Attack is the best form of defence: the golden rules of political campaigning

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/11/political-campaigning-advertising-golden-rules

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‘There are only ever two ad strategies in an election,” says Lord Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite adman. “It’s either the opposition saying, ‘Time for a change’, or the government saying, ‘Britain’s great again, don’t let the other lot muck it up.’ The rest is just details.” And he’s ostensibly right. But while the strategies stay the same, the executions can vary wildly. When the Saatchis released their infamous Labour Isn’t Working poster in 1978, an incredulous Denis Healey publically accused the Tories of selling themselves like soap powder. An excited press reported on the spat, helpfully republishing images of the poster. The Saatchis had just taught Healey a golden rule of political advertising: always try to provoke the opposition into a reaction. Here are some of the others.

Hit first, hit hard and keep on hitting

Jeremy Sinclair was the Saatchi & Saatchi creative director behind the defining political ads of the Thatcher era. He cut his teeth taking on a floundering Labour government in the late 70s. “The unions were taking over and [James] Callaghan was weak. There was much to exploit,” he says. “We weren’t scared to be negative, we relished it. Our approach became ‘hit first, hit hard and keep on hitting’.” It was an attack plan that saw them mastermind three successive victories for Thatcher’s party. After Labour Isn’t Working was used for the 1979 election, they shot down Michael Foot in 1983 with a poster comparing the striking similarities between their election manifesto and that of the Soviet Union’s Communist party, under the headline: “Like your manifesto, comrade”. In 1987, Neil Kinnock stumbled in a TV interview, suggesting that a Labour government would resist a Soviet invasion with guerrilla warfare. Saatchis created a poster that featured a British soldier holding his arms aloft in surrender, under the headline: “Labour’s Policy On Arms”.

Play to your strengths

John Major’s Conservatives went into the 1992 election presiding over the worst recession in decades, reeling from the bloody dismissal of Thatcher and trailing Labour in the polls. They sent for Dick Worthing, Ronald Reagan’s chief pollster, who told them they must identify their strongest single issue and never stop talking about it. “He told me, ‘Look, when it comes to the NHS, the Tories are perceived as dreadful. So you just shut up. Don’t talk about it,’” says Shaun Woodward, then Tory campaign chief. “I said: ‘But hang on, what if Labour say we’re going to privatise it?’ And he said: ‘Don’t be provoked. Don’t say anything. Let me take this to an extreme. I’m not advocating this but, for right-of-centre parties, defence is normally perceived as a strong issue. Of course, what you should do is start a war. Because you’d make defence high salience with the public.’”

Woodward deemed this a little drastic. But the team at Saatchi & Saatchi identified taxation as the issue they were strongest on and resolved to spend the entire campaign hammering home their message on the subject. Soon, the streets of Britain were plastered with images of “Labour’s Tax Bombshell”, a Tory poster claiming that the average voter would pay £1,250 more a year under Labour. Jeremy Sinclair later admitted that they had costed Labour’s shadow budget as containing £35bn of public spending and “basically divided it by the number of taxpayers in Britain”.

When the polls are tight, fight dirty

Leaders don’t like negative campaigning. They like to think that people will vote for them out of sheer enthusiasm, not a distaste for the opposition. In 1983, Bell presented Thatcher with a poster showing 70-year-old Labour leader Michael Foot walking across Hampstead Heath with a walking stick, under the headline: “Even pensioners are better off under the Conservatives.” The prime minister was appalled. “She almost threw me out of the room!” recalls Bell. “She said: ‘You can’t go around insulting politicians, abuse is not acceptable.’” But such was the unpopularity of Foot’s Labour party in 1983, the election result was already a foregone conclusion (“We could have a put a big sign up in Piccadilly Circus saying ‘Fuck Off’ and still won,” Bell later noted).

When the opinion polls are tighter, politicians need to get dirty. In 1992, Sinclair explained to Woodward that Major had to drop his nice guy image to take on a resurgent Kinnock. “It’s very simple in this game: you either kill or get killed,” said the man from Saatchis. “If Major doesn’t win, he loses. There is no halfway house.” Woodward told him that Major was against running a negative campaign. “Is he OK with losing?” asked Sinclair. “Obviously not,” replied Woodward. “Well then,” Sinclair said. “Kill or get killed.”

If it’s funny, it’s fine

By the Blair era, it was Labour’s turn to do the provoking. In Trevor Beattie, the adman behind Wonderbra’s Hello Boys poster and French Connection’s FCUK campaign, Blair had just the man to whip up the requisite controversy. In 2001, he produced a poster featuring Tory leader William Hague wearing Thatcher’s hairstyle. The original headline read “Get Out And Vote On Thursday Or This Gets Back In”. “I took it to Downing Street and told Blair: ‘This will be the most iconic image of this election,’” says Beattie. Blair shook his head and said, ‘No, no, no.’ Then he began to chuckle. Alastair Campbell told him: “You’ve just shown why it works. Because if it’s funny, it’s fine. People look at it and smile, but it makes a really powerful negative point.” Blair gave the go-ahead but insisted that Hague wasn’t referred to as “this” in the headline. Beattie changed the slogan to the much funnier “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

The Conservatives responded with anger and the fallout continued for days, with the so-called “wiggy” image appearing widely across the national press. Blair had learned his lesson about the power of negativity infused with humour. “I used to tell him: ‘Don’t think by being more positive you’ll stop them from trying to kill you,’” says Campbell.

