Archive for April, 2010

So, on the day of the second televised leaders debates what are we to make of the new political landscape? Are we heading for a revolution in the way we see and perceive our political leaders or is it all just smoke and mirrors.

Certainly, there is a real danger that voters could be seen to be concentrating more on the televised debates than the policies of the main parties and we are seeing skewed polling figures as a result.

There is a danger that the polls are simply reflecting people’s reaction to the debates rather than their voting intention, a view reinforced by one poll’s immediate reaction from the debate showing the Lib Dems with a 51% share of the vote - more than enough to confirm Nick Clegg as Prime Minister with a healthy working majority.

These views are not necessarily based on the policies of the Lib Dem Party but how Nick Clegg is perceived by television viewers. The debates only provide time for the briefest of glimpses into the party’s policies - there is no time for any discussion on the the detail behind the policy headlines.

The subsequent reduction in the Lib Dem share of the vote in polls demonstrates that the televised debate certainly had a short term but significant effect in voters’ minds. The impact of the debate and the poll rise for the Lib Dems, even if short lived, has given a boost in momentum for the Lib Dems which may be hard for the other parties to counter.

So, has the televised debate reduced the election campaign to little more than a non-political beauty contest?

Not necessarily.

It will be up to David Cameron and Gordon Brown to react to the Clegg factor and I am sure that they will be working harder than ever to try to alter the perceptions and work on the lessons learned from the first debate to regain some lost ground.

This may give rise to personalised politics and possibly more negative campaigning, we shall see.

Either way, it is unlikely that the public will be taken in by magic tricks or sleight of hand.

Hung Parliament

We have also heard from the party leaders that “the people” will decide if there will be a hung Parliament or not.

I’m quite sure that if there was a candidate in every constituency under the name of “hung” or “hung Parliament” then they would have a better than even chance of being elected but let’s be clear, you cannot gerrymander or tactically vote for a hung parliament - it requires an unusual set of circumstances.

The people will certainly decide but they will not go into the polling booths thinking they can vote for a hung Parliament. If we end up with a hung Parliament it would be an associative outcome rather than causality.

It’s here, the much-anticipated second leader’s debate. What will happen? Will Clegg triumph again? Will Brown again posture towards the Lib-Dems or will he try to go it alone? Will Cameron finally bring up his Big Society policy, even though it has nothing to do with foreign affairs, the topic for the second debate?

Below is a brief synopsis of how I think it will go for each leader.

Nick Clegg

His star is shining bright, so there will be sky high expectations of him. Unfortunately, foreign affairs is probably the Lib-Dems worst subject. Clegg has flip-flopped on the Euro issue and now says taking on the Euro would be a mistake, but at the same time, it is there in black and white in the Lib-Dem manifesto that one day the UK should accept the Euro. Essentially, the Lib-Dems love Europe, especially Clegg. This isn’t necessarily going to go down well with some swing voters, but the question is, how many of these people are actually going to vote for the Lib-Dems anyway?

Clegg is also in an interesting position as expectations are high. Brown and especially Cameron are going to try to ground him. But all Clegg has to do is misquote Reagan again and again - “There they go again” in response to the two bigger parties’ attacks. He probably doesn’t need to answer a question other than make everyone feel sorry for the little guy. I feel this is the best option, because going on the attack and trying to be equal to Labour and the Tories on foreign policy is a mistake - because he’d lose.

David Cameron

If Clegg is under pressure, Cameron is under just as much if not more. He has to up his game significantly from the first debate, where he forgot to mention his key domestic policies. Problem is, foreign affairs isn’t the Tories strongest subject and they have been out of power for 13 years, so their international reputation may not be as strong as they’d like it to be.

Cameron will be hit on his ‘iron clad guarantee’ for a referendum on Europe. It obviously isn’t going to happen and there are a lot of conservatives, not party members, just conservatives, who don’t trust his Europe policies. Likewise, Brown and Clegg are both going to hammer him on the Conservative’s relationships within Europe, including his Polish partners.

His promise to keep an independent DFID and legislate a 0.7% aid budget will also come under fire from ultra-conservative voters. I know many aid groups are pleasantly surprised by this, but when you can’t secure your base, it’s not the best strategy to try to out flank your opposition from the left.

Cameron is also going to mention the Iran question, but his intervention during the green revolution was reported by some as a gaffe. The UK and the USA statements focused on a “we’re watching with interest”, because they knew public support of the protestors would enable the Iranian officials to claim the unrest was caused by UK and USA intervention. However, Cameron came out and decried the lack of support from Brown to the protestors and publically stated that the protestors had the support of the UK people. This was naive foreign policy.

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown has relationships overseas, in fact believe it or not, he is very well-respected internationally, in 2009 he was voted world statesmen of the year and is respected overseas more than in the UK. This is his biggest trump card and needs to play it. This is hugely beneficial for issues such as the Tobin Tax, Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East in general. Afghanistan funding will again be a weak spot due to issues such as the numbers of helicopters etc.

