Last week Gordon Brown announced the UK General election is to be held on May 6th. It’s battle stations for all the political parties.

We at glue are handling the Green Party’s 2010 offering with the aim of getting their first ever MP elected to the UK Parliament. This article gives insight to our approach.

To gain maximum cut through our campaign focuses on two main objectives:
a) Position the party as a credible alternative to Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats
b) Convey their range of policies (i.e. more than just the environment)

We observed that although all three parties are talking about “change”, the vast majority of voters we spoke to told us they saw the parties as indecipherable from one another.

Our communications strategy positions the Green Party as the only real alternative to the cosy political establishment. After all, one more Tory, Labour or Lib Dem MP really isn’t going to make much difference.

We also realised that without the financial clout and media coverage of the main parties, it’s essential the Green Party campaign is noticed by both the electorate and the media, and stands out among the cacophony of news stories and political advertising between now and May 6th.

In order to stretch this limited budget, and with an awareness that some minds can’t be won, we identified and focussed in on 2 audience segments which we feel we stand the best chance of swinging votes:

Disillusioned Labour are the 2.4 million key-workers who feel they’ve been let down over the years by the current government.

What we found was although this audience aren’t Stephen Fry, they are digitally active, especially using the web and email, and they are using the phone for beyond just calls.

Disillusioned Labour are complemented by the Green Party Heartland segment, made up by the more affluent who’s opinions are shared with the Green Party, but whose votes are needed. This segment differs to the last in that they’re much more digitally active. They’re high users of the web, their mobile use is sophisticated, they’re socially active and interestingly can be seen to create and share content.

These 2 sets of insight in combination were used to plan out the core campaign elements, where they exist, how people find them and how they’re shared.

However, simply talking to the electorate in a different way to the other parties isn’t enough. It’s imperative we behave in a very different way too.

Rather than only rely on the usual media channels, we’re putting politics in the pocket of the electorate and allowing the public to decide when, where and how they interact with the Green Party, be it via TV, web or mobile:

Before we go through each of those campaign elements individually, it’s worth first mentioning the visual treatment. At a time when the electorate is being bombarded by personal attacks and political mudslinging, we wanted to take a fresh approach. We used the colours associated with the different parties to create a striking graphic campaign that focused solely on Green Party policies. This treatment is carried across the campaign:

The new 3 minute Party Election Broadcast and Billboard Posters are the antithesis of the usual political advertising – no airbrushed faces, no politicians kissing babies, no fist pumping or hysterics – just differentiated policies, simply put.

It will go out on TV 10 times over the duration of the campaign and was created by Duck Eye.

The Election Broadcast is supported by 6 Billboard Posters, each messaging a core policy. They go out across 50 sites, 10 in each of the core constituencies and the rest nationally.

Banks / bonuses:

Housing:

NHS:

Pensions:

Living wage:

Each poster contains a text short code linking to mobile internet site where other policies can be viewed. Each policy also contains the ability to view the associated policy video.

The Election Broadcast, posters and mobile site all push people towards the campaign hub OnlyGreen.org.uk, where a range of functionality exists including the ability to view the Election Broadcast:

The site also offers the ability for supporters to create and send a Personalised Election Broadcast to a friend - a world-first for a political party.

By filling in a few simple details about a friend or relative this tool will send them a bespoke personal video from you, tailored to the issues most concerning them and highlighting the Green Party policies that are relevant.

Along with the ability to read all policies in detail, people can take a Policy Matchmaker test. This interactive quiz helps potential voters see how closely their views match with those of the Green Party. This is done by answering 10 simple questions on a range of issues. Once completed you receive a score that tells you how closely your views match with the Green Party.

Most people are surprised to find they think like The Green Party on a wide range of issues. People are encouraged to share this surprise with friends by posting their result to their Facebook news feed, to a friend as an email or via SMS.

Sending it by SMS links to a mobile version of the Policy Matchmaker which allows people to take the test on the move. It’s been created using some pretty unique technology from Grapple where technically speaking you build once and publish across devices (around 400 handsets including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia etc.)

If you text ‘green’ to 83040 you’ll get a link to it.

The Obama campaign in the US, and Green success in Local and European elections, taught us that the web is as much a battleground as the high street, and managing and responding to conversations will be key for all parties. We’ll be working closely with the Green Party to ensure this happens, and we’ll kick start activities by encouraging the existing 50,000 people on the Green Party’s email list, the 12,000 members of their Facebook pages, the 8,000 Twitter followers and the 600 YouTube followers to get involved with the cause and send it to friends.