Attack is the best form of defence

In 1997, Saatchis produced a poster of Blair’s beaming face adorned with a set of demon eyes (“New Labour, New Danger”). Such was the impact of the poster, Labour’s senior campaign team called an emergency meeting. “I was on holiday and had to join a conference call,” remembers Campbell. “I think it was Peter [Mandelson] who said: ‘We need to get hold of a bishop to speak out about this!’ And a few hours later we had the bishop Of Oxford condemning the poster on the national news. The whole thing backfired on the Tories.” Sinclair, the creator of the demon eyes poster, later admitted: “It was one of the most famous and ineffective things we ever produced.”

You can’t buy votes

In 1997, with the Conservatives trailing New Labour by 20 points in the opinion polls, Maurice Saatchi was said to have assured Major that the party could spend their way to victory. But after a campaign in which the main parties spent a collective £27m on advertising (in 1992, they had spent just £6.5m) the polls remained unchanged and Labour won by a landslide. Perhaps Saatchi should have remembered the lessons of 1983, when Tory chairman Cecil Parkinson had been so confident of victory that he had cancelled all ad spending in the final week of the campaign. Bell had proposed that the party take out three consecutive pages in every national newspaper. The ad space alone would have cost £1.5m (with roughly £250,000 going to Saatchi & Saatchi in commission fees). But Parkinson saw it as a wasteful extravagance, used to crush an opponent that was already on its knees. Bell was furious, turning up at a press conference to try to persuade Thatcher to overrule Parkinson’s decision. But Parkinson pulled Bell aside and told him: “Look Tim – you are not Michelangelo and these ads are not the Sistine Chapel!” On polling day, the Conservatives won by a comfortable 147-seat majority and Parkinson was vindicated. “It would have cost us millions and looked to the public as if we were trying to buy their votes,” he says.

Project normality

“When Tony Blair first came along I think his greatest strength was that he appeared to be normal,” says Sinclair. “He came across as a regular bloke you could have a drink with.” Forget a grasp of policy detail, statesmanlike gravitas or intellectual rigour – a would-be prime minister really needs to look as if he or she could fit in down the local. Years before Nigel Farage, Thatcher grasped this when her spin-doctor-in-chief, the flamboyant TV producer Gordon Reece, persuaded her to be filmed doing the dishes in her London flat. Later, Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger was hired to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary featuring Major touring his hometown of Brixton, chatting to locals and reminiscing about his humble upbringing. Overnight, the characteristics that had previously seen Spitting Image label him as dull made him seem authentic, approachable and honest. Labour’s ad-team used the same trick in 1997, when award-winning documentary maker Molly Dineen filmed Blair playing football in the park and cooking dinner at home with his family. “It made people who didn’t want to vote Tory again, but still weren’t completely sure about Labour, feel really good about Tony Blair,” says Labour adman Chris Powell.

Pass the blink test

In 1997, a buoyant Labour campaign team needed an idea that would help them over the finishing line. Powell convinced them that the way to go was to remind the public of broken Tory promises. “John Major had increased taxes since the last election, which is the cardinal sin for a Tory prime minister,” he says. Labour plastered the streets with gigantic posters emblazoned with the no-nonsense headline: “22 Tax Rises Since 1992”. A few weeks later they stormed to their greatest ever electoral victory. Politics can be complicated and boring, but a great ad can make it seem simple and engaging. In order to do so, it needs to be understood in the blink of an eye. “Posters will always be important because if you can’t sum it up in five or six words then chances are your message isn’t right,” says Sinclair. In early January this year, Labour issued a poster featuring David Cameron’s face next to a headline that read: “The Tories want to cut spending on public services back to the levels of the 1930s, when there was no NHS.” There are 21 words in that.

Take on the bloggers at their own game

In 2010, the Conservatives unveiled an image of Cameron, with a seemingly airbrushed complexion, proclaiming: “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.” Within days, newspapers were running photos of a poster-site in Hereford, where an imaginative vandal had spray-painted an Elvis-style quiff on to Cameron’s head and adapted the headline to read: “We can’t go on like this, with suspicious minds.” A blog called mydavidcameron.com was set up to allow people to create their own versions of the posters. Standout headlines included: “Some of my best friends are poor” and “Vote Tory or I’ll kill this kitten”. The site received more then 250,000 views during the campaign. The agency behind the original poster, Euro RSCG, was replaced by the ever-reliable M&C Saatchi shortly afterwards.

But increasingly, political ad agencies are refusing to sit back and allow bedroom bloggers to rip their campaigns to shreds. They are creating their own near-the-knuckle content for social media, effectively running a two-tier campaign. When Labour ran a poster in 2010 featuring Cameron’s head Photoshopped on to the body of Ashes to Ashes antihero Gene Hunt under the headline “Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s”, they might have thought they had landed a decent blow. But before the bloggers could create any spoofs, the official Tory ad team had conjured their own, responding with the swaggering riposte: “Fire up the Quattro, it’s time for a change”.

There are the official ads and the ones released anonymously online and presumed to be the work of Photoshop whizzes with a bit of time on their hands. When Pulp’s Common People was reimagined as an animated David Cameron movie, people assumed it was the work of students. It later transpired that a Labour agency had made and distributed it without official party consent.

Make it personal

“People say, ‘I don’t know what David Cameron stands for’, but I don’t know if that is a bad thing or a good thing,” says Bill Muirhead, executive director of M&C Saatchi. “Instead I find myself thinking, OK, what are the weapons you’d use against Ed Miliband in an election campaign? Well, he stabbed his brother in the back. And, you know, anyone who does that to his brother, I mean, bloody hell. Imagine what he’d do to the country.” Expect Tory attacks on the Labour leader to become bolder and bloodier over the next few months. Perhaps Ed ought to call a bishop.

• Sam Delaney’s Mad Men And Bad Men – What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising is published by Faber at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846