He also needs to be more forceful I feel. Although he performed above expectations in the last debate, I think the Iron Chancellor needs to be on the stage. Due to the lack of audience interaction, jokes don’t necessarily play well on TV due to the silence in the studio - it makes it sound like the joke has fallen flat. Brown did well confronting Cameron on the police issues in the first debate and I thought the “it’s answer time not question time”, was effective. He needs to do it again, especially on Europe.

Brown is less pro-EU that Clegg, he keeps Europe at an arm’s length, but with an open palm, not a clenched fist. This will make voters feel more comfortable.

But he still has the image problem and that will be his biggest weakness.

All-in-all, it will be a fascinating evening and I’m looking forward to seeing the polls the next day.

Cross posted with my personal blog

If you live in London, you may have seen yesterday’s Evening Standard front page headline Gordon’s ark.

In the time of an election, rarely does a Prime Minister have the opportunity to appear truly Prime Ministerial, however in this very unique case, an opportunity has been served on a plate to Gordon Brown.

Copyright Evening Standard

The Evening Standard hasn’t been Brown’s greatest fan over the years, but this headline  and this story as a whole adds a whole new chaotic dimension to this election campaign. What is particularly novel about this crisis, is that no lives are actually at risk, it is all about inconvenience, granted it is incredibly inconvenient and could be significantly damaging to the airline industry. I would suspect however that many airlines will be given significant payouts through the EU to ensure they stay afloat.

Every party would love to be able to make political gains because of this crisis, but at the same time they all have to be exceptionally careful not to appear to be doing so. If the Conservatives or the Lib-Dems attack Labour for not helping the stranded, than they can be accused of playing political games, likewise, Labour can’t appear to be too chest thumping about sending in the Navy to save British lives, especially when none are really at risk.

Only time will tell about how this plays out and whether the volcano keeps spluttering away, but this is definitely one of the issues that is making this one of the most exciting elections I’ve witnessed.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

I found it interesting that WPP was using Twitter to provide guidance to employees currently stuck away from their ‘home base’ due to European airspace being closed due to volcanic dust.

We have been pretty fortunate with regards to having the right staff in the right place at this time. This was also posted over at my personal blog.

In the UK, the internet industry has become a media sector lobbyists football. From the Digital Economy Bill and the music-mogul entertained holiday in Corfu that Lord Mandelson denied to Labour prospective parliamentary candidate Richard Mollet’s leaked memo it is obvious that there is a political and commercial will to cripple the internet and turn Digital Britain into an analogue third-world country.

Where this likely to focus next is on social media and the uses of social media in marketing. A key problem with social media compared to other marketing platforms such as cinema and television advertising is the lack of effective, respected age barriers. With television advertising you have the 9pm watershed, adverts on rental films can rely on the age classification, as can cinema advertisers and even print adverts can rely on TGI data to demonstrate sufficient care that they weren’t targeting minors.

Contrast this with many social media platforms, notably Facebook, which has a 13 year-old age limit for participation, yet 37 per cent of 5-to-7 year-olds had visited Facebook and 25 per cent of children surveyed had some sort of social network profile according to an Ofcom survey referenced by Fast Company. If you look at applications in Facebook, their purile content could be considered to be aimed at the under-13s.

Ok, but why is this an issue?

OPPORTUNITY COST.

Societies have generally had negative impressions of the latest forms of media and their effect on young people: rock n’ roll and rave music, video games, films, television and the internet have all had this in common. There is no better example of this fear than the Daily Mail’s recent scare story about sexual predators on Facebook.

Conversely, the heat is also going out of other businesses as the time, attention and money moves to social networks:

• Televsion: ITV has seen a progressive decline in advertising revenues and audience figures for a number of years to online properties
• Cinemas can be argued to have had a similar problem stemming back to the 1980s when excessive advertising inventory was considered to impact the cinema-going experience
• Radio stations have seen a reduction in investment and retrenchment from stations due to a lack of revenue
• Newspapers failure to deal with the digital world is legendary

All of these businesses can see revenue going elsewhere that they could consider to be legitimately theirs. The recent BBC retrenchment in online is partly due to the corporate revisiting non-core online franchises and as a way of heading off lobbying by media companies. This has also has to be seen in the catastrophic records that media companies have had on their disastrous online ventures notably Friends Reunited, Bebo and MySpace.

I believe that social networking and social media is especially vulnerable to over-regulation in the UK. There is ample ammunition in the Ofcom report to encourage regulation and the forthcoming governing of social media by the ASA doesn’t fill me with confidence that the regulators understand the very real differences between social media and advertising content.

So what is it likely to mean?

