the LibDems couldn’t lose.
There could be 3 possible outcomes of that strategy:1) The LibDems win, change the system, and win the revote. (unlikely)2) The LibDems win, change the system, and lose the revote. But because of the new system still end up with more MPs. (possible)3) The LibDems lose, but because of attracting all the disinterested voters have a much bigger share of the vote, and so end up with more MPs. (most likely)
Briefly, there wasn’t a downside, even if they lost they won.
But, as you know, that never happened. It was way too much trouble. They didn’t want to rock the boat that much. I think, truthfully the LibDems are quite happy to be where they are.
They like being number three. It’s less effort. Not being high profile, everyone leaves them alone and they get the occasional soundbite.
It’s sort of the old folk’s home of politics. They keep copying the advertising of the market leaders. Consequently they maintain the status quo. And, in that situation, the main beneficiary is the market leader.
Of course you can’t carry on like that in the real world.In the real world Tesco would have delisted the LibDems ages ago.
Thanks a lot, Dave.
"In every election, only about 65% of voters actually bother voting.
So we could target the third of the electorate that doesn’t vote."
That's exactly what we're doing right now. In two months we've raised vote intention from approximately 50% in urban areas to 80% and from 30% in rural areas to 45% -- which is all to our candidate's advantage, as he is more popular among the intellectuals. The next step is to produce as much volunteer work as possible – not only in order to reduce the costs, but, more importantly, to transform our electors from recipients into active participants – this brings stability, it’s unlikely to see them change their mind in November, after 6 months of volunteer work. The strategy is to organise our electors into smaller groups (remember Malcolm Gladwell’s conference on ketchup flavours), so everyone is part of at least two groups – this way we make sure that if we don’t reach someone with the message aimed at one group they’re part of, we still have the chance to talk to them as part of a second group. So we have:
1. Young people -- easy target, especially for volunteer work; also, they will influence their families: which parent wouldn’t vote for the one their children volunteer to help with the presidential campaign?
2. Population in the urban areas – the idea is to have them educate their families in the rural areas (-another form of volunteer work). This way they establish communication between us and the ones we wouldn’t normally reach. Also, their message will be tailor-made – they surely know how to talk to their own parents and grandparents.
3. Women – our candidate has a great chance to create a visible gender gap.
4. Private sector – our candidate’s party is the National Liberal Party, so this is where we really feel at home.
5. Public sector – fortunately for us, unfortunately for our country, the current government has created the perfect platform for a friendly conversation between the Liberals and the public sector.
6. Civil society – this is the group that gathers together all the other groups and establishes the main message of our campaign. The idea is that the civil society is currently treated as if it were some opposition party – well, big surprise, welcome home: the Liberals ARE the Opposition right now. And given the extremist hues the current President has added to our already fragile democracy, the main line is that THE RIGHT PLACE FOR NORMALITY IS NOT THE OPPOSITION.
So, in brief, we’re covering all the bases, then gather together all the groups, in a way that generates enough enthusiasm to become a very attractive movement – especially attractive to the ones that normally refuse to vote.
If our candidate loses, his party will still have more voters than ever -- and probably a great number of new members.
So if it's not a flawless presidential campaign, it's still the most powerful advertising campaign our National Liberal Party has ever seen.
It sounds very thorough Anca.
Just one question, can you distill all that down into a line that could go on a T shirt?
Remember the great Saatchi campaigns of the Thatcher years: very clever thinking, very simply expressed.
A street sweeper's vote counts as much as a professor's.
Join the Liberation Generation.
Everyone just wants to be free of this dull inertia between all the parties.
It's all bla bla bla.
Every time something goes wrong whichever party drops a clanger, we get the same old spin:
1. 'Aint it awful' (Games people play, Eric Berne MD)
2. We are looking into this blady blady bla...
3. Jim'll fix it.
This country has never been a revolutionary one.
The votes, as mentioned, are collated by old farmland borders which happen to shift for no explicable reason just before an election.
The inertia needs to be broken.
The Conservatives did this by targeting specific problems.
The Labour Tax Bomb Shell.
Britain isn't working.
They won through outright aggression and saying things as they were.
This resonated strongly with the british public.
They pinned their colours to the wall in an ad which was like the ten commandments. everything was clear and simple.
Their end line was 'Vote Conservative X"
And many did just that.
Money is at the heart of it. I'd have Labour tying the colours firmly to the mast by running a campaign with headlines like 'The Tories want to save you money' coupled with images of run down public services. A clear choice for the proletariat. Might make the few think twice of turning. A case of the frying pan being better than the fire.
You should forward your post to the Lib Dems again, Dave.
