Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Karma Chameleon
As clever as Labour's Dave the Chameleon campaign is, I cannot work out who they are speaking to or why.
It seems to me that the message will have most resonance with politicians, so maybe the objective is to undermine Cameron within his own party. Most ordinary people will just shrug their shoulders and say that this is how they have always viewed politicians anyway and nobody ever thought that the Tory leader was any different. More damagingly, the more I look at the advert the more the central character looks like Tony Blair.
This could well turn out to be a massive own goal, a point made by today's Guardian in a fascinating piece on political advertising:
Political advertising is a confusing business. The list of successful ads - most famously, Labour isn't Working, the campaign credited with helping to propel Margaret Thatcher to power in the 1979 general election, is matched by those that have rebounded on their authors, notoriously, the Tory Demon Eyes campaign, which depicted a pair of red, devilish eyes peering out from Tony Blair's face and also, in another related ad, from behind a red curtain. To many voters, it summed up the negativity and nastiness that they associated with the Conservatives.
The article quotes Dennis Kavanagh, professor in politics at Liverpool University and an expert on political communications, as saying that adverts work when they go with the grain, when they work with something that already exists. He believes that this is true of the chameleon campaign as well, but there has to be another factor, there has to be a message that people recognise and are prepared to associate themselves with.
At best the message in this case will just goes over the heads of the majority of voters, at worst it will reinforce people's negative views about the Blair Government and politicians in general. We will see.
It seems to me that the message will have most resonance with politicians, so maybe the objective is to undermine Cameron within his own party. Most ordinary people will just shrug their shoulders and say that this is how they have always viewed politicians anyway and nobody ever thought that the Tory leader was any different. More damagingly, the more I look at the advert the more the central character looks like Tony Blair.
This could well turn out to be a massive own goal, a point made by today's Guardian in a fascinating piece on political advertising:
Political advertising is a confusing business. The list of successful ads - most famously, Labour isn't Working, the campaign credited with helping to propel Margaret Thatcher to power in the 1979 general election, is matched by those that have rebounded on their authors, notoriously, the Tory Demon Eyes campaign, which depicted a pair of red, devilish eyes peering out from Tony Blair's face and also, in another related ad, from behind a red curtain. To many voters, it summed up the negativity and nastiness that they associated with the Conservatives.
The article quotes Dennis Kavanagh, professor in politics at Liverpool University and an expert on political communications, as saying that adverts work when they go with the grain, when they work with something that already exists. He believes that this is true of the chameleon campaign as well, but there has to be another factor, there has to be a message that people recognise and are prepared to associate themselves with.
At best the message in this case will just goes over the heads of the majority of voters, at worst it will reinforce people's negative views about the Blair Government and politicians in general. We will see.
Comments:
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I think you're missing the point about this ad - it's even worse than you suggest! It reveals an absolute inability on the part of the Labour "high command" to work out what their line of attack on Cameron is. You can't be both an unprincipled flip-flopper AND a hard-core ideologue, as the ad seems to be trying to maintain. Presumably this is another example of Tony and Gordon not being able to agree on anything!
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