Sean Topham, co-founder of Topham Guerin, helped direct National's social media campaign.
Sean Topham, co-founder of Topham Guerin, helped direct National's social media campaign.
National racked up hundreds of thousands more video views on social media than Labour as it sought to use sometimes off-the-wall viral trends to energise its election campaign.
Sean Topham, a co-founder of the Topham Guerin agency that conducted campaigns for conservative parties including National, Australia’s Liberals and the UKConservatives, told the Herald the party’s use of videos on platforms such as Facebook and TikTok was vital to its victory in Saturday’s general election.
“It was a fun campaign and a good result,” Topham said in an exclusive interview. “I think the campaign did a fantastic job on social and digital media, and we can point to a number of metrics that indicate that.”
Topham Guerin has been credited with helping right-wing politicians including Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison win elections in recent years with a style of digital campaigning that relies heavily on deliberately amateur-looking memes and provocative stunts that have sometimes attracted controversy.
They decided early in this campaign that video would be crucial to National’s messaging, Topham said. Over several months, their output has combined US-style attack adverts accusing Labour of being soft on crime and gangs with more intimate and upbeat posts showing Luxon spending time with his family and doing relatable things in the community.
On Facebook, the accounts for National and Luxon have had four times as many video views (1.6 million) as those of Labour and outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (383,000 combined) since their respective campaigns launched in early September, according to an analysis of data collected by CrowdTangle, an analytics service owned by Facebook.
In that time, National and Luxon’s Facebook pages also generated far more interactions such as likes and comments than their closest political rivals, the data shows, even though Labour has a bigger following on the platform (308,545 followers).
In this campaign, TikTok was also an important platform, particularly for reaching younger audiences.
Topham claims videos posted by National and Luxon on the platform collectively had more than 17m views in the past three months, reaching about three-quarters of 18 to 34-year-old Kiwis on the platform.
It is not possible to verify those figures independently because TikTok’s audience data is closely held, but a review of the publicly available viewing and engagement figures on the major parties’ accounts indicates Labour had a far smaller presence there during the campaign than National.
Luxon was a constant presence on TikTok in recent weeks, campaigning around the country or at home with his wife Amanda and two children.
Thank you everyone! Home with the family tonight. Looking forward to a good night’s sleep.
One post showed him standing in his living room dressed in a formal dinner jacket but with only a pair of shorts on his lower half. Another post featured Luxon explaining his economic policy while cutting blue sand with a sharp knife — a nod to a genre of viral TikTok videos known as ASMR.
In another series of TikTok posts, MPs including Judith Collins, Mark Mitchell and Paul Goldsmith filmed themselves playing a low-budget arcade game called “Tax Relief Rush” which was intended to highlight National’s promised tax cuts.
“Watching politicians try to appeal to younger audiences is painful,” said a commenter on one of the posts, but Topham claimed the game was opened by nearly 22,000 people in the final 10 days of the campaign.
National’s posts about tax relief also appear to have resonated with audiences on Facebook, according to the CrowdTangle data. A video clip featuring former Prime Minister Sir John Key endorsing Luxon was also among its top-performing posts.
Topham said the creative vision behind National’s videos came from Michael Modesti, a former digital staffer for Canada’s Conservative party, but it had the full backing of Luxon, campaign chairman Chris Bishop and campaign manager Jo de Joux.
Topham watches as former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson takes a selfie during the Conservatives' 2019 general election campaign.
“There was just a real willingness and openness,” Topham said. “I would consider the openness and the way the campaign embraced trends and contemporary themes, and using a platform natively on TikTok, was a sign of pushing the boundaries and being innovative.”
For Chris Hipkins, the most Facebook interactions came on a post in which he shared a cartoon of him drawn by a student at Porirua College with the caption: “Chris Hipkins is the boss Prime Minister.”
On Instagram, it was the Greens who generated the most buzz in the final weeks of the campaign, the CrowdTangle data suggests. Among individual politicians, Chlöe Swarbrick generated the most activity, followed by Hipkins, Act leader David Seymour, and Luxon.