John, I worked on the Labour Party pitch here (Saatchi). We did a lot of work like that ('The Tories want to save you money' coupled with images of run down public services). But in the end, we decided to focus most of the work around a positive campaign on Gordon Brown rather than a negative one on the Tories.
Hi Ant
It was just top of the head thinking on my part. A riposte to the 'Labour isn't working' poster from days of yore. Going the other way what did you do? I'm thinking of his spinning his dour image with a line like 'Putting the serious back into Politics'.
Hello Ant - do you think that's working?
Gordon Brown: Substance over style.
Apparently LibDems HQ is called Fairy Castle. This is the first thing to change. Something far more macho. I wonder if we could call it 77 Sunset Strip? Next Nick Glegg said he had had sex with eight women. That's a vote winner. Eight, must have been a huge bed. Maybe it wasn't in a bed, even better. He must have had a Boar spotter on his chest so that he could see who he'd done. Anyway good lad let's make the most of it. Comparing the number of people he and Brown have fucked.
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury, Jack. When politics is replaced with hyperbole and exaggeration then we are fucked from every which way. As Dave said, the system is not truly representational.
Hi John and gotnobeef.
Yeah, the strategy was something along the lines of GB - substance over style. It got him an initial bounce, but he was fairly new to the job and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Personally, I think the strategy probably needs to evolve but I don’t work on the account so I’m not sure what’s going down (and it’s not really my place to say much more!)
I was gonna say if you give me some more info I could give you another take on it. But if it's confidential I understand that too.
When I was a student I used to help count the votes in elections, at East Ham Town Hall.
If there was anything even slightly wrong with a vote we had to put it aside, for the town clerk to adjudicate.
One ballot paper I put aside was just a massive cross from corner to corner.
Obviously someone who was disgusted with the whole thing..
The town clerk decided that the cross intersected at Conservatives therefore it would count as a vote for them.
For me that always sort of summed up the system.
Hi Dave,
The electorate used to vote for a party and a belief. After Thatcher decimated the unions, the working class man no longer had a voice. After industry was discarded in favour of service industries it's almost as if the Labour Party collapsed into a working / middle class party having to chase businessmen as well as the remnants of the unions for funding.
At one point it looked as if the Liberal Party were actually going to do something and reform as a new labour party, which, as we all know now, is what Labour did. They absorbed the vote of the Liberal Democrat.
It's all such a massive soup now, especially when we add Euro Parliaments into the mix. It makes me ask myself whether the electorate vote for parties any more, or do they vote for personalities?
Barak Obama has made a massive impact.
However, the world is still waiting to see the goodies.
It seems the party may be chosen by the panache and perceived trustworthiness of an elected individual and judged by the performance of the party he or she represents. It helps no party when they start bickering amongst themselves. Then they lose all the hard earnt credibility they had and have to work double-hard to win it back.
The British electorate are a comudgeonly lot. As you say, they love to see the underdog win. It is a diabolical system, and yet while other countries hose down opposing party supporters with water cannon or chop them up with machetes, in Britain we just groan on like the slaves in a galley.
This country could desperately do with a charismatic leader, and that's no criticism of Gordon Brown. I would not want his job for all the tea in Jack's cups.
He has to listen to all those nagging sheep all day long who need an incentive just to turn up for the job they have been appointed to do. Politics in this country needs to project a better image before every ballott paper ends up with that massive cross from corner to corner.
Televised debates have helped to expose who is and who is not talking. Many MP's work very hard, yet some get short changed by bad media coverage.
I get the feeling Winston Churchill is turning in his grave.
For me, the system, hugely frustrating as it is, works like a pendulum, with the Liberal Party as the cable passing the weight of responsibility from end to end.
The British love to be seen to maximise innovation... (at minimum risk).
Dave
Still the best system we've got!
Have you read P.J O'Rourke's 'Eat The Rich'?
Hi Kevin,
I think most of us would agree with Bob Hope, who said:
"You can always tell when a politician is lying. You can see his lips move."
Hi John,
I keep trying his other books, but nothing lives up to "Republican Party Reptile" for me.
I've I should have gone into politics. My books have always been admired for their political insight. You know the titles but Words has been compared with The Art of War and, I wish... likened to Machiavelli's, The Prince. As well as Boris Johnson's dad I have been quoted by politicians, The creek of the bow... comes out tops. People would wave my books in the air at mass rallies and chant pages from them. My problem is in hiding my past, it's the expletive mugs and cards. How do I explain my involvement in that sort of trade? I'll need a good agency, one that's good at lying. Kev get into rehab.
