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- capbyrne: Sat in chic cafe round corner from the Kremlin happily laptopping away. :)
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Online politics
Posted Colin Byrne on October 5th, 2007 | Filed under Current Affairs, Politics, The Media
Leaving aside the fifty thousand pieces of political comment many of us have waded through already on polls, election timing etc, there has also been a fair amount of coverage in the marketing press about the relative fortunes of Brown and Cameron in finding an advertising agency to support their election campaigns.
Brown followed his tea-with-Mrs T mini-coup by appointing her ex ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Cameron is reportedly finding it tough to find an agency prepared to handle his brief (but this may change now the polls appear to be narrowing).
One interesting piece in Campaign reports that the Tories have succeeded in appointing agency Goodstuff to handle communications planning. Campaign further reports that “Goodstuff’s strategy for David Cameron’s Tories is understood to be weighted heavily towards digital communications and will rely less on posters and TV political election broadcastsâ€. Apparently Goodstuff has already worked with the Tories on engaging young voters, where digital campaigns are obviously key.
It’s a brave if risky strategy – posters and PEBs are more about background noise and giving heart to your own supporters than convincing the sceptics – but it will be interesting to see how much of the major parties’ campaigns focus online. It does play to the ‘trust’ issue. People increasingly don’t trust politicians and also are increasingly sceptical, or just opting out, of traditional advertising, so political advertising carries a double handicap.
I heard discussions on this in both Bournemouth and Blackpool, the liveliest being a Tory fringe meeting entitled ‘Do political parties matter any more’ where Iain Dale and ex-PR consultant Ed Vaizey MP highlighted the need both to campaign and fundraise online, as well as the requirement to modernise campaign outreach and collateral.
Meanwhile The Times’ media page has a quote from Kate Stanners, the Saatchi & Saatchi creative director chosen to lead the Labour campaign and author of that great ‘Not flash, just Gordon’ slogan. “Gordon is more PM than PR†she says. Nice that these advertising folk now appreciate that PR is about more than putting politicians in baseball caps.
Finally, back to brand-of-the-moment Facebook. There are many discussions on the relative merits of Facebook vs MySpace but class war has yet to creep into them. Until now.
Toby Young’s recent piece in The Spectator points us to a new research paper from Berkeley PhD Danah Boyd that looks at American class divisions on the two social networking sites – surely classless as long as you are in the class that has regular access to the internet (itself a class divide). Her analysis, crudely, is that MySpace is for poor kids and Facebook is for WASPs as the US press has reported it. Young comments on what he sees as the increasing colonisation of Facebook by “upper middle-class professionals and/or their childrenâ€. Personally I use both and have some very nice – professional and otherwise – virtual friends on both but, oh dear, what do our social networking sites say about us?
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