virtualeconomics

I fought. I lost. A review of Labour's election messaging by a candidate working in comms

 

Every season of The Apprentice, at least one team fluffs the pitching episode by getting caught up in developing a product without working out how they'll pitch it at the end. Being part of a major party's general election campaign that made fundamentally the same mistake as 15 years of baby entrepreneurs was…eye-opening.

 

A product is not a pitch

It was my honour to stand as a first-time Labour candidate in the recent general election (in Sevenoaks, an unwinnable, ultra-safe Tory seat).  I’m also a communications professional with twenty years’ experience (I used to run 100+ journalists at a division of Northcliffe, have hired and trained pretty much every sort of marketing team there is, was at one time an award-winning journalism and media economics commentator quoted in most major newspapers, currently run PR and messaging for a mid-cap travel company and election campaigns for my local CLP). There have been plenty of articles raking over the reasons Labour lost the election. I have instead some thoughts on, specifically, the messaging behind our losing campaign. These are, needless to say, my personal reflections on my experience.

TL;DR? Labour’s messaging didn’t work.

To be clear, the press team who liaised personally with us as candidates were great - responsive, well-informed, tireless. They did what they could.

But. I flatter myself I’m a reasonably smart guy with a lot of comms experience. I spent every spare waking second in the weeks since the election was called trying to understand the message I was being asked to promote and condense it down into simple, consistent soundbites I could use at hustings, on the doorstep, in newsletters and other comms.

It was impossible.

Keep racism low status

One of the great cultural and political achievements of the late C20th was to keep racism low status.

By the end of the C20th racism wasn’t just unacceptable, largely illegal and a virtual guarantor of ostracism from civilised company. It had been made a low-status belief. This didn’t quite kill it off, but more than banning it or shunning it, this drove public expressions of racism rare.

On the launch of the "Tory Momentum"

It’s fun to watch the Tories try to launch their own Momentum. “Activate”.

From the point of view of professional social media, it's a hack job. Amateurish. Almost absurdly so. By way of example let’s have a look at their first attempt at a meme - a stock photo of Jeremy (I'm assuming they paid the stock image rights rather than just copying it off the web), followed for some reason by Admiral Akbar’s catchphrase “it’s a trap”.

First, let’s remember that Twitter is mostly read on mobile devices. Recent estimates put mobile use of Twitter at 85% of traffic. So you’d think the Tory attempt to copy Momentum - a grass-roots campaign typified by its deep understanding of social media - would at least check how their first meme looked on mobile

On mobile, you can see the top half of the meme - Jeremy, two thumbs up, and the Labour slogan “for the many not the few”. You can’t see the alleged punchline though, unless you click through, because it’s lost below the fold. See my photo, above.

On mobile, and therefore for 85% of visitors to this new Tory movement, their first meme is just a (weirdly blue) advertisement for the Labour party, complete with a reiteration of Labour's campaign slogan "for the many, not the few". If you’re going to make memes for Twitter, it’s best to get someone who knows how Twitter works and knows what "mobile first" means to help with the design. (Protip - make your Twitter memes the right size for Twitter. Canva offers a number of free templates which will do it for you.)

The man elected eight times who we're supposed to believe is unelectable

Is Jeremy Corbyn electable? Trivially so. His constituents keep electing him. They do so in ever-greater numbers. They've done it eight times. "Unelectable" is not a useful charge to levy against a man who keeps getting elected. As well say that the sea is dry or that fish fly south for the winter. 

Ah, but. Islington North is not Britain, the argument goes. Islington North is an unrepresentative bubble of weird, rich, London left-wingers. The country as a whole will never elect a left-wing politician. 

Which would be debatable (not true, but at least debatable), if Scotland hadn't just elected 56 of them. Check out the manifesto that a handful of months ago wiped all of the other (indistinguishable, centre-right, neoliberal) parties off the Scottish political map. End austerity and raise taxes. Fund the welfare state and the NHS. Scrap Trident. It's not a strikingly dissimilar policy agenda to this one. The argument that people won't vote for this left-wing lunacy also falls down at the existence proof stage. They just did it. This manifesto just swept an entire country.

Don't bother turning off electronic devices

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a piece pointing out that while plane passengers are asked to turn off their mobile phones during take-off and landing, no-one knows why. The Times speculated that if just 1% of American plane passengers secretly left their devices on, that meant 11 million flights a year somehow managed to stay in the air even though someone had left their phone on.

The 1% number was just a guess, though. So last week I got the guys at my company, Holiday Extras, to run a poll and ask our customers. We run our polls on the "welcome back" email we send to customers, so we know that all of our respondents have just flown back from a holiday.

Stop following me!

Scott Adams wrote recently about the increasingly poor online shopping experience. Every time you buy anything online you need to register, enter discount codes, work out shipping costs, struggle through endless attempts to sell you extra things you don't want...it's no longer possible to meaningfully comparison shop because every online retailer hides the final price in different ways, and it's already easier to just go to a damned shop.

My own frustration shoping online is with ad retargeting.

Ad-lapsing, or TV plus or minus ten minutes

Appointment television ceased to be appointment television when we all got TiVos. We could skip the ads so we skipped the ads. Then we all got Twitter, and appointment television became appointment television again because what's the fun of watching Xfactor or The Apprentice or Dr Who the day after the twitter stream has flown by?

There's a couple of possible solutions to this, but the one that strikes me as most obviously achievable without the invention of any new technology is for us all to agree to a minor conspiracy.

On metaphor and pseudoantineofeudalism

This weekend I saw two things with the same uncompromising message. Charlie Brooker's latest Black Mirror 15 Million Merits, and the Timberlake / Seyfried film In Time.

Both apply the brutally belaboured metaphor of time as money and depict a class of indentured post-industrial serfs slaving away at pointedly mindless tasks for, in Brookerverse, the "merits" (Facebook likes times retweets times pounds) they need to buy everything from toothpaste to ad-skipping, and for the doomed residents of the In Time ghetto literally the minutes and hours they need to keep their hearts beating. Both depict a vast underclass grinding away to support a neofeudal aristocracy (in the one case of bankers, in the other a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell analogue celebrity freak-wrangler). Both offer the same escape routes for their doomed underclass - blind chance, inheritance and gambling.

So far so mind-numbingly obvious. The funny bit is that I paid thirty quid to take my parents to see In Time and we sat through maybe half an hour of ads while watching 15 Million Merits.

Contra Farmville for Dummies

The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

Gatwick Hilton pages: what I've been working on

For anyone who's curious what I've been up to since I joined Holiday Extras as Editor about four months ago, see left and click on the link for the new Gatwick Hilton pages.

We've been working to roll out new content on the site - first by going out and actually collecting that content, visiting hotels and car parks and photographing and writing up our experiencs. Second by redesigning the pages that content sits on so it's not just easy for the Google robot to read but engaging for real live humans too.

Four months and one page sounds like a pretty slender return on Holiday Extras' investment, but in fact we've got another 20-30 hotels all visited, photographed and written up ready to go live too.

Photographs by me, words by me (edited by my senior copywriter Sarah), page design by Oak and technical implementation mainly by our SEO team. Plenty more to do and we're going to be redesigning the whole thing again almost immediately but just for the moment...that's what I've been up to. Let me know how you'd make it better.