But how do you counter-attack a negative campaign?

The Guardian’s April Fools joke may point us in the right direction.

OK, so it’s an obvious spoof. But the article contains some real wisdom:

Brown aides had worried that his reputation for volatility might torpedo Labour’s hopes of re-election, but recent internal polls suggest that, on the contrary, stories of Brown’s testosterone-fuelled eruptions have been almost entirely responsible for a recent recovery in the party’s popularity. As a result, the aide said, Labour was “going all in”, staking the election on the hope that voters will be drawn to an alpha-male personality who “is prepared to pummel, punch or even headbutt the British economy into a new era of jobs and prosperity”.

The fact is, whatever your political persuasion, you’ve got to admit that Gordon Brown, as Prime Minister, has a serious image problem. Even former PM Tony Blair described him as ‘a clunking fist’ (which, by the way, is an anagram of F***ing Stalin, a fact definitely not lost on Blair). Recent scandals such as Smeargate and rumours of bullying and bad tempered rages have left the general public with the opinion that Brown is a disagreeable, even violent, bully. Although his party has made a comeback in the polls, Brown’s personal approval ratings remain low.

So why not turn a vice into a virtue?

Yes, the Guardian’s pulling our leg. But exactly how do you counter a negative campaign based on facts? Simple. You turn the facts in your favour. You make a virtue out of your vices. The idea that Brown’s a ‘hard man’ willing to ‘pummel, punch or even headbutt’ the British economy into recovery is a great attack line. In one fell swoop this line repositions the argument from ‘good guy’ vs ‘malevolent bully’ to ‘wimp who doesn’t have the strength to lead the country’ vs ‘tough, experienced fighter who’s willing to go to any length for what he believes in’.

People are turned off politics because they don’t think politicians have any conviction any more. A ‘Brown is willing to fight for you’ line might be just the ticket he needs to stay in power.

Of course there are those of us who believe the only thing he’s fighting for is holding on to his own power, but that’s not the point.

An effective negative campaign can be negated by using the same facts
and turning the argument against the attacker.

What implication does this have for branding, marketing and advertising professionals in general? Well, sometimes the ‘no nonsense man’ approach works. John Smith’s ‘no nonsense’ cardboard man and Ronseal’s ‘does what it says on the tin’ campaigns spring immediately to mind.

This ‘no nonsense approach’ is taken to its logical conclusion in this brilliant ad by Rhett and Link for Cullman Liquidation. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. It’s one of the best commercials produced in decades — and a great example of how to get your business noticed by viral video. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat:

“So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home… or don’t, I don’t care.”

I blogged the General Election, back in 2005. Blogging was different then. We were mostly ignored. My blog was just an irreverant look at the campaigns, you wouldn’t have come to it for news.

Yes, we all know blogs are going to be important this time around. We’ve got Guido, Iain Dale, Conservative Home, and even a few offerings from Labour — which are nowhere near as widely read, which I thinks says a lot.

But in the hoo-hah about blogging, it’s easy to forget that the internet is much more than just the political blogosphere.

It’s not just blogs that have gone mainstream in the last five years. It’s viral video.

Dan Hannan’s searing attack on Gordon Brown went viral. Two and a half million views of his “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government” speech. The blogs have given us smeargate, the ousting of Damien McBride and Derek Draper by Guido Fawkes. That’s a much more powerful story. But when it comes to general elections, campaigns get quick and dirty. Viral video will be the blitzkrieg tactic of choice for both sides.

Not all the videos will be sanctioned.
Many will be sanctioned. Secretly.

All the main players know the power of a good attack video — both political parties, and their supporters. Five years ago, to reach voters visually, you were limited to a 5 minute party political broadcast, a few a month, at set times, with strict limits on what you could say.

What’s interesting is that, today, the electoral commission has come out and said that in this battleground, there will be no rules. None. At all. They cannot police viral video.

Expect things to get down and dirty, very quick.

A couple of examples —
Guido uses his blog to simply demonstrate Gordon Brown caught in a lie. He doesn’t even need to pass comment.
The unofficial ConservativeHome produces a blunt attack video to highlight Gordon Brown’s broken promises.

I for one would love to know which agencies are handling the digital accounts of the main parties, and their supporters. Viral videos are cheap to make, incredibly powerful, and totally without boundaries. The next election campaign will be like none we’ve ever seen before. Whoever makes the most memorable attack video will probably make the same name for themselves that Saatchi & Saatchi made in 1979 with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working‘ — probably the most memorable British political campaign of all time.

This is an exciting time for advertisers willing to get their hands dirty in politics. Reputations will be won and lost. The direction of British politics decided for maybe a decade, or more.

The Internet: still the World’s Wild West.

It’s also a very good move. Increasingly, we’re skipping ads. We’re ad savvy. I do it on the internet all the time: I use adblock plus. When I owned a television, I’d skip the ads with sky + (that’s a TiVo to friends across the pond). Or before the age of the TiVo, I’d resort to the less technical solution: I’d wander into the kitchen and make myself a nice cup of tea. Now I skip the television altogether and stream my content. I’ll let you guess how many ads I watch when I do that.