Other campaign elements include:

A Twibbon that people can apply to their Facebook and Twitter profile pics.

Seeding of policy videos in niche key sector community sites through Unruly Media.

Pay per click search provided by Vizeum to help people find the campaign quickly.

The livery to the campaign tour bus.

Some shop displays within Lush stores.

Some sentiment analysis being produced by Aevolve

And some mobile inventory kindly donated by AdMob

Text short codes kindly set up by Marvellous

It would be false to think everybody will see all elements of this campaign. What we’ve attempted to do is, based on the values the Green Party want to communicate and where their audience live their digital lives, create a campaign mix that has gives the best chance of changing minds.

We strongly feel the Green Party are not only bringing a fresh approach to political advertising, but are also fundamentally changing the terms on which political parties engage with the electorate. By allowing the public to dictate when and where they interact with the party, empowering enthusiasts to send personalised video content to friends, and helping curious voters easily see if they match Green values, the Green Party stand their best ever chance of sending their first MP to Westminster.

It’s been a huge effort for the whole team here and the many partners who’ve helped along the way. Lets hope we contribute towards the first elected Green Party MP.

Amsterdam-based artist Peter Schuyff takes ordinary objects like baseball bats and colored pencils and carves them into intricate and delicate works of art.

This music video for C-Mon & Kypski’s ‘More or less’ is a constantly evolving piece of footage made up from individuals’ webcam contributions.

The music video comprises a series of choreographed dance positions and movements that people mimic in front of their webcam. People can go to the site to make a submission. The site automatically identifies a frame within the video to be replicated. Cleverly, the frame you’re replicating is overlaid onto your webcam feed so that you can line yourself up perfectly. It then count downs to take the snap. Once you’re happy with your pose you submit it and it becomes part of the music video.

People can then send on their version of the music video to friends plus share using all the usual mechanics.

And here’s the current result:

One Frame Of Fame, directed by Roel Wouters & Jonathan Puckey, with tech by Martijn Pannevis.

Via.

A truly brilliant campaign grounded on audience insight rather than the latest whizz bang technology.

Our brief was to reach 30-40 year-old men with ‘a genuine blow-out moment in these serious times’. We decided to offer a moment of rock ‘n’ roll escapism at work. Most office workers are subject to an internet policy which stops them having fun. We decided to raise two fingers to the IT department by including AC/DC’s music in an Excel spreadsheet, allowed through every firewall. We had to make the spreadsheet compelling enough for people to pass it on. To achieve this we created the world’s first music video in Excel with the video playing back as ASCII art.

An interesting band promo site that pseudo hacks Google Maps. Each position relates to an area that inspired a song on the album. When you reach a specific point in Street View a special arrow appears, and takes you to a night scene involving the band.

Via

Little did we know it at the time, but the above project for Mars’ sponsorship of Euro 2006 was the catalyst for a new approach to personalised video content here at glue.

What we did was crude and simple: we allowed people to create a fan by choosing a head, body and hands. These individual assets existed as PNGs on the server and depending on what was chosen, a JPEG was created using ImageMagick. Thinking not too much more about it, we moved on to the next project.

A year later our Get The Message recruitment campaign for The Royal Navy was born:

We quickly realised that the audience likely to want to recruit weren’t exclusively those behind PC’s all day. In fact the bulk of them weren’t. For this audience the only real channel available at scale was mobile.

The problem was we’d become experts in interactive video using Flash, but Flash wasn’t (and broadly still isn’t) compatible with many handsets. The file format of choice was / is MPEG video so we needed to replicate the browser experience using it. We scratched our heads and fairly quickly came round to the idea that if we can create individual JPEGs on the fly, stitching them together would create video. So that’s exactly what we did - this time combining ImageMagick with FFMPEG.

The video message is delivered as an SMS. The recipient downloads and watches the video, and also has the ability to respond direct on handset:

At the time this was a first and we all felt pretty happy and gave ourselves a slap on the back like only the ad industry can. But almost naively, and for a second time, we’d stumbled on the door to a much bigger opportunity:

Replicating the flash experience had fulfilled the requirements of this project, but we soon recognised that by automating motion graphics or 3d packages it’s immediately possible to generate video without creative limits.

