An Election Day Message from The Ad Pit

If any of you vote Tory today I will be extremely disappointed in you.

Labour may not have been all we hoped for back in 1997, but that is no excuse to forget what happened to the working class during the last conservative government. If you are young and don't remember life under a conservative government, lets just say finally getting rid of them was our Obama. If you think you hate your prime minister now, just wait til 2 years into a Cameron majority government.

I don't know one single person anywhere who likes David Cameron, not one single person. Most people see him as a necessary evil to get rid of Brown, but why not change our stupid electoral system for the better and vote for a party that actually cares about everyone instead of a select few? The only major party that opposed the war on Iraq. The only party with a leader people actually like.

But if you don't vote Lib Dem, I won't mind. Just don't vote Tory, please.

Vote for Advertising

In what is almost certainly the closest and most battling election in over a hundred years, things have been getting very interesting with twitter and facebook ablaze with comment following the leaders debates.

It's a very good sign that people are engaging with politics in a way that we have only really seen in the last US elections. The twitter buzz has been an important part of building the momentum that is happening around Nick Clegg.

The disappointing thing for me though is that adland hasn't helped make any knockout blows for any of the parties.

Lib Dems have had a good go with their Labservatives idea; which reasonably gets across the similarities between the two old parties.

Labour's work has been alright, but didn't really get the online reponse they might have hoped for. (as far as I have seen at least)

The Tories on the other hand have completely bombed, and ended up with work that has been spoofed and mocked in all quarters. So much so that in my view it's fundamentally damaged the way that people look at political advertising.

The problem is they all look and sound like political ads, sharing that holier than thou tone and smug humour (if you can call it that) which reads terribly to anyone outside the party circles.

No one has delivered anything revolutionary, there will be no Great Schlep here, no amazing nation defining work that changes the way we see a politician or party.

Perhaps the only smile for adland is that the real revolution has been through good old fashioned tv... with a shedload of tweets.

John Mugabe

As someone who works in advertising I am more than aware of the power we sometimes have to put fear into people. Fear that you might smell, be ugly, have no friends, be uncool. I hate it when ads play on those fears, but quite frankly it seems we have nothing on the ads of American politics.

John Mccain's campaign ads so far have been shocking, doing the Republican thing of playing on peoples fear of the unknown. America is a divided country, and the Republicans are masters of manipulating people that are not (as much as we like to believe) totally stupid, but in most cases just very badly misled.

Frankly with ads like these (below, ads with explanations) , pushing fear, outright lying, manipulating facts, its no wonder that people who don't know any better vote for these selfish cheating scumbags.

Please explain to me John Mccain how you are any better than Robert Mugabe? A tyrant you say, fake democracy you say. Is he not just doing the same as you, using fear to make people vote one way? Scaring people and lying to them in order to win an election that everyone else around the world knows should be won by the only candidate with real ideas for a better country?

Fuck you Mccain. Fuck you Republican party. Frankly America has no hope when the world lets a country be dominated by this type of campaigning. We should have acted on Mugabe, we should have acted on Darfur, we should act on this. The most powerful country in the world should not be run by people who are happy to cheat and lie and manipulate the people they are supposed to be helping.

Image from Stu's Views