Today’s guest post is by Grahame Morris: Federal Director of STW Group’s Barton Deakin Government Relations and a former chief of staff to Prime Minister John Howard.
Do you live in a marginal Federal electorate? Desperate to avoid the election communication noise because you don’t care what political candidates want to say to you? Well, good luck!
You’ll need to blow up your letterbox now, put your TV in storage, drop the radio in the bin, pull the plug on the computer, take the batteries out of the iPhone, Blackberry and iPod, cancel the newspaper subscriptions and drive through the back allies to avoid the 24-sheet billboards.
At its essence, a Federal Election campaign is simply a massive communication exercise every three years.
It is probably the biggest spend crammed into the shortest period for any product launch at any time in Australia.
There’s not a lot of money to be made from political campaigns. But those creative people who are involved in the communication side of the game get a prolonged adrenalin high, a lesson in high pressure working conditions, instant judgement on your work from the media every day, bragging rights if successful and a lifelong memory of a weird experience that few people have.
The way the major parties approach parts of an election campaign (advertising, direct mail, online, social media and so on) tends to differ. Some have always had one agency do the lot. Some have specialist agencies and others, including the Liberal Party, pick a team of specialist individuals from several creative organisations and build a kind of temporary in-house “agency” for the duration of the campaign.
Their job is essentially to crystallise the messages in a visual and audio form that has impact… and get it right.
An election is not a time to practice.
More and more nowadays, many ads are made and on air within 24 hours to make sure they relate to issues of the day.
Meanwhile, back in the marginal electorates, voters are being wooed by personalised direct mail on issues most likely to be of interest to them.
In the current climate, the true Labor marginals are these ones: Brand (WA), Corangamite, Deakin, La Trobe (Vic), Greenway, Robertson, Lindsay, Banks, Reid, Page, Eden-Monaro, Parramatta, Dobell (NSW), Moreton, Petrie, Lilley (Qld). On the Coalition side, they need to hold Boothby (SA) Aston and Dunkley (Vic) Hasluck (WA). The seats of New England and Lyon which are held by Independents are also in play. Labor also has to worry about The Greens in Grayndler and Melbourne.
(Find out what electorate you’re in on the Australian Electoral Commission website.)
Those seats will decide the election outcome and as a general rule, it is the young families with mortgages where the breadwinners are half way up the ladder in their careers who will make the difference.
They aren’t particularly interested in politics and they make up their minds late. That’s why policies are released late and it’s why there is a communications blitz towards the back end of the campaign.
Incidentally, if would-be political communications gurus have a way to produce a positive message that actually has political impact, most campaigners around the world would like to hear from them.
Unfortunately, as of now, negatives are powerful. They work.
They cut through, particularly in the irreverent “up yours”, cynical and wonderful political market that is Australia.
Grahame Morris is the Federal Director of STW Group’s Barton Deakin Government Relations and a former chief of staff to Prime Minister John Howard. He also ran the communications side of many election campaigns. For updates on the people and policies of the Coalition in government and opposition around Australia, sign up for Barton Deakin Briefs.