Enter DYNAMIC VIDEO (a phrase we’ve banded about the agency for a few years now that REALLY needs a better name…)

Whilst traditional video is shot with a camera and broadcast, dynamic video allows for content to be generated specific to the person watching it, at the moment of viewing.

To help understand this complex concept, think about the gaming world where a game is produced but each game-play is unique to the actions of the game player. With dynamic video the same is now true for brand experiences.

Here’s one such example we created in 2008 for Bacardi using their existing endorsement of UK beatboxing champion Beardyman. The project was initiated by the simple thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if everyone could beatbox as well as Beardyman.’ And from there a project was born. It’s a simple upload your face mechanic, using Kofi Annan here for the purposes of demo:

There’s all sorts of complex things going on under the bonnet. There’s proprietary image recognition software interpreting the uploaded photo, identifying facial elements and stripping it out from its background (no need for manual intervention). Then using 3dMax the video is generated by mapping the face texture onto existing wireframe animations.

This technique has 2 immediate benefits:
1. Visually pretty much anything is possible (at least anything that’s possible within motion graphics or 3d applications)
2. The generated file is the ubiquitous MPEG - enabling distribution across channels without the need to re-engineer

However the technique is fairly processor intensive - taking around 20 seconds per person to generate. This gives a through-put of 4,320 videos per processor per server per day. Whilst this is ok on a smallish campaign, the only real thing you can do for larger ones is throw more hardware at it which can be costly and only becomes viable once a client really values what is creatively being achieved.

The emergence of cloud computing farms and the rendering capacity these offer to an extent solves this issue, but it’s early days. These cloud farms not only offer scalable rendering capabilities, but with the proliferation of smaller devices in all our pockets, enable richer experiences to be created remotely and be viewed on device.

Another sector dabbling in using cloud farms in this way is the few virtual rendering games companies that have recently emerged, which negate the need for a console by rendering content virtually and bringing it into home via your broadband. (can our broadband really cope with realtime 1080p video content? Or is this partly the reason these services haven’t yet taken off). Definitely one to keep an eye on.

As is the recent emergence of open source video specific rendering farms like PandaStream.

Or potentially the answer is in not saving the generated video to file, but rather to dynamically construct the video within stream as done here:

It’s a neat solution, but the SDK means the production process is alien to existing skill sets in the short term.

So generally speaking it would be fair to say there’s lots of trial and error needed. And I can’t help but notice the aforementioned gaming industry is set on collision course with the digital industry - both attacking a similar problem but from different angles. This is a most exciting prospect. (Here’s the closest example of the two together I’ve seen to date).

In the mean time it would be great to think that the Adobes‘ of this world, or maybe more likely the hardware guys of the world like nVidia or AMD move into this space and create a tool to ease the production process, but until they do these experiences will be built by ingenuity in combining niche technologies together to the needs of the project.

It therefore becomes apparent that to stay ahead of competitors R&D can’t be undervalued. The same goes for having the time and freedom to explore, trial and learn new technologies and techniques on paid for work. As we’ve testified here, bits of work that at the time may not seem like much, may in the future prove to be invaluable by re-emerging as a wholly different entity.

So collectively we (the industry) have come to a juncture where new creative opportunities exist. With this brings the need for internal re-education both on how we approach briefs conceptually, but also in how we approach capturing the assets in a new way that enables them to be manipulated with these techniques.

And with an eye on the future: glue recently ventured into the world of TV. I for one am really excited at the prospect of the day that the archaic TV broadcasting infrastructure is modernised and we can apply our digital know how onto the currently stagnant format. It defies belief that everything is still run from BetaMax. Admittedly I don’t know the setup intimately, but I’d have thought all it needs is for systems to be driven by an internet enabled computer - which happens on occasion, but not enough.

Here’s another more dynamic example that the clever boys and girls at MiniVegas were able to negotiate for a special short term deal for S4C a few years ago (the movement in the electric cable is driven by the commentators voice):

We’re undoubtably in exciting times, and hats off to the team here driving all of this forward @SuperScam @BananaFritter @hellokinsella

Bring on the next project.

This is a much expanded version of a cover feature from the rebrand 1 year anniversary issue of Revolution magazine.

This site for Maloney and Porcelli (a fancy restaurant in New York) allows you to sneak off for an expensive meal and then claim it back as expenses.

Sadly it’s only in dollars.

Via Kat.