Mr Pot, Meet Mr Kettle
I picked up Campaign last week and there was a quote from
me.
“This will be
accepted by people who are staunchly Conservatives but rejected by people who
aren’t. It’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just ineffective and invisible.”
It was referring to the current poster featuring David
Cameron.
Campaign was accurately reporting what the Times had quoted
me as saying.
So is that what I said?
Well, yes kinda.
It is true that I said those words.
Just not in the way it sounded.
The conversation from which that quote was distilled
actually went on for about ten minutes.
The journalist asked me what I thought of the latest
Conservative poster.
The one where David Cameron has no tie.
And there’s no Conservative logo.
Would this new depiction of the Conservatives as more
relaxed and business-like, convince voters to switch?
I said I didn’t think it was as good as the work Saatchi’s
did.
But then I think that was some of the best political
advertising ever.
He asked why.
I said, think of political advertising as a Venn diagram.
Core Users in one circle, Core Non-Users in the other.
There’s no point talking to Core Users, they will always
vote Conservative.
There’s no point talking to Core Non-Users, they’ll never
vote Conservative.
Just like any market, the only people worth talking to are
the ones whose minds you can change.
The ones in the overlap.
And how you change their minds is you tell them something
new.
Something they didn’t know before.
Or something they never thought of.
Take Saatchi’s poster “Labour’s
Tax Bombshell” for instance.
It was a 48-sheet poster filled with a huge black bomb.
Written on the bomb, in white, was the amount each person’s
tax was going to have to rise, to cover all the promises Labour were making.
Someone at Saatchi had looked at what the competition were
saying and run some numbers.
That was something no one had thought of.
That was something new.
And so it changed the minds of lots of the voters in the
overlap.
And that’s where elections are won.
In the overlap.
Slogans and name-calling won’t work.
Slogans just reinforce the status quo.
They don’t change anything.
Slogans are just Core Users and Core Non-Users shouting at
each other.
Like the terraces at a football match.
And that’s the conversation I had with the journalist from
The Times.
I’m not sure he was listening.
Because he said to me, “But
how about this new Conservative poster? David Cameron isn’t wearing a tie, and
they’ve left the Conservative party logo off. That’s pretty new and radical
isn’t it?”
I felt I wasn’t getting through.
So I said, “Do you
seriously think any undecided voter in the overlap is going to change their
vote because David Cameron isn’t wearing a tie?”
And he said, “So
you’re saying you think the poster’s a load of rubbish then?”
By now I’m just trying to make myself understood about
advertising to people in the overlap.
And I said, “Look,
this will be accepted by people who are staunchly Conservative but rejected by
people who aren’t. It’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just ineffective and
invisible.”
And that’s the only part of the discussion that ran.
I’d gotten so involved in what I was saying, I’d forgotten we were talking specifically about a single poster.
I thought we were having a general discussion about political advertising.
But to be fair, all the journalist was doing was picking out
the bit that made the best quote.
And dropping what he thought was the boring bit.
I shouldn’t complain.
After all, that’s pretty much what we do.
