Clever election tricks that fit the bill

Labour's Phil Goff beside billboards mocking Don Brash quotes. Picture / Richard Robinson

It was a gripping contest. National's billboards took the early advantage - driven home by the individual flair of the Taxathon ad. Labour was done like a dog's dinner.

But a late "don't put it all at risk" team talk motivated a come-from-behind counterpunch.

This was definitely a game of two halves and, at the end of the day, advertising was the winner.

More than anything else, the general election has shown that it's marketing that is the message and that negative attack and counter-attack ads have impact. The overall effect was to mobilise the ambivalent public for an increased voter turnout. National brought its previously dispersed flock back into its fold. Labour's flock stayed put.

Neither managed to change "soft voter" habits. So who really did the best job?

"National's ads were the best in terms of the way they engaged a sense of humour that really had a good connection with the anti-PC nature and the cynicism of conservative voters," says Massey University head of the Institute of Communication Design Claire Robinson.

"Labour's ads were inconsistent and kept changing. There were far too many words and they tended to be on the attack all the time, which is not necessarily the best strategy for the party that is leading."

Robinson says the effect of both campaigns was to reinforce the opinions of the centre-left and the centre-right.

"What the National ads did was pronounce that National was back. They confirmed the values, policies and the behaviour of a really strong centre-right party and said, 'Here we are'. So people did flock back to National."

But what they didn't do was get voters to cross the centre line. "Labour was able to keep their percentage of the vote because nobody was taking them away."

In focusing its attacks on Labour and aiming for an outright victory, National forgot to address all the challenges from the minor parties.

"If they had thought about it strategically they would have attacked Labour in their messages, but also attacked New Zealand First. If more of the New Zealand First vote had gone to National, it would be a different situation."

Robinson acknowledges that such a tactic can be risky. An attack on a minor party can sometimes have the opposite effect of galvanising support for the underdog - something Labour seemed well aware of in its strategy of not criticising the Greens.

But National's billboard campaign did set the agenda. Owing a lineage to Tui's "yeah right" campaign, they were elegantly simple and humorous and perfectly designed to catch the attention of the drive-by voter.

Succinct messages - Tax/Cut, Iwi/Kiwi, Cabs/Cops - reading from left in Labour's red, to right in National's blue, cleverly presented the essence of a problem and its solution.

"The beauty of it was they could attack the incumbent, promote the alternative and gain brand value at the same time," says Jonathan Dodd, a strategist with market research company Research Solutions.

"It's tough in marketing to do branding as well as an offer. They did it all - attack, promote, keep the humour up and keep the branding up. That is brilliant work."

Ironically, the billboards' polarised messages may have also worked in Labour's favour. "It is difficult advertising to people who are intensely brand-loyal," says University of Auckland Business School associate professor of marketing Brett Martin. "If you insult the brand they are loyal to, voters will counter-argue the ad."

Loyal voters not only disregard what's being said but try to come up with reasons why they shouldn't believe what they're seeing. Advertisers argue that doesn't matter because such staunch supporters are not the target market. But the stark contrasts in National's divisive billboards may have strengthened rather than weakened resolve in the Labour camp.

There was plenty of counter-arguing the ads on the nationalbillboard.fias.co.nz website, which allowed voters to produce billboard variations such as Tax/Cult and Brash/clerk.

It was an advertiser's dream come true - direct engagement with the ads by the audience - something National already had a sense of in the stream of billboard suggestions - many of which were used - from its supporters.

As well as tempering the negative and critical messages, the latent humour in National's billboards gave the public permission to interact. "With those spoofed billboards people were thinking, 'We can have a bit of fun with politics, there's room for us to put our 2c worth in'," Robinson says.

Humour was much more explicit in National's Taxathon TV ad - vital says Dodd to getting "a critical judgmental message across without looking like a critical, judgmental, negative person."

But although the use of humour is a frequent event in New Zealand advertising, it can have a downside - unpredictability and people often remembering the joke, but not what was advertised.

Martin says the Taxathon ad avoided that pitfall because the humour was tied in with the information National was trying to get across. "The humour was tied to the criticisms they were making."

The strength of Taxathon was not just in the use of animation, which allowed its cartoon characters to say riskier things than real people, but also how it worked on a number of fronts, combining many messages and resonances in a short space of time.

The animation changed the words of an old Telethon jingle - "thank you very much for your high taxation" - and labelled Michael Cullen the wastemaster-general and Helen Clark the prime moneywaster.

It also had a dig at David-Benson Pope (the tennis-ball incident), George Hawkins (the 111 fiasco), and other Labour ministers - including John Tamihere (with foot in mouth).

There was a hint, too, of National's 1975 Dancing Cossack animation - in that instance to portray unions and the Labour Party as communists and with images of Polynesians committing crimes, costing New Zealanders jobs, and being dole bludgers.

That indicates that negative advertising is not exactly a new phenomenon in New Zealand election campaigns. And negative attack messages were everywhere in this election.

National attacked Labour and used an unflattering photo of Helen Clark on their billboards.

Labour attacked Don Brash and his flip-flopping on policy. The Exclusive Brethren attacked the Greens and Labour. The unions attacked National.

The Maori party copped flack from Labour for voting with National. And Winston Peters and Bob Clarkson had a spat over a left testicle.

The reason why negative messages are used is straightforward - they get noticed. "If you say something negative it sticks out and people pay attention to it more," Martin says. "If they pay attention to it it's more likely to sink in and have an effect." And while traditional product advertising tends to avoid negative comparisons because of how it might backfire, it works well in the political arena because there are less choices and it's easier to highlight points of difference.

To get people to change their behaviour Robinson says ads have to shock people and shift them out of their complacency. But she says the negative election advertising here is mild compared with the United States.

"They go for the jugular, for the personal lives of the candidates, and really dig the dirt on their competition. We are so clean in that regard."

So far, crossing the line into the dirty side is a no-no in election advertising. "Be tough and negative on policy, but don't get personal," says Dodd.

Labour's most negative message was undoubtedly its "Don't put it all at risk" slogan, which worked through its ambiguity. "It" could be anything.

"By using the word 'all' it's saying: 'Whatever you're thinking of as valuable, hey, that could be put at risk'," Martin says.

But as Robinson points out, because of the traction National had gained through its billboards and TV campaign, Labour had no alternative but to come out fighting. "When you're being attacked you've got to counter-attack."

Robinson says Labour is traditionally quite resistant to attack-advertising, "because they're afraid they are going to turn off all their nice woolly-jumpered voters, they don't want to do anything to hurt anybody".

But all parties attack at some point during an election campaign and for Robinson this one didn't feel any more aggressive than previous years.

"If you're trying to knock the leading party off its perch you've really got to attack them - so that people start having doubts about whether that party should be in the leadership position." And Labour, once it gets over its aversion to negative advertising, has often shown itself to be successful in halting the tide of public opinion with their attack ads.

So did "don't put it all at risk" allow Labour to scrape home a win in this election?

"Advertising is not that powerful a medium," Robinson says. "It has to work with people's views to get the message across. Communication doesn't work hypodermically."

To that, those who created National's killer billboard campaign might say, "yeah, right".