Great list of famous political US attack ads here via Ad Age. Some you will know, but what about the ad in the number one spot.
It is from Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign and features a small girl pulling petals from a daisy before fading into a nuclear mushroom cloud. Read more »
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is adding another spot to the great canon of American political advertising that is based on a lie.
This spot running in New Hampshire takes a 2008 clip of Barack Obama as he first ran for the White House and said: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Sounds like damning stuff in these dire times, doesn’t it? Read more »
Rolling Stone magazine is not happy with Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. At least the part of the campaign, with its $60m war chest, that is is asking designers to create a poster about jobs… for free.
Everyone remembers the 2008 campaign and some of the posters that came out of that, notatbly Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, which seemed to sum up the Obama campaign, when people were happy to do anything they could to help and buy into the message of hope after the George W Bush years. Read more »
Following on from Friday’s post on Labour’s Twitter lead, research says that Gordon Brown has a lot of ground to make up with Britain’s 30m online social network users as he looks to make his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference this week.
Of course, his social media reputation is not the only thing he and Labour needs (a fight back would be nice, but not the place).
Social media agency Yomego carried out a Social Media Reputation audit (a new service it is launching) of the Prime Minister’s online reputation looking across the spectrum at Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube alongside other social spaces such as blogs, comments, ratings, reviews and user-generated content.
While the party might have more MPs Twittering and engaging with social media, David Cameron’s reputation in the world of Twitter, Facebook and the blogging community is ranked 20 points higher, which is of course ironic give what he thinks for instance of Twitter (“Too many twits might make a twat.”) although he really should come clean about Facebook as well (I’m just sitting here drumming my fingers waiting for that one).
Out of a possible 100, the Prime Minister scores 42.59 in the audit, which measures the volume and newness of social media chatter and whether it is positive or negative.
To be honest the recent week’s that Brown has been having that is almost better than expected. From here on out, and with his speech this week, the party and Brown have to get that higher.
According to Yomego, in Brown’s case there was lots of noise, but opinion was almost universally unenthusiastic with his 
“sentiment” score lower than that achieved by British National Party leader Nick Griffin (seriously? I find that hard to believe, but that is what the agency says).
Tory leader David Cameron rated a score of 62.49 with the level of noise on social media networks achieving similar volume and recency to the PM, but the overall sentiment rating more than three times better than his Labour counterpart. Well the Tories are between 13 and 15 points ahead in the polls depending on who you look at so that is going to happen.
A ray of light for Brown comes from the Liberal Democrat who should be soaking up the anti Brown/Labour chatter, but while leader Nick Clegg scores a respectable 54.13 he is let down by a low noise rating. You mean no one is talking Clegg? Apparently he is not exactly inspiring the Lib Dems to new heights as the party’s recent conference appeared to demonstrate (either that or Lib Dems don’t chatter/make much noise in social media).
Steve Richards, MD of Yomego, says that the audits carried out so far have underlined how important it is for brands (political parties) to manage that social media noise and sentiment around them.
“The noise around your brand may be deafening but if that noise is overwhelmingly negative, its reputation will suffer real damage. Conversely, if positive sentiment about your brand is drowned out by your competitors, you won’t see the benefits.
“For politicians, with nearly 30m people in the UK alone regularly using a social network, social media reputation is an important barometer for measuring whether their message is getting through and how it’s being received. That’s particularly true as we enter the party conference season and all parties start gearing up for a general election next year.”
Other stuff thrown up by the audit, but not strictly earth shattering (but here you are) are the high scores achieved by Barack Obama who scored 77.79 (shocker – he is the social media king, or president as he likes to be known) and French Premier Nicolas Sarkozy achieving 66.15. Does he Twitter? Do the French? I’m sure they do, but weirdly I don’t think I have ever followed/been followed by someone from across the channel. The rest of Europe yes, France no.
I digress, um here’s a bit of how they did the Social Media Reputation audit, which Yomego says is a first measurement system combining quantity and quality, with insight and will be officially launched at Mipcom 2009 (5th – 9th October).
The result is a total score out of 100, representing an average of the level and freshness of noise generated and the nature and recency of sentiment behind what’s being expressed.
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