Video Awareness

In the run up to the election, Facebook news feeds across the UK were filled with videos ads from the conservative and labour parties trying to win over un-decided voters. Most of the ads that were seen were video ads…a great use of the best performing ads on Facebook right now!

“Let’s make them look bad!”

Rumour has it (The Independent) that the tories spent over £1m on adverts that made the labour party look bad, rather than trying to make themselves look good. In the business world, this tends to be a big no no! However, it was Labours advertising strategy that won our vote for Facebook ad campaign of the General Election award…

“Ah Haaaa….Vote Labour!”

Labour decided to bring in as many celebrities as they could to make videos about why they were voting labour. One video featured Steve Coogan, better known as Alan Partridge who explained how he grew up in a large family that were always looking out for others. It really looked to reach people’s emotions and get them to believe that voting Labour was the solution. Exactly the same strategy as businesses should be using to advertise their products. We were really impressed!

It seems to have worked…

Labour’s strategy of appealing to people’s emotions and advertising to the masses seems to have won them plenty of votes. According to the ‘Who Targets Me?’ project Labour decided to advertise their campaign in 464 areas of the UK as opposed to the tories campaign that only targeted 205 areas. It goes to show that with a good advertising campaign you can go broader and still have success.

What can we learn from this?

It’s important to step back from the politics here and look at what we can learn about the advertising campaigns. The Tories seemed to focus on campaigning to their current audience to secure what they already had, by making the competition look bad. Ok, that’s one way to keep votes from people who are already likely to vote for them, but what about winning over people who weren’t going to vote for them?

In business terms, it’s like targeting your own customers with negative product reviews of your competition’s products. That’s going to make your current customers feel glad that they chose your products over your competitors, but it’s not going to get you extra customers.

Labour’s strategy of going broader with a campaign that displayed them as a solution will have both reinforced people who were already going to vote labour, as well as won over other voters who were on the fence.

In business terms, they’ve made their customers feel like they made the right decision, won over people who were shopping around but couldn’t decide where to buy their item, and gained new customers that didn’t even know they wanted to buy their products.