• The biggest impact is probably going to be on application developers who are likely to be further challenged on building viral applications whilst not overtly marketing to children. An application installation may require a ‘date of birth’ registration screen to demonstrate that due care and attention has been paid to reach over 13s
• Facebook advertisers are much more at the mercy of Facebook in terms of the accuracy of age groups, but may have to introduce an age request page as an interstitial after clickthrough
• Moderation on Facebook on groups and comments on fan pages is likely to require heavier intervention to ensure that claims by commenters do not breach ASA guidelines, which is likely to be a buzzkill on community building as consumers will feel excessive constrained and ‘messaged’

But real question will this legislative kraken drive eyeballs and revenues back to the analogue media titans? I don’t think so, there are very few media vehicles that have staged as dramatic a media turnaround, even with a favourable regulatory environment.

For many international brands it maybe looking at pumping more into campaigns driven out of the US at US consumers and hoping for a positive audience bleed from the UK. This has an additional advantage that ASA regulations on competitive adverts can be flouted and campaigns can go negative. This would be a good bet for them. When I was at Yahoo! about half the UK users went to the US site and I would estimate that this was similar with other US online properties. Short of going to a North Korean-style web experience there isn’t much that could be done about this.

A secondary impact of this would be a reduced demand for UK-based agencies and practitioners as technically these campaigns would be US work. Many US-based international corporations would be more than happy to retrench more marketing spend in their own country where their head office managers have more control over the projects to ensure consistency.

Given that, an estimated 48,000 people employed in PR at the moment and social media is the future you are talking about regulation would actively encourage the off-shoring thousands of well-paid white collar jobs, as well as a further dent in the UK as a creative hub for the marketing services sector. This doesn’t include the countless digital creatives in Soho and beyond or the advertising groups like WPP who have decided that the future is digital. Once this talent is gone, there will be no turning back. This was first published at my personal blog.

When the Sex Pistols played their last concert at the famous Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco John Lydon’s final remark to the audience was “Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night“.

I was reminded of that phrase when I looked at data by the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) which shows how much debt western Europe actually has in comparison to the rest of the world. It is one of the most frightening images I have ever seen.  This was originally published on my personal blog.

Labour, the Lib-Dems and now the SNP all have at least one thing in common, they all seem to have the Tories directly in their crosshairs as the Tories seem to be under the most scrutiny and attack so far in the election campaign.

Of course none of this is a shock, it is only natural for the parties to have a go at each other, but what is striking about the attacks on the Tories is that it would normally be reserved for an incumbent Government, rather than the Opposition. The Tories are obviously the bookies favourite to win the most seats, at the very least the largest number in a Hung Parliament, so they are seen as the biggest threat by all of the parties.

Labour is obviously going after the Tories on everything as their prime competition. The Lib-Dems are trying to impress themselves onto voters as the eligible kingmakers whilst protecting their own seats which is evidenced most recently by Nick Clegg launching a “VAT Bombshell” poster campaign focusing on the Tory tax scheme. Alex Salmond is also trying to scare voters away from voting Tory in Scotland by running with a line that the Tories will go on a “smash-and-grab” spree by reviewing £1billion worth of funding to Scotland.

The latest Lib-Dem attack on the Conservative tax strategy

Of all of the parties, this probably benefits Labour the most as a lot of the “attack-dog” work they would normally have to do is being done by the smaller parties on a far more targeted level than the Labour election war chest would normally allow. The Tories therefore have to spend more time defending their policies and ideas on a national scale as well as batting away attacks on a more geographically targeted scale. Labour, while still needing to point out their perceived flaws in Conservative policy has more of an opportunity to sell in their policies.

Whether this will make a huge difference on Election Day, we will only know on May 7 but what is sure is the Tories would like more scrutiny on Labour, rather than being almost constantly defending their own policies and agenda. Labour would therefore be enjoying the underdog status and it is well known this is a position where Brown feels very comfortable.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Such excitement in this morning’s scanning meeting as the team pored over the papers trying to spot the April Fools stories. This year seemed to yield more stories than ever before with several clever advertisers getting in on the act as well.

Granted, in some papers it wasn’t so easy to spot which were the April Fools stories and which just fell under the normal brand of ridiculous reporting, with some of our colleagues even convinced that certain papers did not have any irregular features in them…slightly embarrassing not to spot that the Circle Line is probably not going to be home to another Hadron Collider. What?! It was early!

Anyway we thought we would do a roundup of everything we found - have we missed anything!?

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - The Guardian

Experts find way to stop us ageing - Daily Express

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - Guardian

If we are to believe The Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, our Majesty has fallen on tough times, and has taken to Flying with EasyJet…be honest - you did have to look twice!

Meanwhile, The Sun wondered how many people might be tempted by a lick of paper, the Daily Mail wowed us with stories of the AA’s new breakdown service.

In France it’s much simpler. Just pin a picture of a fish on someone’s back…. Poisson d’Avril!

For a full list of today’s Fleet St Foolery, click here.