The advert has to evolve or die.

There are two ways it can evolve. Either ads get better at entertaining us, which is why we switch on the TV in the first place, or they get more subtle.

People don’t respond well to bad ads. Here are two I remember very well: the Cadbury’s gorilla and the DFS furniture “rockstar” advert. The former is an advertising classic. The latter is thirty seconds of pure pain from the devil’s own VHS collection. The “good” ad is a minute and a half long. Yet I challenge you to sit through ten seconds of the furniture advert without cringing. Go on, try it? Does it make you want to buy a sofa?

So as our tastes become more sophisticated, so our demands on adverts increase.
Product placement is the perfect way around that.

It’s not an advert for coke. It’s your hero, drinking a coke. See the difference?

Of course you do. Because product placement is already everywhere. It’s in films. Sometimes, film characters even endorse products.And does anyone else remember the Starbucks logo in Austin Powers II? How blatant was that? Did we mind? Did we think we were being brainwashed? No.

Product placement is a direct alternative to direct advertising. In an era when ads have a reduced impact, and many of us aren’t watching them at all, it’s not even a necessary evil. It’s just necessary. One of my favourite imports from the US at the moment is the brilliant Mad Men, a series set in an advertising agency in the early 60s. It’s full of product placement. Nobody complains.

But it can’t be done badly.

As my example of the two adverts — the gorilla and the sofa — shows, people respond to subtle endorsement. Or else, as the Austin Powers integration shows, you can be as blatant as you like about it so long as you’re funny. Or just be slick, like Mad Men.

Either way, UK ad agencies are going to have to figure out the product placement game pretty quickly. But there’s no need for it to stop there.

Television is a dying medium.
Product placement in viral video has been around for a while.
It looks to me like, once more, television is just playing a game of catch-up.

The rest of us are already on the web.

Everyone damns with faint praise so let’s start by setting out what the BBC does well. They do produce quality television.

They also produce a lot of dross, but so do the other channels. I’m quite sure that programmes like Jonathan Meades’ Magnetic North and Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia would never have been made by another broadcaster. So credit where credit is due, they’re good at the highbrow stuff. Although I, a subscriber to everything from films through the post to a contract mobile phone I can watch films on, don’t have a problem with paying for it. This is subscriber-model stuff being foist on the masses, who are subsequently billed for it.

I don’t like anything else about the BBC.

By their own admission, their news output demonstrates an inherent left wing bias (despite absurd claims to the contrary) and it’s simply not true to say that ‘oh well, at least they don’t show adverts’. Because they do.

The BBC advertises itself.

I’m not just talking about those moments where they play two minute clips about how great they are in between programmes (although their smugness does nauseate me far more than any of the commercial ads on the other channels), I’m taking about the vast amount of money spent on lobbying and promotion and behind-the scenes jostling to ensure that the BBC remains the UK’s number 1 broadcaster, state funded — the biggest brand in the country.

So when polls like this one come out, saying how much everyone loves the BBC, I’m a little cynical. They love the BBC because they’re being told to love the BBC by the BBC, which dominates not just the programming schedules, but also the news agenda, with its ubiquity. I was installing widgets on my iGoogle page the other day and even though there were plenty of other options available, the news widget I installed just displayed headlines from the BBC. Why? Because they’re so huge in the UK, they dominate the news agenda. I know that whatever’s on their frontpage will be the thing everyone’s talking about, so for a quick look at what I need to know (to know about what’s being talked about), I’ll use the BBC. Then if I’m really interested in the story I’ll read the broadsheets and get some detailed analysis from my favourite blogs. At the minute, I still find it hard to beat a combination of The Times and The Spectator.

There’s a very obvious analogy to be made when it comes to state propaganda machines, involving people with funny accents, walks and bombastic salutes. So I won’t patronize you by making it. No, in fact, I think the BBC’s level of control of the UK population is far more insidious. The BBC is known as, calls itself, “auntie” — if there’s such a word as ‘matrician’ deriving from ‘patrician’, then the BBC is it. It’s like having a bigger, older sibling telling you what to say and think and do, carefully watching in case you slip up or say something out of line. Not that you’ll be told off, of course. Just politely told that you’re wrong. The BBC frames debate in the UK, making it utterly impossible to discuss things like the NHS (another state “institution”) sensibly and sometimes doesn’t even bother giving anyone right-of-centre the right to reply.

So what can we learn from all this?

Well, other than the fact that as something of a libertarian (my first degree was in political science, you know) I don’t like the BBC very much as a coercive state broadcaster, we can learn this:

The more you tell people you’re great, the more they’ll believe it.
Sometimes, people aren’t searching for evidence…
…they’re looking for reassurance.

That’s why “Auntie” is still alive and well.