'RPR' will check that one out. Thanks. I suppose if you believed some, GB has No Hope. I still believe. Forever the optimist!
Jack
You've just got to convince yourself it never happened…
Spot on. I used to love to watch George Dubya Bush deliver speeches and wait wait for the point where he would pause and stick his tongue in his cheeck. I always imagined him saying to himself 'I wonder if the mugs are going to swallow this hooter of a statement!'
Hi Jack,
Years ago I recieved a peculiar brief from a friend of the President elect of an African republic. Nobody understood how to vote and nobody had enough money for T shirts, which was allthe rage there then. They came up with the
idea of giving away free T shirts to voters with a hand demonstrating how to vote in the ballott box and who to vote for. It worked. He became president.
Perhaps you could do the same with your mugs. Let me know if you do, and I'll happily call the ambulance myself.
Dave, isn't the problem with Proportional Representation that everybody's suspicious of it, from professors to street sweepers?
If you read newspapers, you see the chaos it causes in countries like Germany and Israel, with their horse-trading and unsatisfactory coalitions where small parties often wield tremendous influence.
And if you don't read newspapers, then it's more dodgy European ideas mucking around with our country, innit?
I'm not sure you could really move the debate with the PR issue.
Though I do agree that the lib dems should be looking for a single, compelling reason to vote for them which will fit onto a T Shirt.
For me, a proposition, not a line, would be that the politics of Left and Right wrecked the 20th Century. Let's leave them behind.
That's a shocking story about vote counting... though the lib dems have always had the reputation as the dirtiest of dirty tricksters at the local election level...
Thank you John for your wise advice. But is there a difference between forgetting on the one hand and convincing myself that it never happened? It never happened sounds a bit psychotic.
Kev, I like the mugs idea a lot. Are you saying that I should overprint? Change things to fucking vote for Jack. *** Mondays until Jack gets in. I used to fucking care, and add, and will again when Jack gets in. Great idea Kev. Rehab still goes though.
You can't sack me I'm part of the Union Jack.
Don't take this the wrong way but psychoses not up your street then?
Have you seen 'All The King's Men'? - The rise and fall of a corrupt politician, who makes his friends richer and retains power by dint of a populist appeal.
The Zimmerman sums it up well:
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.
John,
Zimmerman again (although he nicked it from Woody Guthrie):
"Some men rob you with a six gun,
some men rob you with a fountain pen."
Brits love losers -- so long as they don't exhibit an excess of humility. In which case they get sympathy but get forgotten. Quickly.
What Brits want is a loud and preferably uncontrolled outburst of 'bad losership'. Something they can get their teeth into on YouTube, for instance. Gordon Brown's gone about this the wrong way, of course. But Shaun Murphy (remember him?) had his chance last week and blew it. Not so Drogba -- Chelsea's answer to John MacEnroe and more!
Go on Drogs and let's nuke Norway.
Hi Neil,
You've got something there. Someone who can truly vent the nations anger and frustration and make us feel good about it like Alan Sugar. YOU'RE FIRED!
John, when it comes to psychoses I'm a pick-n-mix man. What have you got in mind? Denying an event that did happen never happened (That is producing a range of mugs with *** on them) sounds close to the edge to me. Although I have managed to do it over several drink related incidence. You know 'the fear.'
Kev have you got being fired on the mind or something? That's twice. Obsessions, symptom acid burn out. Rehab.
Hi Kevin
What's 'anger' got to do with anything? We're talking winning by losing. You know...it's like, er, a marketing strategy. NO NEED FOR SHOUTING, I'd politely suggest to you.
Those sweet Lib Dems whom everybody loves precisely (with the exception of Vince Cable) have been losing things successfully for aeons. And with great dignity may I add in lower case.
I guess they need to watch out, though: if Joanna Lumley replaces Nick Clegg they might actually win the next election. But do calm down, Kevin: it's only a blog post.
The one thing that living on the edge has got is the view.
Sometimes I just like to prod around like a clumsy doctor. If the patient makes an uncomfortable noise I know he's alive and kicking, then he tells you more about what ails him. In doing so I've learnt a little more from you about the tone of voice of the Lib Dem supporter. Jack does it all the time, cranking-up people on purpose just to get a reaction. Then if he doesn't he comes in with the Mugs for 99p line that guarantees a reaction.
Paul Arden (God bless him, R. I.P.) when he was alive and well, used to feel comfortable with discomfort, and that made a lot of people feel uncomfortable
because it dragged them out of their comfort zone, and when creative people are dragged out of their comfort zone, many produce outstanding work.
