This story has a bit of everything for anyone with an eye on contemporary advertising practice: crowdsourcing, cultural in-jokes and a parody ad.
Labour invited supporters to submit ideas for poster ads, and the winner was:
For the uninitiated (non-Brits) out there, that’s David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party (Her Majesty’s Opposition Party) atop the bonnet hood of an Audi Quattro. It’s not really him, it’s just his head on the body of Gene Hunt, a character from the television series Ashes to Ashes. Hunt is a no-nonsense politically incorrect detective.
The inference is that the Conservatives want to take the country back to the 1980s, a time which is synonymous, in their collective history, with the miner’s strikes and the removal of government props for lacklustre nationalised companies.
It seems fairly unlikely that the 24 year old creator of this poster remembers much of the decade he mentions, but a lot of other people do and that’s why the Conservatives have revelled in a piece of advertising judo and released their own version:
Cameron is quoted as saying:
“I think there will be thousands of people, millions of people, in the country who wish it was the 1980s and that police were out there feeling collars and nicking people instead of filling in forms”
This is going to be a high tempo, personal campaign. Should Labour really have left this to the wisdom of the crowd(tm)?
