“For one general election only, it will be the communicators What Will Win It”
Raymond Snoddy wonders if the media can turn around the coming general election, and if so, whether Murdoch has lost his normal touch. “By coming out so early and so ostentatiously for Cameron, The Sun may have indulged in a little premature political ejaculation” …
A few months ago you could have stated with absolute certainty that marketing would play a very small role in the coming general election.
The charmless Gordon Brown was unelectable, hopeless on telly and likely to be stiffed with the blame for the recession even though all he was guilty of was some badly misguided bank de-regulation in the UK.
Finally there was the devastating: “Time For A Change Innit” argument.
Brown’s willingness to go for the first televised debates smelled of the Last Chance Saloon – the final throw of the dice. Cameron would even have a better grasp of the first Twitter and Facebook election as the Prime Minister has already demonstrated all too graphically.
Surely all David Cameron had to do was book all the best poster sites, smile naturally at the television cameras, avoid excessive triumphalism and glide into Downing Street. All polling history suggested that no governing party could possibly come back from such a deficit in the polls after 13 years in power and in the midst of the worst economic mess for a generation.
Suddenly the highly implausible begins to look just within the realms of possibility. The outcome is not certain and it is in that narrow domain that the media, and how the candidates are sold, can make a difference.
Usually claims of the sort made by newspapers such as: “It Was The Sun Wot Won It” are nonsense – except in a minor way. The press can act as an accelerator for changes in the public mood that are already under way but little more. The Daily Mirror was never able to put even the tiniest dent in Mrs Thatcher.
Interestingly, by coming out so early and so ostentatiously for Cameron, The Sun may have indulged in a little premature political ejaculation. It may turn out to be a rare case of Murdoch losing his normal touch, which involves correctly identifying the winning band-wagon and jumping on.
The fact that so many voters are still undecided, and if anything becoming more so, opens up priceless opportunities. But will the best-laid plans of the marketing and PR professionals be undermined by the new media?
Will this be the first ‘Gaffe Election’, where something really stupid, which in the past would have gone largely unnoticed, is captured on a mega-pixel phone and sent round the world in seconds. In a debate at City University last week, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson was one of those who pointed to the power of the unexpected gaffe.
Another lesson from the Obama campaign in the US was the way the internet and email had greatly increased activism by lowering the barrier to entry. You didn’t have to turn up at village hall meetings to take part. By the end one in five Obama voters were on the campaign’s email list.
The results of such a phenomenon, translated to the very different UK political system, are uncertain – though the Tories might benefit more from superior internet organisation.
The vote at City University was overwhelmingly in favour of the power of the leaders’ debates over the influence of the new media.
The debates will probably be held under the spectre of a hung Parliament, which will give considerable momentary influence to David Dimbleby, Adam Boulton and Alastair Stewart.
The internal competition between the UK’s main broadcasters and their political heavyweights all eager to draw blood, could represent peril for the political leaders. The only one who can’t lose is the strangely invisible Nick Clegg. At least after the debates, whatever he says from his platform of equality with the big boys, more people might realise who he is in future.
Cameron will be good. Television is, after all, his natural environment, although he will come with some easy target pinned to his chest – Ashcroft, and his initial opposition to the scale of the stimulation packages that lessened the impact of the recession and his desire to start cutting immediately.
For Brown the communication strategy is tricky. As the incumbent it is his to lose. The personal marketing advice has got to be: Be Yourself. And there of course lies the problem. People don’t much like “himself”.
Any attempts to try to turn Gordon Brown into the likeable, chummy, friendly, funny sort of person you would like to invite to dinner are doomed to failure.
The marketeers have to do a Guinness – make a virtue out of the fact you have to wait ages to have the stuff poured and deal with its dark character when it gets there. So they have to make the best of dour and humourless by emphasising solidity and experience compared with the Old Etonian light-weights.
Ah ha… after we have dealt with the serious economic issues there is so much subliminal potential in the Old Etonian line.
It has to be handed deftly – as only Peter Mandelson can. Old fashioned class war along Kinnock parameters would sink like a stone, particularly as not too many Cabinet ministers went to comprehensives in Dalston.
It’s got to be tickled and teased, raising oblique questions about how relevant their life experience is to yours? In the end, for one general election only, it will be the communicators What Will Win It.