There was no intention of offending you, but I guessed somehow you had more to say: to win, the liberals would have to be the exact thing they are not. They are not Alan Sugar. Alan Sugar is the politics of winning. Hence the liberal party is the politics of losing. Their aim is to lose...in a very comfortably British way. It's our culture.
I'm always intrigued by what I can't see. The duck appears to moves effortlessly but underneath the feet are flapping like crazy. Check out when you can the 2008 doc, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Hi John, There may be something in that. Maybe the lib dems need something they can rally around as a party piece. A sort of descrete indescretion:
www.youtube.com/watch
Kev
Love it. Too Monster Raving for the Lib Dems though.
BTW Kev
I do not understand the anthropological significance of this ritual behavior. Please explain.
Neither do I. Eric Berne identifies it as either: Perversion under Sexual Games,
or in this example perhaps it could be attributed to Frigid Woman under Marital Games, or Lets pull a fast one on Joey from Underworld Games.
There's something very British about it the same way my dear old out-of-touch mum explained the arrival of Malcolm McLaren & Co:
"Ohhhhhhhhh No, It's those awful Pump Rockets again!"
Ah Mums,
When I was about 16 my mum went to the local record shop and said, "I want a record for my son by that bloke with the big lips: that Jack Migger."
Classic. Took my mum to the Tate Modern the other day. She said she would like some of the paintings if they were bigger!
Alan Bennett meets Peter Cooke.
She liked some of the colours but not all of them.
You need to collect all these in a little book.
When my mum got angry she used to say, "We're going to have a different alteration round here."
Hilarious!
Perhaps John should buy Mum a Pantone Colour chart for Christmas.
We had an old art director at Saatchi who used to look at the work through his spectacles, screw his nose up, sigh, look us straight in the face through gritted teeth, and say: 'You know people who live in glass houses shouldn't roll stones'. Everyone would fall about laughing, and he'd give us that Eric Morecambe dead pan look of scorn and retort: 'It's alright for you lot to stand there laughing but a bird in the hand gathers no moss you know!'
Sounds to me as if everyone could do with some fresh aphorisms/truisms/malapropisms. Wonder where they could find them? I'm saying nothing after the insults I've had to take but I knew I'd come into my own.
Jack, You are terminally unique. You never lose an opportunity to sell, and here's a big one, a party that always loses means they must change their strategy every time to ensure they keep that record up. A liberal cup of aphorisms / truisms / and malapropisms can only guarantee future success in the politics of losing. Get on the phone to party headquarters now Jack. Britain needs you.
I think you called me a loser Kevin. The last time I was called a chancer by a weird guy on this blog. Funny I think he was on acid too. I regard that as progress.
No Jack, Youll be the one making the money!
Juts heard the leader of the libdems, Nck Clegg, say a vote for them is a 'vote for hope'.
I look forward to the posters with the letters 'lessness' being added to that tagline.
Well, It's a bit like WW2 out there right now. If we want to persuade the government to act: apparently, according to Nick Clegg we have to lobby Europarliament first. So launch the landing craft, cross the channel, invade France and make your way to Belgium post haste.
Alternatively, if you prefer the instant loser strategy:
Just fill in a claim form for the whole trip and charge it to your expenses.
Can't we just bypass France?
This one's for you John. It's even got your name on it.
"Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up sir."
That's American Politics for you. 'Shoot first, ask questions later'. Eli Wallach.
Baby Doll. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Born 1915, still alive and kickin today.
As the GI's in Viet Nam used to have written on the back of their jackets:
"Kill 'em all. Let God sort it out."
Interesting post
The two big 'uns are cancelling themselves out. Same tit for tat advertising, some of the more recent attempts are shockingly derivative (stand up and be counted saatchi & co for that jedward travesty). In advising the blue lot a couple of years ago, we brought up a lot of similar points about challenging - they didn't listen either, though the reds have left the goal wide open for them anyway. I think Syco have it right, might as well make the whole mess a reality show and have done with it.
Blinding post Mr. Trott. It's always a complete downer when the client, no matter what sector they are in, seem to be allergic to a little revolution for positive change. Budgets and the sheer pressure of accountability, certainly in marketing, are major factors, but as Kevin Gordon points out, a country with a lack of appetite for change will inevitably fall into the status quo trap with the safety net of that's how it's always been.
As for Roy Murphy's comments re the (collective) Jedward fiascos, I couldn't agree more - in fact so much so, this debacle moved me to a vein-splitting rant on the subject on my own personal blog - which I am not proud of in any way but simply had to mention http://bit.ly/6bnEIK
Please, please keep up the great work Mr. T!
jedward bedward
Dave Trott
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